Shallowness, decadence and mascara

Now the venturers have left, I'm starting a slow but steady return to something ressembling normality. In addition to post-expedition paperwork, inventories and debrief chats, I'm desperately trying to sort out last minute things for mine and Adam's trip - train travel (turns out you have to book trains in advance and can't just rock up on the day!), more accommodation and a taxi to pick us up from Bangalore airport on Monday morning. The office phone has gone down and the computer server keeps crashing, so these tasks have been more challenging than they perhaps should have been!

I also, very importantly, have to keep going into town to buy more clothes, since I accidentally posted most of mine back to the UK or donated them to the logs room, not to mention the fact that I've looked like a Raleigh-branded mismatched lunatic for the past 13 weeks and would really like to look like an attractive-ish human being again. See example of said lunacy in pic from last phase.

I also HAD to buy mascara, since I may have learned how to live without makeup, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. Yesterday I managed to buy a pair of jeans, pair of light trousers, three tops, said mascara, a copy of the Indian Marie Claire and some conditioner for 20 quid in the ever-reliable More Megastore. Fab!

And finally, I've had to begin an important retoxification programme to ensure my body can cope with alcohol once again. So far I've had 1 beer, 2 rums and a G&T (over 2 nights). We had an amazing thai green curry at Gav's house on Wednesday, an evening that was mellow, candle-filled, tasty and fun. We then went out to the Green Hotel for dinner last night, the hotel we went on our first night in India, which shows that what goes around comes around, circle of life stuff, etc. etc. etc.

I really don't feel much like drinking even now, so haven't done anything stupid! Staff party is on Saturday night in Ooty so we'll see if I can say the same come Sunday....

Christmas comes to Fieldbase early

All the venturers have left now, leaving a somewhat emotional and bereft-feeling staff team behind them. This afternoon they headed off in their different directions, either by coach to Bangalore airport or to travel on in India or, in the case of the host country venturers, to the train and bus stations in Mysore to head back home to their families.

Before they left we reassembled in our original Alpha groups, an emotional experience in itself as we caught up with the highs and lows of expedition. I've been with 5 members of my original group through all three phases, but it was amazing to catch up with the other 5 to find out about their adventures.

We've had a festive couple of days at fieldbase. Last night we prepared a Christmas dinner for 50 people (my role involved peeling 20kg of potatoes, a task that took a mammoth 2 hours!) and watched the nativity plays that fieldbase staff and the alpha groups had prepared. Curry and Stew, the two fieldbase goats, played a starring role in the fieldbase staff play. I was narrator in our alpha group play, which involved squinting at a scribbled piece of paper filled with asterisks and arrows and trying to figure out where to pause to allow the venturers to do their acting. We hadn't rehearsed beforehand so it was all a bit stressful!

The decorations at fieldbase have been amazing. Beautiful lights, a Christmas tree, paper decorations, huge stars hanging around the quad, leech socks decorated with tinsel hanging up for Santa! It all felt very festive, albeit incongruous given the daily temperatures which hover around the high 20s, palm trees and green parrots that flit around fieldbase.

After dinner and speeches from three venturers, the country director Gavin and the deputy programme manager Robin, we were all surprised by fireworks exploding into the sky over the roof of fieldbase and the coconut trees.

Definitely an image that will remain in my mind for a long time.

Phase 3 - Kebepura community project

27 November 2008
We deployed yesterday and arrived at Kebepura, the village where we are constructing eco-sanitation units, by midday. Met with Mykaps (NGO with whom we are working in partnership) and introduced ourselves; we started to unpack before going into the village community centre for a meeting.

This was perhaps the first meeting I've ever been to involving a woman cradling a baby and a monkey at the same time. The monkey, which looks cute but apparently is incredibly evil, jumped on a small child's back while she was crawling around the floor. Apparently it's good with children but vicious with older people.

