The past several days have been my favorite of the trip. We arrived in Assam on the 13th, after a two-hour flight from Kolkata, and took two TERi cars to the lodge in Guwahati (the state capitol) where we’re staying. It’s not exactly luxurious (no air conditioning or blankets) but it’s clean and has a restaurant that delivers room service, so we’re all pretty comfortable. Evan, Chantal, Sonya, and Jess have all been sick, so yesterday Sonya stayed home, and today only Jess, Sarah and I were well enough to go to the village. But though we’ve been down in numbers, both days have gone really well.
Yesterday, we decided to spend the day in the village without a video camera—a first for this trip—so that we could devote all our energy to getting to know our subjects and scoping out the lay of the land. The village, called Dakshin Dimoria (“Dakshin” means “South”) is about an hour’s drive from our hotel, and it’s a relatively compact, well-organized hamlet bisected by a single large dirt road, with many smaller paths branching off of it. It’s set amidst streams and rice paddies at the foot of a range of forested hills. Cows, goats, dogs, and chickens wander freely through the village or graze in surrounding fields, while the hills to the South harbor monkeys and wild elephants. Almost all the villagers make the majority of their income through farming, but the area has serious problems with deforestation and land overutilization, as larger generations inherit finite amounts of land. TERI has worked in Dakshin Dimoria for about a decade, doing community based watershed-management programs, and it decided to place the state’s first LaBL pilot project here because it had so much experience with local people.
Prasan Deuri, the entrepreneur running the village charging station, has worked with TERI on watershed management for several years, and our guide, who’s in charge of that project, says he was the obvious choice for the LaBL job. The station is based in a half-acre compound built by TERI for the watershed project, which has a garden, greenhouse, gazebo, and pond in addition to the one-room office from which Prasan rents lanterns. The station opened just 15 days ago, but already rents an average of 22 lanterns (out of 25 available) each night. Mr. Prasan seems competent and well connected. Each day he makes rounds through the village, checking on clients to make sure their lanterns are working well. He’s done a great deal to accommodate us, and in the afternoon today he sat for an hour-long interview that may be the best we’ve done this trip. Afterwards we spent an hour or two filming him making house calls, and then Sarah headed back to the station to film him working there while Jess set out to film B-roll in the village.
The villagers have really gone out of their way to welcome us. Both days several community leaders have stopped by to meet us, and a local women’s collective has prepared us two delicious lunches of rice, lentils, stir-fried potatoes, fried eggplant, carrot salad, cucumbers, fish, green coconut juice, and the spiciest peppers I’ve ever tasted. Yesterday the women and their children put on a traditional dance for us, which was amazing to watch and resulted in some great footage. After lunch today, Sarah and I got a tour of the local orchard, which has hundreds of mango, guava, and lychee trees—and a number of cows and goats grazing among them. As we were about to leave, Prasan beckoned us excitedly toward a patch of grass and began sweeping the ground in front of him with a long stick. After a few seconds, a five-foot long black cobra slithered out and onto a path three yards away from us. Tragically we have yet to see any wild elephants.
Since we got all the footage we need of the village today—and half our group is still too sick to leave the hotel—we’ll spend tomorrow resting, logging tapes, and doing interviews at TERI’s Guwahati office nearby. On Tuesday we’ll fly back to Delhi, and on Wednesday we’ll conduct interviews at the main office there and then head to the TERI campus in Haryana for a four-day stay.
-Sam