Departure

Fenruary 11, 2006

First of all, thank you to the good friends who met me and Mrs. Hays for a little birthday/goodbye yesterday evening. You guys are great.

I am about to head to Lambert Airport to catch the flight to Chicago that forms the first leg of my journey. At 7:30pm this evening I will board a very large plane for a very long flight from Chicago to Delhi, India. I will arrive at 9:35pm Sunday evening, India time. After one night in Delhi, I plan to take an overnight train Monday night to Pathankot, arriving there at 7:30am on Valentine's Day. Once there, I will track down a ride up to Dharmasala, which will take about 4 hours by jeep, a little over 5 hours if I take a local bus.

Yesterday I read about two separate bus incidents in Jammu and Uttar Pradesh. In each case, buses plunged off mountain roads into river gorges, killing many occupants, not an uncommon occurence in India. India has the third largest road system in the world, but just under half of it is paved, and less than 10% of it meets international road construction standards. I am going to try hard to find a jeep and driver to take me from Pathankot to Dharamsala.

Today Mrs. Hays and I bought a maroon fleece jacket for Rinchen Tsomo, and yesterday we bought a big coloring book and some fancy crayons for Ngawang. Mrs. Hays also gave me a bracelet she wants Ngawang to have. I cannot wait to see our friends again. It has been two years since I first met them, and I look forward to seeing how they are doing and whether we can do anything more to help out. For those of you who have been discussing Tibet in class, another good resource in the U.S. is Tibet House. If you are interested in knowing why my friend Rinchen Tsomo took so many risks to leave Tibet, check out the film Cry of the Snow Lion

My next post should come to you from India. Bye for now, and thank you for all the wishes of good luck and a safe journey from everyone on Friday at school. I really appreciate your kind words.

Packing

Several people have asked me whether I am ready for my trip to India. I leave this Saturday, February 11.

Emotionally and mentally I am not quite ready. I have been very focused on school work and on completing a book project I have been working on for Inside Dharma, the prison outreach organization that I help run. So I have not really devoted my thoughts to the trip very often lately.

I have, however, made sure that my immunizations are up to date. Luckily, the shots I received for my 2004 trip are still good. I checked with the Center for Disease Control and in accordance with their recommendations I have been immunized for typhus, hepatitis and polio. I am also taking medication to protect me from malaria. I will also have to take many precautions about the things I eat and the water I use while in India.

I have tried to gather the items I need, and in terms of packing I think I am just about ready.

Packing for a trip to a developing country is different from packing for a place like Boston or San Francisco or Paris or Rome.

For one thing, the rolling carry-on suitcase does not cut it when you are headed somewhere like rural India, where there will not be many smooth, hard surfaces on which to roll things. I will be in a mountain town with muddy streets, open sewers, roaming cows and goats...I am lucky to have a good backpack.

Knowing that I will have to carry everything I need for 2 weeks means I need to pack lightly. The general rule is to pack, then remove everything, lose half the stuff and then pack again. My first trip to India taught me what I can live without. It also taught me what I need in order to get along well. Here is a partial packing list to give you an idea of how I need to pack differently:

• a few very sturdy items of clothing that I can wash in a sink, and that I can layer in the cold mountains
• one pair of slip-on shoes for air travel, and some wool socks
• one pair of sandals
• bismuth tablets, which I eat to protect my stomach before meals
• loperamide, in case the bismuth does not work
• an MP3 player for the long, long, airplane ride
• tiny bottles of alcohol-based hand cleanser to carry everywhere
• my passport, visa (the goverment document, not the credit card) and some dollars and rupees
• a small flashlight (there are no street lights where I am going)
• a small travel towel (I will not be in a hotel in the American sense...)
• a sewing kit
• a small digital camera and several batteries
• Tibetan and Hindi phrasebooks, since English will not be the first language of the people I meet
• contact information for the American Embassy, in case there is trouble...but there won't be ;-)
• That's about it!

