Sadhana Forest Part 2

We have been in Sadhana forest for three weeks now, and it is feeling strangely homely. We are in the routine of getting up stupidly early at 5.45 am (although this doesn’t make it any easier) and doing our daily jobs. Jonno is still doing forest work and community jobs, and I have joined the children’s project which is run alongside Sadhana forest. The project is called ‘Children’s Land’ and it is visited by six different groups of children, some from the local village schools, some afterschool projects and an orphanage. The project is built on the idea of ‘unschooling’ which believes that school is not the best learning environment for children as it does not allow them the freedom to learn and discover things by themselves and makes learning uninteresting, and that children already have the desire to learn by themselves without being forced. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling if you want to know more about it). When the groups of children come, they can do whatever they want and although we set out some activities they are not forced to do anything (basically an Indian Challengers!). The group of us that help out at children’s land also are required to study the concepts of unschooling and discuss it and we also learn some of the local language- Tamil. The children are gorgeous and most of them speak basic English which definitely helps. It is also fascinating to see how groups of children from a different culture interact and the roles they assume even as children. Last weekend I was cooking with one of the groups when all of a sudden they started shouting ‘pooja!’ and gathering and requesting items. I asked one of the girls what they were doing and she told me to come with them. I followed them through the forest and to a shaded area with some statues. All of the children were rushing around, sweeping leaves away and sprinkling the ground with water. I then discovered ‘pooja’ is a hindu ritual. After the ground was prepared, they took out some powder and drew designs on the floor at the feet of all the statues, lit firelighters in the middle of the designs and placed an oil lamp at the front. We then had to take it in turns to kneel by the statue and another child went around marking our foreheads with coloured powder. The children’s level of excitement around carrying out this religious ritual was both incredibly interesting and contagious.

Children's land

Playing in the mud pool!

We are getting used to the hippy, eco friendly way of life at Sadhana, and are accepting that we are permanently dirty, as soon as you step off of the shower block you are back in the dirt so any attempt to stay clean is futile. The food is…well……food, we are living off a staple diet of papaya, pineapple, rice, dahl (a stew made of pulses), vegetable broth and salad. Oh, and unlimited bananas. We have on a few occasions had some hummus and something like a chapatti, and we are all jubilant. When we have the chance to eat out though, Jonno feasts on chicken and I keep to my challenge of being vegetarian but treat myself to paneer (an indian type of cheese). As much as I can deal with a lot of aspects of the community I am still struggling with the wildlife. Our room is some kind of noah’s ark, and is inhabited by (but not limited to) cockroaches, a wasps nest, mosquitoes, spiders, frogs, bats, a type of chipmunk and an occasional cat. We are told that we should not keep any food in our rooms, and we soon discovered why. On returning to our bedspace one evening, I noticed that my rucksack was missing. I searched everywhere around the bed, but still could not find it. First came a wave of anger…there must be a thief in the community! How could these seemingly friendly people steal my backpack! Then came the realisation….there might have been some snacks in that rucksack. We then started a hunt around in the woodland outside the hut, and after a while we found it….my rucksack had been ransacked and the perpetrator had managed to get what it wanted, leaving the non edible items sprawled in the surrounding area. That will teach me.

Even when I am trying to do some yoga the wildife gets in the way...I think Ruby and Dobby have Indian contacts.

We have also donated our nourishment to the wildlife in other ways. Both me and Jonno seem to be the delicacy of the local mosquito, and unfortunately for Jonno his bites have not reacted well. We have been trying all sorts of lotions and repellents, both natural and highly toxic, but nothing seems to be working. Nobody else in the community seems to be getting bitten despite them not wearing any repellent, so we are definitely feeling bullied, and spend most of the nights itching like crazy.

Jonno's diseased arm

No wonder he is getting bitten so much...his tactic was to fend away mosquitoes with the repellent tube 

As we have been talking to people at Sadhana, the conversation has naturally come up as to what our jobs in England were. Unfortunately for Jonno, his job with computers was mentioned and the secret was out. He now has had crowds flocking around him with everybody’s IT related problems, and can’t escape it. He has even had his own ‘seva’ (job) created for him and whilst everyone else plants trees in the forest he is fixing computers, and setting up printers and programmes. Even in a forest in the middle of nowhere he is never far from a computer crisis. I think I might have to make him a cape and he can wear his pants over his trousers….

