These images correspond to Sonya’s journal entry from Day 14 – See Change staff

The view from the front door of our hotel in Guwahati.

The community of Dakshin Dimoria, where we spent our first day in Assam.

Prasen, local entrepreneur

Rupali

A cemetery in Kolkata from the colonial period.

Kakdwip, in the Sunderbans. Clay statues of gods and goddesses dry in the sun on the side of the road.

It is Sunday in Guwahati , Assam, and it is monsoon season. The latte brown water from yesterday’s brief but powerful monsoon downpour is subsiding in today’s bright breezy sunlight. I am watching from my 4th floor hotel room’s window as a colorful and musical parade of young people marched along the street below. They carried banners and hand painted signs proclaiming “Peace” and “Non-Violence,” and looked jubilant and at ease in the heat, each group dressed in different types of native dress.

The first set marchers wore white robes with electric turquoise scarves and matching umbrellas (against the sunlight). Then came embroidered woven tunics that looked like they might be made of wool and reminded me of Andean dress. Then came people in red and white with spectacular headdresses that had at least 15 two-foot long sticks sticking out of the top, each stick wrapped in blue fabric and topped with what looked like a bright red golf ball.

Each set of like-clad youth was followed by at least as many soldiers, who looked even younger than the paraders. The soldiers were all in deep green, marching in two parallel lines, and trailing off into pairs of boys talking and laughing. On the young soldiers’ berets were big yellow pom poms that flapped as the gossiping pairs spontaneously and erratically sprinted to catch back up to the parade.

I thought the soldiers were bringing up the rear, but as soon as I went back inside, I would hear new music – flutes this time, or different drums or songs. I would run back out again and see the next portion of the parade, in the same formation but with different costumes. And with the same straggling, grinning soldiers behind them.

At least four of these mini parades passed by the “fly over” (overpass) construction site that comprises most of my view from the hotel. In the background, there is a four-story Government of India drug testing laboratory in pepto bismol pink with a bright yellow sign and currently a green and brown pond of stubborn monsoon water occupying its driveway.

I am staying “home” today for the second day in a row to rest and get over a bad cold. Our team occupies three bedrooms on this third floor hallway, and today one person from each room is home sick. The other two have stomach ailments. This is all par for the course for traveling in India paired with working hard and moving around a lot, I gather.

I am enjoying the quiet in my room. Well, the relative quiet anyway. I mentioned the parades, but really even without the parades, India in my experience has been consistently at parade decibel level. Right now, the ceiling fan is whirring and trucks are trundling over the rocky construction-site road outside the hotel. Someone is hammering, motorcycles rev their engines, and every single passerby, be it bicycle rikshaw, motorized rikshaw, motorbike, truck, van, car or cow (strolling right down the middle of every busy road), is making a noise as it passes. There are squeaky breaks, clanking chasis, bike bells and car horns of every style possible.

The variety of horns is impressive really. There are Herbie the Love Bug toots, foghorn blats, muted bleats, confident New York City taxi style honks, and one that I keep hearing sounds like it is meant to be a melody, but is painfully loud and flat, like someone playing bagpipes. And me, I am watching and listening from my blue-tiled refuge, and contributing to the noise by singing to myself.

-Sonya

Dr. Pachauri, or “D.G.,” as TERI employees reverently call him (reminiscent of using POTUS for the President), was supremely at ease with our interview, a practiced media spokesperson for his convictions about climate change and his projects. He also wanted to ask us about our experience so far with this project. He told us to check out the disco scene in Delhi, shared about the fourteen countries he will be visiting in the next three weeks, and hugged us each goodbye, reminding us that we could make a difference. We all left feeling special and satisfied. He was such a charismatic, intelligent salesman. I would buy whatever he was selling. How about a solar lantern, then? Sold.

We have been in West Bengal and Assam for the last two weeks shooting video and still photography in about six different villages in total. Village site visits have only comprised about six and a half days of our time here, which is hard to believe. There have been some other days here and there where we conducted in-office interviews with TERI and LaBL employees, too. Other days we are traveling to new regions, and for the first five days we were working to get set up, and still fewer of the other days, we get a rest and time to write.

When we are shooting, we have a set of roles that we each assume, although we rotate through most of them. Sarah and Jess run the two cameras, one doing more interesting angles, and one staying steady and consistent. Those two jobs are almost always done by those two, and the rest of us change depending on the day. The other jobs are interviewer, still photographer, sound (holds the boom mic, mostly), camera aide (fetches new batteries, keeps children out of the shot, sets up and adjusts tripods, does whatever needs doing), and lighting (sets up/holds the reflector or external lighting). We all prepare interview questions together or in small groups the day before and we all are working on written pieces and blogging (sorry for the delay with getting them up, we haven’t had internet in about 8 days), and we are all taking photographs.

