Today we found a scorpion squirming around near our breakfast. We were eating chewda, a type of fried pound rice mixed with peanuts, spices and onion slices. It's real delicious. Anyways, we caught the little critter and put it in a jar with holes on the top so it could breathe. By we I mean I watched while the whole process was happening cuz I'm still scared as hell of the things.

* For the past two days there has been a "chakka jam" in this district of a few hundred thousand people. A chakka jam is basically when the Naxalites deliver threats to everyone, every business, government office- basically anything that can be opened or travel on the roads- that they better be closed on those two days or they'll face bloody consequences. And everybody fears them in this district, even the police. So the shopowners, farmers, schoolteachers, hospital staff, and the common man cannot depend on the police for protection. So yesterday everything was closed. Today many of the stores defied owners in my town of Kurkheda and opened up. Let's see what comes of this.

* A few weeks back the Naxalites entered into a medical shop of the police patil of Korchi and shot and killed him point blank. Their reason? He was getting "too close" with the police and he had participated in the recent march against violence, which the Naxalites interpreted as a march against them. It was in fact a march for peace in which many prominent members of society including journalists, professors, businesspeople, activists and others took part. Why did they single him out? Probably to make a point and spread fear amongst the town residents.

* I've had a few arguments during my time here about the merits of violent revolution, such as the Naxalite brand. A few of my friends are supporters of the Naxalites and defend their modus operandi because of how violent the Indian State treats the poor people particularly the tribal people, landless, and peasants- who incidentally make up the majority of the Indian population the last time I checked. So it's quite ironic, and yet a tragically common story, to find the State of a developing country against the majority of its own people. But upon realization of this fact during my time here, I must admit that I have also departed from my Gandhian purism and also believe there are times when violent struggle is justified. I however disagree with my friends on the Naxalite issue. Judging by how they cow the local population into submission here, rich and poor alike, and how corrupt and power-hungry they also can be, I don't see how one can justify supporting their cause. In my area the Naxalite cause has lost its ideological purity- of fighting for the landless laborer and peasant- and has turned into another means of exploitation, not just of the poor tribals, but of the rich jungle resources over which the Naxalites command unchallenged control.

I think since I'll be leaving here in the next 6 weeks, it's about time I gave you an update on my life and what I've done here thus far, i.e. what the hell is my project anyways? You, dear reader will learn that and much more in this edition.

This has been the best year of my life without a doubt. It has contributed enormously to my growth as an individual and to my academic, career and spiritual passions. I can no longer return to my country hoping for a "normal" life, and yet I have come to crave the most "normal" things of life such as a simple morning and evening walk in nature. It is things like this I have learned to appreciate from the people I have been living with and learning from during the past 10 months. Sometimes the most normal, basic things are easily forgotten in our high-paced high-productivity lives in America. And yet they are so normal here because they are so necessary. Thus I love drawing water from the well for my bath. I love filling the cooler in my room with water too cool my room down from the immense heat that hasn't yet let up, despite the onset of the monsoon. I love trying to make chapatti, which I still suck at. I love trying to make jokes in Marathi, which I'm becoming very good at. The boys I work with enjoy my jokes, although my English-speaking friends call me an old man. Both are probably true.

Last weekend I took 19 boys to Anandavan for a field trip. In case I haven't mentioned Anandavan earlier, it's probably the closest thing that approaches utopia on this earth, that I have seen thus far. It was created by an amazing man named Baba Amte about 60 years ago. He was a well-to-do lawyer who left his trade to work with organizing landless laborers against the rampant oppression of his time. One day he was walking on the road and saw a man lying on the side of the road with worms eating out the sockets where his eyes once were. The man was a leper, completely outcast from Indian society, left to rot away in his miserable existence. When Baba Amte saw him he ran away in fear. Later, he was so ashamed with how he reacted that he decided to do something for leprosy victims. Thus he got a land grant from the government, on an old mining quarry- of barren and rocky land. Today due to the hard work of thousands of leprosy patients they have transformed that place into a utopia for sufferers of all types- leprosy patients, disabled people, unemployed people, dalits, tribals and anyone who needs a place to go. At present about 5,000 people live there and it has achieved recognition as a town of its own right with its own gram panchayat, which is the village-level decision making body. And Baba Amte has been awarded basically everything that the Indian government and the State of Maharashtra can give, as well as many international awards. However the best thing about his many awards and honors is that he has no qualms about returning any them in protest of government policies. Thus he has returned some of his most prestigious awards such as the Padmabushree to the Indian government in protest of the Narmada Dam project. In fact he was one of the first along with Medha Patkar to lead the opposition to the Narmada Dam. Now Baba is 92 and very sick. We were very fortunate to meet him on the road as he was being pushed on his rolling bed around the campus for his evening walk. For the past 50 years he and his wife have gone on a morning and evening walk together religiously.