The meeting was quite difficult, as despite my best intentions I started to nod off. This did not go unobserved by the venturers, much to my chagrin as I was trying really hard to set a good example! After several speeches we were presented with flowers and after a good five minutes of inhaling their scent deeply, we were informed by someone from Mykaps that it was dangerous to smell them since they contained small but deadly insects. However, I haven't dropped dead yet.

After the meeting we walked the 1.5 odd km down a track to Kebepura B, the second part of the village where we will be building the final 15 eco-sanitation units.

While the main part of the village consists of 80-odd houses, a school, a tiny shop (literally the size of a cupboard), community centre, plus the 30 units that the first two Raleigh groups have built, Kebepura B is an even smaller cluster of about 10 houses, a cattle shed and a rainwater harvesting tank / hand pump.

Animals roam freely in both parts of the village and in the morning we were woken by a cacophony of different animal sounds, from cockerels to dogs to peacocks to cows to small children playing outside. There is also an elephant risk from the forest next to the village, despite the elephant-proof electric fence (which has a huge hole in it at any rate, through which villagers take their cattle to graze on the edges of the National Park). Villagers are very scared of wild elephants since they are not only potentially dangerous but can also destroy their livelihood and crops in one fell munch.

We are staying in the main part of the village. We have one room in the village school where the venturers are sleeping and where we are storing our worksite tools and food supplies (mostly porridge, since every meal apart from breakfast is catered by Mykaps). Jo, Nikki and I have a large tent - really more of a mini-marquee - that we have set up in the school grounds.

The interest from villagers and school children is much less than I'd anticipated. Nikki told us that in the first phase they were watched while they ate, did their reviews, walked to work, set up the tent, washed, basically in every aspect of their daily routine, but the novelty has clearly worn off by now as besides a few shy glances from the women and being approached by the children to enquire our names, our presence in the village is clearly not the oddity it once was.

I should also mention that I think I've secured a job for the new year in the Older People and Ageing Society division of DWP. Very strange to be standing in the middle of the school playground surrounded by children, chickens and cows being informally interviewed by a senior civil servant about a job come 2009!

29 November 2008
First day at the worksite and we completed all 15 foundations for the units and one unit built their unit up to 3 brick level. The foundations are so shallow that they cure in literally no time, so there is a danger of running out of work if we're not careful.

Luckily we have the option of building wormeries if and when we finish the eco-sanitation units, and before deploying we discussed a few possible trip options with the group, to break up the work schedule and make good use of our rest days, including the long-awaited trip to the Mudumulai elephant sanctuary.

We are also trying to organise another trip to Kalkere, a more local elephant reserve about 9km from the village in the N Begur forest range. For this we need to arrange permissions with the N Begur Range Forest Office, which is one of the places we visited during the project planning visit for the environmental phase. Seems so long ago now! Finally, we are also seeking permission from fieldbase for a trip to a Tibetan colony just north of Handpost, which is where the Mykaps head office is based.

It rained yesterday and we discovered our tent / mini-marquee isn't waterproof. Nearly all the zips on the doors are also broken, so our tent is now held together with duck tape and two large pieces of tarp sheltering it from the elements. We've decided to add on extra components to the tent-palace project every day - next stage is a mini-moat to stop water turning the ground to mud underneath the tent. We have also considered a drawbridge and a turret, naturally constructed from duck tape and ricebags, just to add to the castle feel.

Yesterday I stayed at the school as one of the venturers was feeling unwell. I ended up getting drawn into a rousing chorus of the hokey-cokey and heads, shoulders, knees and toes (with the school children, rather than him), as well as taking on the less-than-pleasant task of disinfecting the showers and toilets with almost an entire bottle of bleach. This felt extremely necessary, since I had found a congealing turd in one of the shower cubicles, again I assume one of the school children's rather than belonging to our lot!

Having grappled with poo in the showers and litres of toilet duck, I made things nice for the return of the others from the worksite by putting the kettle on and chopping up some pineapple, whilst entertaining small children in the sidelines. By the time the others got back the children were singing traditional Indian songs and dancing in the playground for me.

