Flood Relief

Kandara village, Himalayas, India

After doing a jungle hike a few days before near Rishikesh, as you may recall from my previous post, completely by chance I'd met a Director of Indian charity 'Asha-Kiran'; a very pleasant chap called Manish. He offered me the chance to help them out for a couple of days, delivering supplies to the region that was affected by the devastating floods in June this year, which killed over 20,000 people - a startling figure. I thought about it for a while then decided how could I not go - here I am roaming about the place for my own benefit with all the time in the world, whilst less fortunate people nearby are missing some of the basics of life - it would be selfish not to. 

We planned to meet in Rishikesh at 6am. Feeling shattered after just three hours sleep, due to having to sort out insurance and credit card problems the night before, I was there on time only to get a text saying they'd be an hour late. Great start. I went and had a chai at a small shop up the street, and despite the time of day and darkness, there were five men in their sixties and seventies chatting away. Who'd get up at that time just for that I pondered. One of them sat down and shuffled beside me, looking at my phone screen to see what I was doing. As I may have noted before, Indian people have no qualms about staring, being nosy, being noisy, interrupting, talking over each other, asking personal questions, or invading your personal space. The concept of manners doesn't exist as such, but manners is a term that determines what is socially acceptable, and with all of the above being considered fine here, in reality you can't call it wrong. It's just their culture, their way. Through hand gestures I could see the chap was very interested in what I was doing, so I showed him a few photos of my travels over the years, whilst he unsucessfully tried again and again to use the touch screen, like a baby trying to walk for the first time, and relayed the place names to his friends with excitement. 

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With daylight now broken, the car arrived and I met the others who were also heading to the flood zone - Manish, Victor - a Spaniard who was the other Director of the charity, three local Indian guys who were also volunteering, as well as the driver who they'd hired along with the car. We headed North out of town, and I could see straight away it was going to be a long and tiring drive - along the windy contours of misty jungle-clad valleys, following the river Ganges towards it's source. Along the way there were numerous road safety signs saying things like 'driving faster can cause disaster', sections where the surface turned to mud and gravel, with speed bumps and pot holes that were back breaking to go over. We passed packs of mules heading to the hills with bricks and sand in their saddle bags, people using village pumps, and a huge hydro electric project. Groups of women carried huge piles of grass and plants on their backs along the roads to feed their cows, other women crouched on the verge smashing rocks salvaged from the riverbed into pieces of gravel, which looked like a desperate existence to me. A small truck pulled out of a side junction without looking and we braked hard to a halt, stopping just in time. Further on, passing through a town, I couldn't help but smile when we drove past a barbers shop that also sold brass instruments - what a great combo!

The Ganges river

 

Women en-route, collecting grass for their cows

After about five hours we came into the start of the area really affected by the floods, and the devastation was very apparent. Some low lying houses along the Ganges lay crumbled, others remained covered to nearly the first floor in silt. There were landslides everywhere. The road we were on was built into the hillside, and in many places one lane had been completely washed away leaving us some hair raising squeezes along the remaining lane, with a large drop down to the river beside. In a few places the road had been washed away completely, and bulldozers had temporarily cut a dirt track further into the hill, or laid a track along the riverbed for us to pass on. It was all a total mess, and whilst some of it was being rebuilt, it seemed very obvious that the government weren't doing nearly enough, not even roughly maintaining these temporary roads.

 

Breathe in, 'cause there's a bi drop the other side

We eventually left the road that we'd followed along the Ganges for hours, and headed up a snaking road into the mountains. As ever there were big drops, narrow windy roads with poor surfaces, and no barriers. It felt like I was in an episode of 'Worlds Most Dangerous Roads', but thankfully after twenty minutes or so, and seven hours after leaving, we reached our destination - a small and remote mountain village called Kandara. Being so far up in the hills it wasn't apparent that the flood had directly affected them, but I'm sure it must have in different ways and if nothing else they were extremely poor. Our task as I found out then for the first time, was to issue blankets, warm jumpers, wooly hats and gloves to remote families who lived and farmed in different places in the surrounding hills. To keep things simple, each family had been asked to send just one family member and in most cases it was the women, who were all sat by the street waiting when we arrived in their brightly colored saris, trousers and headscarfs, chatting amongst each other, all seemingly ageless to me. We unloaded the contents of the lorry which had travelled behind us into what I guess was the village hall, then it was time for speeches. First from Manish, then a couple of the village leaders, then the local councillor, with bursts of applause at various points, but with all of it being said in Hindi I had no idea what was going on.

 

Village ladies 

 

Village men

We got to work, each of the seven of us performing some small task. Mine initially was folding the blankets in half and passing them on, then later taking mens clothing packs out of the sack when they asked for one. It was very undemanding and really there were way too many of us, but I guess they didn't really know what to expect, and better too many than too little. I couldn't help but be impressed with both how noble the cause was, and how well organised it all was. It was great to be part of, but made me think that if the people were that grateful for blankets, that meant they'd been sleeping in cold beds for goodness knows how long. Such simple things, things we take completely forgranted. All the unnecessary things in our lives we think we need, but really don't, and these people don't even have a warm bed to sleep in. It was therefore touching to think of the hundreds of people here possibly having their first warm nights sleep for a while.

