Hello Doctors!

The kids were getting free medical checkups from the doctors on our team. I grabbed a Ukelele and we sang an impromptu song.

Awake and Shine.

In India, good education is not a right.

From village to village, all we've seen first-hand are horrific schools which are not given any funding or resources. Some are government schools, others are run by the church. They're equally terrible. We've seen children waiting on the front porch an hour after school was supposed to start because their teachers had not yet arrived. We've heard stories of scabies-infested church schools where nuns beat children with sticks because they express that they "like" other five year old children of thesame sex. We've seen the empty and dirty faces of village kids as they walk home from a place where they're not allowed to be themselves.

Many children don't even go to school at all. You see them working in the fields, hanging around the village or sitting idly by the road.

It's not uncommon to see children working in odd labor jobs. In this place, times are tough and family unemployment is high. Many of these children only speak the local dialects of Nepali or Lepcha and aren't able to communicate in Hindi (the official language of much of India), Bengali (the dominant language of much of this state) or English. They're left to fend for themselves in a world that's rapidly working against them.

Four years ago, Awake and Shine was created as a part of an overall philanthropic project by Retired Indian Army General Jimmy Singh from his personal resources. This is a school where village children can learn skills, self-confidence and subject matter in a safe and trusting environment. Classes are taught in English. This allows the children to be able to set and reach goals that are beyond the invisible walls of their remote village. It's an environment where the children thrive.

This is a special place.

It's a small school of about 70 students in the hills overlooking Mt. Khangchendzonga. There are 6 teachers and five class levels of education. They plan to add another class level each year as their current Level 2 class progresses. The school is run by Maureen Blake, a former teacher from the UK who grew up as a childnot too far away in the town of Kalimpong. She's there approximately 6 months of each year. She's the only person from outside of this community who is involved in the school.

Teachers are actually from the villages and are trained in-house. Their passion is instantly evident as you watch the unique exercises that they've developed to teach the children lessons and concepts. It's natural. It's rhythmic. It's brilliant. And the kids truly get it.

This is a place where the children are given opportunities that they would never have had.

Their vibrancy is instantly apparent. Today we attended their end-of-term awards day. It was such a thrill to experience these children singing and celebrating their year. It was even more interesting to look at the children's parents watching from the field, enjoying the possibilities that now exist for their future generations.

We were lucky enough to get to present some awards. We also presented some gifts to the school including sports equipment and generously donated uCorders.

Laughter is the language of children.

You hear it almost immediately as you stumble down the rocky mountain path to the Awake and Shine schoolhouse.

Kids playing, laughing and smiling. This is a place where positive energy shines and opportunity exists.

We're here to make the potential of these opportunities possible. One of the pressing needs that we're addressing here is for a pathway to be built that links the school through the mountain trail to the main road. This will help the kids actually be able to attend school, particularly in the monsoon season. Some of these children spend more than an hour each way on steep mountain trails just to get near the building.

Many of you know me and are aware of my overall cynicism and way of looking at the world. Everything is relative. When you look at some of the horror facing these villages every day, the fact that this school exists is astonishing. The amazing uplifting spirit and remarkable self-sufficient nature of the project is something that should be used as an example in developing communities everywhere. It would have been very easy to dissuade me from this project, but now that I've seen it with my own eyes I can tell you, this isn't bullshit.

There are some pretty spectacular people in this world, indeed.

We all can learn a lesson from this place.

The work isn't done. Please help us out and DONATE at http://www.indiaproject.ca

A Second Opinion.

When you say the word "hospital" it conjures up images of packed emergency rooms, busy specialists, 24 hour frantic rushes and whirring machines that make beeping noises.

The hospital is the place that you go when you absolutely need help. You know that it's going to be there for you.

Today was not what I had expected at all.

We had heard stories about how the medical care was non-existent in Samthar. In the back of my mind I figured that people were merely speaking in hyperbole, or that they were turning a blind eye to existing programs.