My favorite job so far is camera aide, especially if we split up and it is just the interviewer, the camerawoman, and me. The interviewer is busy interacting with the subjects, and the camerawoman is generally completely occupied, focusing on the shot. She calls out urgent requests and I try to anticipate what she needs. This includes, as I said, fresh batteries and tricks like standing right behind her so when she needs to backup to follow the subject as they walk past her, the area is clear except for myself and I am paying attention and can then jump out of the way. That maneuver reminds me of saving a parking space by standing in it.

Interviewing is tricky in the villages. All of it is conducted with a Hindi, Bangla or Assamese translator, and we have yet to have the same translator for more than two days. One day we had a Bangla translator who didn’t speak English. Lucky me, that was my day to interview. The plan was that our guide from TERI, Sumant, would to translate from English to Hindi for Mr. Hindi-and-Bangla-only-translator, and then the translator would translate to Bangla for the interviewee.

This double language barrier actually ended up working in an unexpected way. It turned out that the interviewee, a tiny and strikingly elegant woman entrepreneur, understood Hindi, and she, Sumant and the “translator” commenced to have a lively discussion, with me completely in the dark. This shift of power in the situation humbled me and excited me.

That day, in preparing for the interview, the group had decided that it was very important that we make more of an effort to make a personal connection between the interviewer and subject. We decided that I should have some time to chat with her, with the translator’s help, and to prep her for what to expect. During that time, the others would be setting up for the interview. Once she and I had a rapport going, we would go ahead and dive into the interview to try to get the most personal and authentic account possible in this limited situation. We didn’t know about the double translation situation, yet.

We had also decided that in chatting and prepping with her, I should not ask her any of the questions we wanted to have her say on camera because it was proving to be counterproductive to do that. Try as we might, we had been having too much difficulty lately in communicating that they still needed to tell their answer to the camera, despite having told one of us already.

So. I am in control. I have a strategy that has the whole group’s stamp of approval. I have a translator and my dazzling charm and I am going to show this woman so much respect and interest that she will feel as super-special as I know she is, and she will tell us all about everything we want to know about. A personal account. Human interest. A story the audience will feel passionate about, will relate to.

“Whatever you want to do, we will do,” he promised. Then he proceeded to do it. Without me. Without my master plan, my arsenal of carefully worded questions, my amped-up, disarming demeanor. And it worked incredibly.

Sumant asked me what kind of chatting questions I wanted to ask. I gave him a couple of short ones, and waited as he asked and she talked for a while, smiling at him, and scarcely glancing my direction. Then he asked her some more questions, and they talked for while longer, the translator chiming in, presumably to help the other two understand each other. They laughed and gestured, talking amiably. New friends.

“What’s she saying, Sumant?” I was feeling out of the loop and trying to reinstate my involvement.

“Oh, she is talking about the solar lanterns and what she does with her day and how she became involved in this project,” he said nonchalantly.

“But, I need her to say that for the camera again. Remember? Well, if she is going to do that now, then can you make sure she understands that she should say it all again?”

“OK.”

The group is going to kill me, I thought. They had asked the translator to make sure that the interviewee understood this too many times and had it not work. The sound bites were coming out, “Well, as I said before…” or as a second, and for some reason much less articulate, version of their original, pre-cameras-rolling response.

As I watched, my face the perfect and completely unnoticed mask of curiosity and friendliness, the three of them seemed to be getting to know each other, and the entrepreneur seemed at ease. Maybe this isn’t such a bad change of plans, I started to tell myself. I kind of liked the way that Sumant was so natural and genuine in talking with her, and I did trust Sumant to honor the goals I had explained. I decided to be Sumant’s support person for this new strategy. I was the foreigner here. What had made me think I was the best person to make her comfortable, anyway?
I set up three chairs to the right of the camera, one for each of my translators and one for me. Sumant informed me that she would like to do the interview in two parts. First, she would talk for a while about whatever she liked and felt was relevant to the topics he had given her. Then I could ask questions.

She had a lot to say about the women’s collective that she was a part of and about her life in general, and afterward decided that she wanted to show us her daily routines. We shot her washing dishes, adding fresh cow dung to the walls of her home, sweeping her floors, tying Betel leaf vines to supports in a thatch-walled garden, and working in the lantern shop. She had teaching her son about her job, letting him help with maintenance, bookkeeping and charging the lanterns, and she wanted to share this with us, as well. Receiving this kind of invitation into her life without us needing to invite ourselves felt really good to be a part of.

I felt like we had been lucky that it all worked out, but more than luck, Sumant showed us his skills as an interviewer and I got to be a part of helping a successful interview happen in a different way than I had thought.

-Sonya

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