We have also been attempting to explore the local area when we have free time and we have not accidentally fallen asleep in a hammock after our morning’s work. The nearest city is Pondicherry, about a 20 minute drive away. Pondicherry is a bit different to other indian cities, as well as the usual crowded marketplaces and endless horn beeping of traffic there is still an area around the coast where there is French influence from when they owned the area. This has lead to a section of the city with quaint French buildings, art galleries and café’s before returning to the usual Indian chaos. We have visited Pondicherry a few times, and only found a small number of items we were looking for. One of these items that took a lot of hunting was a laptop to replace the broken mess that was our tablet. We were mistaken in our thinking we might be able to find a second hand laptop, when asking various computer shops we were received with blank stares. So instead went on a hunt for a cheap new laptop. We saw many signs for computer shops but not all of them actually lead to computer shops, and of those that were a lot of them were closed. One of these promised places we tried to find had an arrow on the wall leading to a tiny alleyway, stacked high with rubbish and bags of items. We then had to negotiate our way past a room of hay bales, climb up some dodgy looking stairs, down another corridor and step over a sleeping man to reach the computer shop, which was then closed anyway. We finally found a shop that had an average looking small laptop for a fairly good price, so decided to go for that. We only had one smallish backpack with us to carry the laptop back, and the shop insisted that we needed to take the laptop box with us too. So I started to rearrange the contents of my bag, trying to cram in the laptop with packaging in tetris style. The woman in the shop watched our struggle for a few minutes and then disappeared, emerging with a big bag of loose tea leaves as an extra gift for the purchase of the laptop. This was a very nice gesture but then meant the challenge got harder, which made me suspicious that the gift was more for the entertainment value.

Way to the computer shop...

....via this room

On another afternoon we were walking through one of the busy market places in Pondicherry when suddenly I noticed Jonno was not behind me. I found him on the corner of the street, in deep conversation with a man selling bongos. I thought this was a bit strange, as usually we try to escape the street sellers as fast as we can. Jonno beckoned me over, and it turned out that the seller he was talking to in fact used to live and work in Goa, and remembered us from when we were in Goa on our last trip to Goa last year. I didn’t think we were that memorable…and we didn’t buy bongos from him on either occasion!

When we are feeling less energetic we tend to opt for the local cafes, and judge the establishment on the quality and price of the chai (tea) there. Our current favourite place has 2 very comfy chair hammocks and we can easily spend hours there drinking cheap chai and reading. It is definitely useful to have the superbike to take us places, even though more often than not it does seem to have a mind of its own and turn into a bucking bronco after every speedbump. We did on one occasion push the bike to its limits and manage to get three of us on there (also just trying to fit in with the indian culture- you haven’t achieved anything unless you have managed to get a family of five with a refrigerator on a motorbike).

Chilling in the cafe

There are also a few times we have ventured out in the evenings, and have managed to find some cafes with live music which are generally free- even better! Sometimes the expectation vs reality is slightly different. One event a few people in Sadhana mentioned was a bonfire that was happening nearby, so we thought we would check it out. However, the directions we were given were very vague- in fact we were told to look for signposts to ‘infinity’ and from there to ‘follow the vibe’. So off we went on our old not so reliant in search of this bonfire. Soon enough we found ourselves in a maze of sandy pathways, completely lost and no sign for ‘infinity’ in sight….buzz lightyear we were not.  We bumped into a few more people on mopeds who were going to the same place, we followed them for a while but this was an even worse mistake. The path they lead us down involved a mass of thorny bushes on one side and a fence of barbed wire on the other side- with about 1 meter gap to pass through. Thankfully Jonno has had a lot of experience with these type of situations and I have seen him ride through hoops of fire before so he lead us smoothly through the death trap.

However, we were still no closer to this bonfire. In the end, the only thing left to do was to follow the advice given and ‘follow the vibe’. Once we switched off the bike engine we could hear in the distance a faint thumping music, so this is the direction we headed for. We did this a few more times, circling the ‘vibe’ until we found a mass of bikes parked up and decided it was this place. What we expected was a smallish bonfire with maybe a few people with drums and at the very most a few people dancing around the bonfire. What we arrived at was a rave, with a full on sound system, lights and a bar. Most of the people there were intoxicated from various substances. Now in any normal circumstance this would have been a great opportunity for a party, but as we had signed a contract in blood that throughout our time in Sadhana we would not drink even outside of Sadhana, added to the fact that we were both exhausted from a week of early mornings and forest work, this did not put us in the party mood. We tried for a while to hype ourselves up, but shamefully only stayed until midnight before we decided it was not happening and headed back.

So one more week to go at Sadhana Forest…a lot of the people we met and have got close to here have already left which is strange to get used to…the group of 120 we arrived to is now down to about 50. We have also been so preoccupied in our jobs and routines here that we have not done much planning for our next part of the journey, guess we had better do that soon….

Jonno working hard sifting ash