We set up a field clinic literally in the field behind the 'hospital'. There was no reason to fear the competition, as the facility looked abandoned. A wooden skeleton of a building in the middle of the mountains.

Closed. On a Tuesday morning.

As the patients lined up we realized that there were actually people looking at us curiously from inside the hospital. We decided to go and have a look.

The government runs this primary health center. There's supposed to be a nurse and a doctor stationed there. The nurse is there, she's the one who was looking out the window, but the doctor is nowhere to be seen. The nurse is in her 20s and speaks perfect English. She looks bored out of her mind. Luckily she has some friends hanging out with her.

"Where is the doctor?" we ask.

"Oh, he is not here. He's in Calcutta. He is getting married."

Calcutta is 23 hours away.

"How often is he here?"

"He is often here." says the nurse. It's not what we've heard.

The nurse is not from here. She's from a city a few hours away. She's just finished nursing school and this remote outpost is an extremely easy and extremely high paying government job. She clearly misses the city life.

Perhaps she catches on to the nature of our inquiries, perhaps she's drawn away by a pressing concern, either way... about two minutes after our conversation she's gone. Disappeared along with her friends. The last thing we hear is them talking in English about how Facebook is way better than Orkut and Hi5 on their mobile phones back in the city.

The hospital is once again empty.

Thankfully, the chain locks on the doors are left unlocked... so we decide to go inside and have a look.

Generally breaking into abandoned hospitals in foreign countries is a bad idea, but in a place where the police are over 5 hours away, there's little realistic concern.

It's a dilapidated five room building. We enter the doctor's office first. It's immediately clear that this office has never been occupied. There are absolutely no files on the shelves. There's a layer of dust over everything. There are no medical instruments. The fireplace has never been used.

The next room over is what appears to be the pharmacy. There are a few boxes of antibiotics and what appears to be logbooks. We open them up. They've seen three patients in the last month. Meanwhile, there are twenty people already lined up in the lot where our clinic has just started outside.

We also find a staff attendance sheet. All of the dates have been filled in. It looks incredibly suspect. Especially since the building is clearly unused. And there are arguably no staff.

There's a beautiful red wedding invitation on the desk. It's by far and away the only thing in the building that's not completely covered in dust. It's stunning. Thick dark red paper with gold leaf imprint. The kind of thing that costs exactly as much as it looks.

We leave the pharmacy and walk over to the only patient room in the building. It looks like a torture chamber from the middle ages. A wooden plank bed. A rusty crib. A wine bottle in the corner. An unintentionally reusable IV drip hanging off of a nail on the wall. It's filthy. It's not the kind of place where you'd want anyone to be sick.

The death-row green 'operating room' is empty. No furniture. No electrical outlets. Nothing.

At dinner later on, we find out that the pharmacy is provided with free medicines from the government. The pharmacists sell these for whatever price they can and pocket the money.

Perhaps tomorrow if the doctor is in, I'll be able to ask him what this is all about so that we can clear up this misunderstanding.

The Balancing Act.

I’ve been thinking about how the folks who live here must perceive our team. How they must perceive our presence here in their villages, amongst their families and in their homes.

It’s somewhat more clear when I see the way that they look at us when we take the first steps onto a new mountain ridge. Their eyes peer us up and down. Their faces look nervous. Their body language is rigid. They mutter amongst themselves and curiously watch our every move. They have no idea what to make of us.

We are people from another world.

This is the rarest of places. A region completely out of reach of the mass media. There are no ads here, because there are no stores here. There are no magazines. No newspapers. No television. No want and no need.

A place where children can actually dress like children. Where female role models are not hyper-sexualized stick insects and where everyone actually knows your name.

I was joking around with my team-mates that we should start dressing in space suits, just so we could realize how the villagers would treat us the exact same way that they do now.

The simplest games become these interesting cultural experiments.

