Living in Ladakh: Halloween

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Halloween

The Party Master with Dr. McTasty

My site mate’s name is David Barshes. He’s from Chicago, he’s been living here for a year, and he’s a CBD (Community Business Development) volunteer. He works with a few local NGOs and businesses, he has a lot of Armenian friends, and he loves Halloween.

Hasmik, Eloise, Armen

The party was a bilingual blast complete with bat-shaped cookies, m&ms, and pumpkin carving. The result of failed icing was a gooey, vaguely chocolate-flavored cookie dip. Eloise, a volunteer from the nearby city of Sevan, came as a “sweet dream”, in black and decked out with candy necklaces.

Johanna and Eloise

Armenians don’t usually celebrate Halloween, but some of them dressed up -- we had Al Capone, dark robes, and masks, though most of the guys forsook dancing and drank vodka shots all evening...

McTasty, Satan (Mikael), Armen, Vartan

There was much toasting and dancing, Armenian and otherwise. An exciting discovery was made: it turns out that Armenians, too, gotta have the funk.

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Living in Ladakh

Ladakhis: village-rooted people of a portion of the vast Himalaya, who have raised families and built soil for thousands of years on glacial melt, in a land where each year only four inches of water fall from the sky. Most Ladakhis are Tibetan Buddhist or Muslim. Paved roads have been built only in the last fifty years, and the passes still close for about six months each winter. The sun is hot, and the nights are cold. Roasted barley flour, wheat bread, vegetables, noodle soup, butter tea, meat, and apricots are standard fare.

Caitlin & Jason: we are white middle class US citizens who recognize the disastrous folly of American economic imperialism and feel great joy in working with people of real resilient cultures still deeply rooted in land. We feel deep desire to know the plants and to learn how to draw food, shelter, and clothing directly from the land. Even while we seek nourishing ways of living, we participate in and benefit from systems of white supremacy in the United States and abroad, and we seek to challenge those unjust systems and dismantle them in every way we can. We come to Ladakh to live and work and learn language and song with a highly skillful community of farmers and a web of youth and educators centered around SECMOL. We feel like family here, and we find in our relationships with the people of Tar a great source of inspiration. We are always reexamining how our lives interweave between here and the lands and people where we were born and raised in occupied chkuwabonakik, "the land where the sun's rays first look our way," in Maine in northern New England.

We long for a lived understanding of humans as part of the natural world, reciprocal, responsible, and striving for justice while cognizant of past and present lived understandings of racism and injustice. We see practices of meditation and mindfulness as central tools for bringing about meaningful, long-lasting change in the world. We love simple good food, the exquisite beauty we find each day in observing other living beings, music, and making our own tools, clothes, and gear. We strive to live mindful of our ancestors, awake to the reality of what we do today, and mindful of the consequences of our actions on lives of many generations to come.

Living in Ladakh

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Halloween

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