Tomorrow we had been planning our trip to the Tibetan colony, but Raleigh HQ have put a blanket ban on all trips over this weekend in response to terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I don't know much about these, due to living in the middle of nowhere, but I'm fine and nowhere near Mumbai.

As the masons don't work on Sundays, we are hoping to organise a cricket match with the local community instead.

Today has been a fairly lazy day - for me at least. The venturers all got stuck in with brick-laying, fantastic to see as it means they've succeeded in building a positive rapport with their individual masons. All the units are now built up to a 3-brick level, so this afternoon was spent lazing (me) and cutting metal sheets (them). There is a bit of a danger with this project of going a bit flat, as there isn't a huge amount of building work to do and still less for us as project managers since we want to allow venturers to do as much as possible.

The real joy of this phase is living in the midst of a rural tribal community and making the most of opportunities to interact with the villagers. Already we've been playing with the school children and today I walked around the whole of Kebepura B (which took about 2 minutes!) taking photos and (attempting) to talk to the local people, conversations that chiefly consisted of factual information about name, age and numbers of people in our respective families.

Everyone is so approachable and smily and interested in our presence without it being overwhelming. Looking forward to learning more about the local people and their community at tomorrow's cricket match....

2nd December 2008
Building work is moving on apace this week and now all the floors in the eco-sanitation unit have been laid, while one of the units is up to 7 brick level. I didn't work a huge amount yesterday, apart from shifting dirt to fill in the base of the units. This acts like a mold for the floor to sit on top and set solid, after which the dirt will be dug out of a small hole in the base of the unit leaving the floor sitting intact on top. We hope anyway.

I grafted a bit more today, both carrying breeze blocks (300 in total) to one worksite and working with one of the masons, Shivu, in constructing the concrete floor in one double unit. Mykaps expect beneficiaries to contribute to the project through their labour to ensure that the local community has fully bought into it and will use and maintain the units appropriately, so I was working alongside the wife of the village chief, who was carrying the bricks on her head. Jo, Nikki and I also managed to have a little sit down on said breeze blocks - turns out they're pretty versatile things!

I haven't done any of my one-to-ones yet and to be honest am finding it difficult to stay motivated and focus on our task as project managers. This is partly because I can feel that I am starting to disengage from Raleigh and look forward to life post-expedition, to Adam and my holiday if not my return to the UK.

I wish I were staying more focussed, as I feel I'm cheating both myself and the venturers by feeling like this. The community project is fantastic in that I feel privileged to be staying in a lovely rural community with people who have so little but seem able to give so much. However, the work isn't as demanding as either the environmental phase or the trek, and time pressures are much less.

We are catered for lunch and dinner, meaning the only real chores are making porridge, scrubbing toilets/showers, making tea, purifying water jerry cans and making sure is stowed away so stray dogs can't get at it. Being less than fully occupied means I'm starting to feel lethargic and a bit lazy.

In an attempt to curb this inclination, Jo, I and a couple of the venturers are going for morning runs to the little temple at the top of the road, a 20-25 minute run in total. On our way we pass the water pump with its steady stream of bucket-wielding women balancing jars of water of their heads, cattle, goats and one or two farmers gawping at us in disbelief as we jog past.

The local shopkeeper has proved most enterprising. Within a couple of days of our arrival his cupboard-sized shop was already heaving with bottled mineral water, coca-cola, sprite, packets of crisps (admittedly masala flavour!) and oranges, all the things to suit a western palate, alongside the slightly dusty plastic containers of Indian sweets, condensed coconut blocks and spicy snacks. Naturally the gannets move quickly, but even I've managed to buy the odd perfectly succulent sweet lime before they all vanish from the shop shelves.

6 December 2008

We've just got back from a two day break to Mudumulai wildlife sanctuary. We visited an elephant camp for rescue elephants and watched them being fed giant "ragi bols", huge versions of the squidgy playdough stuff that Manu the forest ranger fed to us in phase 1 (basically you swallow them whole with a dash of sambar, and the bigger the balls the better!).