While on a trek down by a mountain river, we decided to create makeshift Inukshuks out of the stones. Two of the Nepali children on our hike were absolutely perplexed by this.

Since the waving of a hand is not a recognized greeting here, it allows one to be more flexible with their symbolic manifestation of ‘hello’. I’ve taken the cultural-mashup approach, mixing the traditional ‘Namaste’ hand gesture with a hearty Texan “Howdy!” to people I meet along the way. I’ve received several curious glances, many warm smiles and one actual “Howdy!” back.

The villagers aren’t the only ones who are confused.

While walking along the trail this afternoon, our guide knelt down and picked up a jagged leaf that he told me was “The Medicine Plant”. Who knows what kind of ridiculous opiate the damn thing was. All I know is that the day flew by, I broke out in hives and I swear that at one point I saw some people in a rice patty dancing to the YMCA song.

The next time I come back here, I’m bringing my laser pointer and some astronaut ice cream.

Flip Flops.

Kholaghari.

The kind of place where you wouldn't be surprised to see pterodactyls fly out of the jungle canopy towards the mountain peaks above.

No roads run here. The only way to get here is to trek the steep climb down from Samthar into the valley below. It took our team several hourswearing hiking gear and with guides. The local kids can do it in a fraction of that time while wearing flip flops.

These kids must have some genetic advantage that predisposes them to mountain life.

There's a clearing in frontof our roadshow medical clinic. The kids from the village are kicking a soccer ball around as they wait to see the doctors. Every once in a while the ball goes over the edge... of the mountain. With no reservation whatsoever, the kids effortlessly chase the ball and literally FLY off the field to get the ball. In flip flops.

I'm winded just watching them.

We're set up in front of a horrific one-room government schoolhouse who's existence exposes the massive corruption in this part of India. The building is falling apart. There are splintered chairs and rusty nails.The floor feels like it's about to give way. There are no books, no blackboards and no shelves. If this was in America, the building would be condemned.

In the English language national newspaper, there are government ads talking about the massive advances in education in this state. This possibly fictitious great-leap has clearly not helped the poor children of Kholaghari. Our Nepali guides tell us that there's massive amounts of corruption here. Promises are not kept. People are not helped. Photo-ops are merely that. And politicians become very, very wealthy.

People here are not sad or upset. They're proud of who they are and where they live. The General, who's serving as our host, expressed his opinion that the reason that people are so happy is because they brew their own unregulated alcohol, a millet-based brew that they call "Chong".

They've set up our tent literally four precarious steps away from the edge of the mountain. Generally this would be of great concern to us, but we don't want to appear to be total pussies in front of the flip flop climbing villagers.

It's not working.

If not for our physical prowess, at least they respect us for the massive amounts of help we're bringing their community. So much so that they even threw a bonfire in our honor tonight. The whole village gathered around to sing us Nepali songs and dance. A special evening. Apparently we were the first foreigners to EVER spend the night in their village.

After their song-and-dance show, which I saw as somewhat of a "Gorkaland Idol" smorgasbord of a showcase, they motioned for us to sing a song of our own. We had absolutely no idea what do. We broke into an impromtu rendition of "O Canada" over the tabla beat. It was the only song which we all knew the words to.

They clapped along, smiled and danced.

Ponbu City Limits

There's this amazing sustenance economy that exists here in the mountains.

It's an incredibly remote place which is very hard to access. Every dwelling has a small piece of land in which they produce all that they need in order to live. Most homes have a cow or two for milk, some green vegetable garden, chickens, a grain called Millet which they ferment into a moonshine-ish homebrew and some of the lucky families even have a pig. There's generally an extremely small c-store of sorts that sells a painfully small variety of biscuits and candies within a few hours walk of each village on every mountain ridge.

They're proud people who make what they consume.

The romanticism of this ideal wears off when you consider the plague of these people. Malnutrition.