The mental part of preparing means getting myself ready for the smells of India (burning trash and leaves, incense, curry, body odor, warm naan, exhaust, soot, etc.), the sounds of India (honking horns, shouting in languages I do not know, the chanting of Buddhist monks in the gompas, the blaring call of the imam over masjid loudspeakers early in the morning, endless Bhangra music) and the sights (feral dogs, sadhus, flowers, monkeys, mandirs, cows, lepers, rivers, mountains, beggars, colorful saris, brahmin priests, and so much more...). I will leave out the textures and flavors of India for now. Maybe I will talk about food later.

You know, just thinking about this is helping me to prepare myself mentally. I am getting excited to go...

Rinchen

Here is my friend, Rinchen Tsomo, dressed in traditional clothing from her native region of Dege, Tibet.

Getting ready

I am only a few days away from departing for India a second time.

My first visit was in March of 2004, and it was an exciting three-week trip that included a brief meeting with H.H. the XIVth Dalai Lama, a private audience with H.H. the XVIIth Karmapa, and meditation and instruction in the caves where the Buddhist saint Padmasambhava taught before taking Buddhism to Tibet.


I will once again spend the majority of my time in Upper Dharamsala, the home of the Tibetan Goverment in Exile and a large community of Tibetan expatriates.

One of the people I will visit is my friend Rinchen Tsomo. She escaped from Tibet, which is suffering through its 47th year of brutal Chinese occupation, by crossing the Himalayan mountains on foot with 21 other people. Six of those people died on the trip, and all of them contracted frostbite. Rinchen made it to Nepal, where she found work in a rug shop in Kathmandu that sold rugs from her native region of Dege. Rinchen married a man and had a baby, but soon after that her husband disappeared (Nepal is a dangerous place.)

When I met Rinchen two years ago, she had brought her four year-old daughter Ngawang to Dharamsala to leave her at the Tibetan Children's Village orphanage because Rinchen could no longer afford to take care of her. When I learned that, I knew I had to do something, so I emailed Mrs. Hays from India, and she said we should help Rinchen move to Dharamsala to be safe and to be with her daughter. So that's what we did. For the last two years we have sent Rinchen enough money each month for her to live in Dharamsala, where she can live in safety with her daughter, who is enrolled in the Tibetan Children's School. She is supposed to be doing very well, and I am going to check on my good friends to make sure they have everything they need.

I am looking forward to seeing the beautiful Dheodar Mountains again, eating Tibetan food, and learning more about Tibetan culture and Buddhism ..

Wetlands and Wikis

I just returned this evening from a trip to South Carolina with Mr. Anderson. We were there to meet with teachers and school heads from 16 different schools from all over the eastern half of the U.S. The event was sponsored by NCISR, which Whitfield helped to found back in the 1990's.

The keynote speaker was Alan November, and his remarks have me all fired up about blogging, RSS feeds, publishing student work, wikis, skype and lots of other cool things that my students knew about already, but which are kind of new to me.

South Carolina was my 42nd state. I had visited all the states in the eastern U.S. except SC and now I can focus on travelling west. My only remaining unvisited states are Washignton, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, the Dakotas, Alaska and Hawaii.

We had lots of rain during the conference, which was held at Kiawah Island, a barrier island along the Atlantic shore. While we spent a lot of time in meetings, I did get a chance to walk along the ocean and among the tidal ponds, where I saw Great Egrets, Blue Herons, a few Buffleheads, Sanderlings, Double-Crested Cormorants, Brown Pelicans and several spieces of gulls.

We didn't see any of the alligators rumored to be numerous in the freshwater on the backside of the island.

I would like to return to South Carolina to do some more extensive bird watching with Mrs. Hays some day.

First Post

I have to start somewhere, I suppose. I am estabishing this blog in response to a discussion with Alan November at the NCIS national conference at Kiawah Island, SC on February 3, 2006. I cannot wait to share with my colleagues and my students the ideas generated by discussions at this conference.