The baby elephant put its trunk on my shoulder and I felt thousands of muscles in his sinewy trunk pushing against me nearly knocking me over! Here's a picture of him doing the same to Nikki!

We also went on "safari" this morning in a Forestry Department bus, but we'd actually seen more wildlife the day before on the bus we'd used to get to the National Park. This morning we saw some spotted deer and a peacock, but just driving through the park on the main road yesterday brought us face to face with a doe and her baby, not to mention wild boar. Someone on the tour bus, a fat bespectacled Indian tourist, was playing music out loud from his mobile phone, and I felt like killing him. So the safari was a bit of a letdown, but at least we got to travel in a camouflage print bus cunningly disguised as a pile of leaves.

It was then back to our accommodation for some illicit porridge making, before jumping on the bus and heading off to Gundlupet to buy birthday cake for one of the venturers and to eat lunch in a roadside restaurant. We arrived back in Kebepura this afternoon and quickly discovered our tent had been broken into and most of the contents disturbed.

Closer inspection reveled that we were missing 2 packs of crisps, a bottle of coke and a miniature plastic tuk-tuk, suggesting the intruders were highly discerning. They'd also left dusty footprints across the tent and not only taken the crisps but also left evidence in the form of crisp crumbs sprinkled liberally all over our rollmats.

Unsurprisingly given this evidence, the culprits turned out to be 9 children from the school, and we quickly had to intervene to make sure they weren't caned, which mostly involved us leaping across the grass to the teachers' accommodation and gibbering madly about how they were only packets of crisps and it didn't matter to us. The teachers didn't understand our English, but at least they stopped threatening to hit the children.

In slightly more pleasant news, the work in Kebepura B is coming on really well. I laid my first bricks and had a go and filling the gaps between bricks with cement. Very messily I hasten to add.

All the women in the village have also come to introduce themselves to Nikki, Jo and me. They came en masse, one woman clearly the appointed spokesperson by virtue of the fact she could speak a few words of English. they gathered around us giggling shyly and smiling, offering us information about their families and offspring and asking us questions in return about our age and marital status.

The youngest woman was 20 and already had 2 children. Apparently the women in this village stay in school until about 14 or 15, at which point they stop their education and marry. The woman with some grasp of English appeared to be an exception, in that she was 20 and still unmarried. Although it felt a little intrusive to inquire the reason why, I wondered whether the fact she turned out to be the daughter of the village chief hasd anything to do with it. The other women had mostly married into the village, either from nearby villages or from places further afield such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

I reciprocated these sharing of confidences by showing them a picture of Adam, the only one of which on my current memory card is of him eating a fish pie we'd made in our kitchen at home last year, whereupon they announced that they would also like to turn up en masse in London for our wedding!

It is mostly the men in the village who have been labouring to dig foundations and mix cement, although as I mentioned the chief's wife got stuck in the other day and we all carried breeze blocks together (though I didn't lift them on my head!). However, this project is of particular benefit to the tribal women of the vilage, as in the past they have had to wait until nightfall to leave the house and relieve their bladders in the nearby forest.

This is obviously not only uncomfortable for them, particularly if they are pregnant, but it's also dangerous because of the wild animal risk from the forest. Having their own personal loo should offer them both some more comfort, privacy and safety. It feels very humbling that something so simple, easy to construct and that we'd take for granted in the UK, could potentially offer so many benefits to the individuals we are meeting on a daily basis.

8th December 2008

Following an argument about an asbestos roof with Mudu the mason, a conversation that involved some serious throwing of the trowel out of the tuktuk, 8 of the eco-units now have rooves, 4 of them also have steps leading up to the door, completed floors and toilet pans, 2 still need building up to 9-brick level while a further 5 await roofing tomorrow. Progress has been steady but slower than anticipated, partly because not all 5 of the masons have been on site as intended, but also because of sickness in the group.

