To Jodhpur, with Detours.

On the following day, Thursday, Heather and I packed it up and boarded a car. We grabbed Rama, our filmmaker pal and, to our surprise, her brother, who would take us to their father’s village, to lead a workshop at Rama’s childhood school, on our way to Jodhpur. About an hour out of Udaipur town, we turned off the highway road onto a side road towards Rama’s village. Stone walls lined either side of the road. If felt as if you were driving down a long driveway to an estate, or some resort….albeit in the desert. Beautiful rolling landscape stretched out to either side. Soon small market centers began to appear and we rounded a corner to a huge camel and it’s master chilling on the road’s side. Over the hill, the valley revealed itself with a wide river and expanse of green field. This was a most beautiful detour and one I am very pleased we were being escorted into. We arrived into town, stopping first at the school to confirm our plans. The students were sparsely lingering about, the school appeared desolate on a Thursday afternoon. The head teacher met us on the street, lots of children and young men gathered around the car. There is always a moment of nervousness when lots of eyes and bodies gather quickly and closely to see “who the ‘tall white people’ are?” and “what are they doing here?” The head teacher attempted to decline what seemed like a previously agreed upon arrangement. Maybe he wasn’t in fact the principal, and was attempting to make a decision, but whatever the circumstances, Rama wasn’t taking anything but a firm YES, seeing as she had brought us here and wasn’t going to be denied another opportunity to show off her new friends, share this project with these kids, and film another workshop…all of which added up to an eventual agreement by this elder Male in charge. I smiled when she got the ‘yes’, and then told us to get in the car, that we were going to visit her father and would come back in an hour or so to do the workshop. Awesome. Our detour for tea included parking the car, hesitantly leaving all our belongings with a driver we could exactly communicate with, walking down valley, across river, back the other side to where Rama’s father was building his humble abode on the opposite side of the river. We got the tour, saw the oxen powered water wheel drawing water from the river, up onto the plateau into the irrigation canal where it fed the wheat and other fields. We had tea and ate Rama’s home prepared chapatti and subgee: Indian vegetable dish. After a nice pause and a bit of show and tell, meeting the numerous workers working on Rama’s fathers house, including building the U-Turn walk way from the flat up and around the rock encrusted hillside where the house was situated, we headed back to the school. This time, we did as the locals do and rolled up our pant legs and carried our shoes as we walked through the river, rather than atop the rocks. As we drove the 3 minutes back to the school, we rustled up man students on the streets, as Rama excitedly encouraged them to return to their school for something exciting. Boys ran hard next to the car as we moved up hill. We were hearding our participants and it worked, about 125 kids showed up to a school where I would guess there were only three teachers present, if any teaching anything on that day.

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