Almost every single child here is iron deficient. You see hypopigmentation of the skin. Stomach problems. They're missing vitamins and minerals. It's a problem with a clear cause and clear remedy.

Bananas are plentiful, but they lead to constipation.

It hurts when you watch sick children eating chocolate bars for lunch because it's all that they can get.

During our field clinics here it's common for the doctors to include multivitamins and iron tonic in each prescription. It's almost assumed.

We're about to start our second day of clinics here in Ponbu, a village of about 100 families at a few thousand feet altitude.

Yesterday was tough.

We saw a 17 year old boy who couldn't figure out why his legs were swollen. After observation, it appeared as though he had an undiagnosed major neuromuscular condition. There was nothing that we could do except to guide him on his way to a better equipped facility.

The image that's going to remain in my mind though was that of the thin frail old woman who arrived with her friends in the mid-afternoon. They were laughing and chatting. When it came time for the doctors to see her, she gave her age as 46. We thought that it must have been a miscommunication or mistranslation. She came closer and it became clear that she wasn't well. As she removed her shawl we realized that she was half the size that she appeared to be. She couldn't have weighed more than 40 pounds. Cancer was eating it's way through this poor woman's body. She was in incredible pain, but she kept smiling. Even after her visit with the doctor, and even after she had received devastating news, she kept smiling. Eventually she rejoined her friends and they resumed their apparently pleasant conversation, smiling and laughing as if nothing had happened.

There's a cultural component to all human interaction which is incredibly hard to deconstruct without being a part of it. I can't quite figure it out. Perhaps there's a degree of fatalism here. People seem to be very comfortable with whatever is in store for them.

One more day on this ridge, then we trek back to Samthar.

Thanks to all who have helped with this project so far. I can let you know that it's truly making a difference.

You can help us with this project by DONATING at http://www.indiaproject.ca

Good morning, Big Suruk.

When you go to sleep at 8pm, you find yourself awake in your tent at 4 in the morning, shivering in the cold and listening to the sounds around you.

Some are identifiable, some are not. The echo of some foreign language in the canyon below. The wind rushing over the canvas. The barking of wild dogs. The growling of potentially predatory species.

Before we left, I was joking with Jennifer that we'd be eaten by tigers. This morning as I listen to and catastrophise the sounds around me, I'm not sure who the joke is on.

Stepping back.

We're camped out on a plateau at a place that translates to "Big Suruk". It's an extremely small collection of simple dwellings perched overlooking the third highest mountain in the world. There's no electricity and no running water. A few hundred people live in the vicinity. They have no access to health care whatsoever.

We hiked over and set up a makeshift medical clinic yesterday here. It was promoted in the preceding weeks with the help of the General who's farmhouse is serving as our base camp here in the mountains. The four doctors on our team saw over 80 patients here yesterday, some of whom may never have seen a doctor before.

The patients started arriving just as we did. Their issues ranged from simple aches and pains to considerably more severe conditions.

Some patients were easily treatable, like the child who appeared with head-to-toe scabies sores. Or the multitude of people who needed simple painkillers to deal with the physical strains of mountain life.

Others had to be given the advice, which they may never take, that they should follow up by going to the primary medical center at Kalimpong. One gentleman who arrived at the clinic showed all the symptoms of late stage lung cancer. A mother with a brain damaged child why he looked so different. A woman showing the symptoms of kidney failure had no idea she was even sick.

Some of this was truly heartbreaking. A small child showed up asking us to help her little sister who was born without an eye.

There's supposed to be a doctor serving this community, but he doesn't even bother to show up. He hasn't been seen in months.

We've stocked up a simple pharmacy full of useful medications and we're aided by local translators. They mentioned how grateful the whole community is.

In a few hours, we're hiking down to a village called "Little Suruk". If THIS is big Suruk, I cannot imagine what little will be.

The light of my iPhone is the only illumination on the mountain right now. I should get some sleep, tomorrow should be equally intense.