From Sewagram we ventured out to figure out just what non-violence means for ourselves. Half of the group spent 3 days with Vasant and Karuna and their family, on a farm near Nagpur. This experience included scooping cow dung into a basket with our hand to fuel the biogas tank, learning what it means to compost for real, and eating purely vegan the way it was meant to be. This is only a quick description, but it changed the way a lot of us view capitalism...
A quick change of pace put us in Pune where we had three straight days of biodiversity power points on the top floor of the YMCA. We managed to have a beer and do some laundry before we were spread out across the city into our home stays. Moriah and I were sent home with Kaustubh and his parents, a family I couldn't be more at home with, and we both got to see parts of the city from back of his motorcycle, experiences to remember.
IHP doesn't have the tendency to stay anywhere for long, so off we went, mid-home stay, to Amba Valley to visit with the "tribal communities" and experience the water privatization struggle. Check dams, cashew trees, and activism can't be due description, but our time there was amazing. Our Christmas turned out to be a bit unconventional this year, and the 23rd in the Valley we played ultimate Frisbee, ate a tuber and onion dinner cooked in the coals of the bonfire, and sang the twelve days of Christmas at the top of our lungs all within the dried rice patties, it being the dry season in India...
The ride home to Pune, Kaustubh and Christmas Eve worked out a bit differently—our bus broke down for about 7 hours in a sacred grove among the mountains of the Western Ghats. We all began to point fingers jokingly blaming each other for incurring the wrath of the goddess for peeing in the woods, but as time wore on the joke became more serious. With the 25th close at hand Moriah found 20 birthday candles in her backpack, Nate had a lighter, Aaron had the Christmas story in a notebook, and Ina led Silent night, and on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere India, we managed to have our own candlelight service… Merry Christmas indeed.
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