Nevertheless, we are only working a half day tomorrow before going on an 8km trek to a nearby elephant sanctuary in the forest, where we will be staying overnight in a forest guesthouse courtesy of the Bandipur Forest Department.

I personally can't wait, although it has just started to rain this evening which may prove difficult for elephant spotting. I'm very tired tonight, physically because of digging dirt out of the bases of the units, but also mentally/emotionally for a whole host of reasons.

10th December 2008

We spent an amazing couple of rest days visiting Kalkere, an elephant camp located about 9km from Kebepura. Accompanied by two armed rangers, we trekked into the forest, where we spotted fluffy black and white monkeys, though sadly no wild elephants. Kalkere was the most incredible experience.

In the afternoon we arrived I stroked a huge bull elephant, a working elephant that was brought to the camp to help to train a blind wild elephant that the Forestry Department had rescued. Being so close to such a heavy and powerful animal, albeit a gentle one, was really quite incredible! We also watched the rangers feeding some of the wilder elephants, including the blind one who had only been living at the camp for a month, so was still quite scary - lots of trumpeting and bellowing from her!

In the evening we joined the Foresters on elephant watch, who spend their nights sitting around campfires keeping an eye on the inhabitants of the camp; in particular to check that wild elephants don't harm the blind elephant, who is clearly quite vulnerable at the moment. This was possibly one of the most unique and amazing experiences of my life - sitting around the campfire with my fellow PMs, Nikki and Jo, the host country venturers and the elephant watchers; the crackling fire, Jaga singing Tamil songs, elephants munching in the background, elephant snores and sneezes were the only sounds to be heard.

Before we went to bed Jo, Nikki, Jayesh and I spent about an hour stroking two young elephants, a boy and a girl aged 3 and 4. I can't get over how muscly and dextrous their trunks are, and also how intelligent they are! They sniffed us all over from our feet to our faces, and managed to locate a chocolate wrapper in Jo's pocket, which they tried desperately to steal. It was simply the most beautiful evening, and one that I think I'll remember forever.

In the morning I woke up early and sat out in front of the Forestry Guesthouse hoping to glimpse more wildlife, in particular wild elephants. Maybe I'm not patient enough, but after an hour I'd only seen one deer, so I went back to the elephant camp elephants and watched their handlers do a training session with the blind one, using the placid bull elephant to help them. Incredible.

13th December 2008

Last day in Kebepura and there was a huge ceremony in the main village community centre, to which all the local bigwigs and Gavin, our country director, attended, along with about 100 villagers. We were presented with flower garlands and listened to lots of speeches from representatives from Mykaps, local village people, the chief of the village and Gavin. I also gave a (mercifully short) speech on behalf of the project managers, as did one of our venturers. Gavin then cut the ribbon on one of the eco-units and after a few Indian nibbles - spicy crisps and sweets - we headed over to Kebepura B for one final visit.

Saying goodbye to the women of the village was particularly emotional, and the daughter of the village chief was actually crying as she waved us goodbye. It was a bitter-sweet day, in that we have achieved our goals of building 50 eco-sanitation units in Kebepura A and B (across the three phases of the expedition), but I felt painfully aware that as we left to return to Mysore and the luxury of buying consumables, tasty food and drinks pretty much as the whim took us, that we were returning to a world that most of the people in this village could never really imagine, let alone hope to attain.

Although I enjoyed coming back to Mysore and doing the usual foray into Food World to buy cereal, wholewheat bread and marmalade (which even in Mysore are not easy products to come by!), it did make me question whether the things that I can purchase so easily are actually all that great. I felt somewhat decadent, wasteful and shallow.

I will always remember the village women waving goodbye to us from Kebepura B between the two toilets that we've built, toilets that should make a huge difference to their everyday lives, looking back over my shoulder to see their smiling and tearful faces as we walked away to a world of luxury and privilege.