Bundles of goods, fresh off the lorry

Every villager had to sign some paperwork to say what they'd received for charity accountability purposes, and I realised this was the first time in my life I'd actually come across illiterate people. Unable to write, they signed for the items using their fingerprint as a signature by pressing it into an inkpad. It was getting dark and the hall didn't have lights, so the locals found some cables and light bulb holders and lashed it all together; I kid you not, using matches to melt the off the cable ends instead of pliers, all whilst the cables were live! I didn't spot it, but Victor actually saw one of them jump a little as he gave himself an electric shock. After half an hour the lights fizzled out and with no-one bothering to fix them, we were back to torch lights. 

By about 8pm we were done, and with hundreds of people satisfied we went off to the restaurant. Actually, calling it a restaurant is a bit of a stretch of the term, as this was a recently converted concrete chicken shed, still full of building materials and junk, with a few tatty stools with an old bench serving as a table. It was more a case of being some bloke in the village who opened part of his house to the occasional visitor. Until then in India I'd been very careful about where and what I ate, as cleanliness and hygiene in the kitchen is something that doesn't often exist, but here with no other option I was at their mercy. The food was pretty basic though tasty, and the chicken didn't really represent chicken as I knew it, but I awoke alive the next day, always a good thing of course. 

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Our accommodation was a couple of rooms above the village hall which served as an occasional guest house. Victor and I being the foreigners as they like to refer to us, were given the VIP treatment and given a room with an actual bed each, although when I came to get in I found under the bedsheet was nothing but a sheet of plywood! Some padding out was required. As a testament to how tolerant Indian people are - the four other volunteers - all aged between forty and seventy, and a mix of charity director and teachers, happily slept in the other room all in a line on thick blankets laid on the concrete floor. Something you could never imagine with people of such standing in the western world - no charity money wasted on excesses here.

At 6am the next day I was rudely awoken by a banging on the door - 'good morning sir, chai. hello sir, chai, morning'. I opened the door and it turned out to be the chap from next door, who decided that we didn't need sleep at that time of day, but a cup of tea. I downed it and dozed off again. At 8am as my alarm was going off, he came round again with another one - alI can say is bless him! After sorting out a few odds and ends with the goods we'd delivered, we had breakfast at the chicken shack - a particularly spicy portion of curried cauliflower and potato served with some chapattis (bread). I'm pretty used to spicy breakfasts now.

With our job done, we headed back towards Rishikesh down the same sketchy roads, and as we travelled, I saw for the first time a traditional Indian cremation taking place on the gravel and rocks of the riverbed. A pyre of wood is built right beside the waters edge with the body inside, then set alight, with a small memorial service being held a few metres away whilst the body is burnt. We continued on, and being sat in the back of the 4X4 this time where the roof is lower, and with no seatbelts to hold me down (standard), I hit my head quite hard on the roof a few times when we went over particularly vicious bumps which was as painful you might expect. I ended up having to slouch as much as I could to survive! We had a few blankets and clothes left over, and Manish made a few enquiries at suitable places along the way, eventually deciding to give them to an orphanage that we passed. We all went into a meeting with the manager for a while, all in Hindi, and then unloaded the goods. It wasn't too bad a place for the poor kids to live by local standards, and the volunteers there were very grateful for the donation.

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We continued to the next town, stopping briefly in the local government offices to hand over our paperwork to the disaster coordinater for the affected region, which was all spoken in English, as is all government business. Further on Manish pointed out a farm up in the hills which the local guys told him produced certain items of fruit and veg exclusively for the Queen of England which are flown across. How exotic ma'am. Throughout the journey I chatted with Victor (24) who had once stayed a summer in Torquay, and in his excellent English asked all manner of cultural questions about the UK that I couldn't answer, such as 'how do you spell eye by gum, and what does it mean' - as you can see couldn't answer very well on either front. He also said he thought English food is rubbish (as most Europeans seem to say to me) and that it was weird how we have carpet everywhere in the house, especially in when in bathrooms - 'so disgusting'. Another example of us thinking everything we do is normal, when it isn't necessarily, it's just our way.

We eventually got back to Rishikesh at about 8pm, and after saying our farewells, I headed back to the hotel I'd previously stayed at, greeted at the door by handshakes and smiles from the elderly owners; a lovely couple. The volunteering work, whilst not in anyway difficult, had been a very interesting experience. It's something I'd been meaning to look into doing here and may well do a bit more sometime. It made me appreciate even more what a great standard of living we have (though I'm reminded daily of that anyway) and it was truly a humbling experience.