I am not exaggerating when I say this place is amazing. It is based on the philosophy that the poor and dispossesed do not need charity, but everyone needs a chance to succeed. So everyone in the town, regardless of physical disability, does work. Anandavan has an amazing way of finding each individual's talent or strength and using it for the advantage of the whole group. Thus many leprosy patients who are missing limbs, fingers, or whatever are able to work making various things or farming or maintaining the town. In Anandavan they make everything on their own- their own clothing, their own transportation, their own furniture, houses, artwork. They grow all of their own food on 450 acres of farmland. They sell a lot of their food and handicrafts in cities and towns all over the area. They recycle plastic garbage and make it into new things such as pillow stuffing, cotton, and use it in making cement. They do practical research in alternative technologies that would be good for India, particularly in rural areas, and thus they use bio-gas plants to cook their food. Bio-gas basically means they trap the methane and other gases that escape from the toilets and convert it into cooking heat for the community kitchens. They use all of their cow dung and cow urine as fertilizer for their fields. Their cows are enormous because they feed them fortified feed. They have ingenious water management systems that are combined water sources, irrigation, and fishing ponds. They have designed their own underwater bamboo dams that are revolutionary. They practice organic farming and the list goes on and on. In short, it's a mind blowing experiment that is fully managed by disposed, outcast and rejected people from all over the country. They even have their own traveling road show, called Swaranandavan, where disabled people perform Bollywood favorites- manning everything form the light and sound board, performing on all instruments, and singing and dancing. The boys I brought with me really enjoyed that part of the trip most.

The reason I brought the boys from Yerendi, one of the villages I've been working in for the past year, to Anandavan was to give them exposure to new ideas that they can start in their village. Before going we had discussed some type of trip that their youth group could take to get an idea of what they could do for their village. We decided to go and see Anandavan because of the many opportunities and rural development projects they are doing there. We got funding from Indicorps and from the NGO I'm working with, and we also collected 100 rupees from each boy, which isn't really that much for a two trip in rented jeeps. So on Saturday morning we all piled in two jeeps and made our way to Chandrapur district, the next district over from mine. On the way back on Sunday we stopped in Chandrapur city and went peddle-boating on a big lake in the city. It was a great time overall.

My work with the boys in Yerendi arose kind of spontaneously many months back because of my work with my original project- microplanning. I had arranged four of the boys in the village to do a village survey on the economic and social condition of the village. Through my work with them I became increasingly involved in the village, teaching English at night to the little kids, playing ultimate Frisbee with the youth, and more recently attempting to form them into a youth group. The "yuvak mandal", Marathi for youth group, is composed of boys from two wards of the village, who don't normally interact with eachother. One ward is predominantly Scheduled Caste people, who were formally Dalits but have now converted to Buddhism and are followers of B.A. Ambedkhar, and the other ward is all Gond tribal people. They have a history of disliking eachother and thus there are two groups in the village who don't cooperate. The youth have imbibed these communal feelings from their parents and thus don't mix much with eachother. Through joint English classes and ultimate Frisbee I tried to encourage them to come together and do constructive things. Then I thought that a youth group combining both wards would be a good way to build unity for a common purpose. My goal in the next six weeks is to get the boys to commit to starting something, whether it is a new cooperative business, or a village improvement project, together. We've been meeting every night and discussing the possibilities.

I guess I'm just going to go backwards in relating the past six months since I've written to you all. So the last time I tried to explain my project I was stuck somewhere on the idea of PRA's- participatory rural appraisals. Well I learned a lot more about the benefits and drawbacks of PRA's and slowly moved away from Community Resources Mapping to the concept of microplanning- that is planning at the smallest level of governance, the village level. I was excited about microplanning because it was focused on mobilizing the community to take stock of the present situation in a methodical manner and come up with a plan based upon community consensus of what could be done to develop the community resources. Thus microplans focus on health, education, infrastructure, environment and employment. In order to start my project I decided to do a household survey of two of the villages I was working in at the time- Ranvahi and Yerendi. However the process of surveying took much longer than I had expected, and in the meantime my focus turned to many other things such as teaching English and my many trips to other NGO's and other areas on excursion visits.

Then at some point in February we were invited by the Forest Department to help them formulate their microplans for joint forest management in cooperation with the villages. The forest department is implementing the policy of joint forest management which aims involving the tribal people in the difficult work of forest protection. The basic need for this has been the realization that after 50 years of bureaucratic management of the forest by the government, the tribal people have been alienated from their traditional rights and needs in the forests, and the forests are becoming more degraded yearly. Ultimately the government realized that it must work with the people, or both sides would end up losing out. Thus the Forest Department has been trying to come closer to the people and make plans for forest management and village development. Each village has been assigned an area of forest under its community control, and in exchange they are promised developmental benefits from the government- such as new wells and roads, as well as skills training for new business opportunities. However, because of a history of misgovernance and corruption the people are highly distrustful of the government and its intentions. Moreover, when the Department tried to make microplans in the past it was accused of not really using participatory methods and instead making plans without the people's input. Because of all these reasons this year the government approached the NGO's as a mediator, to make the plans on behalf of the government, while ensuring that the people would participate and express their real needs and concerns.

Four NGO's were called to the meeting and we were each assigned a group of villages. Our NGO was assigned five villages in the Korchi area, which is a bout 1 ½ hours from where I live. I and another NGO worker, Izamsahay, were put in charge of making the plans for our five villages. We spent the next two months together in Korchi off and on holding village meetings, doing surveys and PRA's and trying to get an idea of how the people would participate in the government's joint forest management scheme. The Forest department wanted us to give in our plans at the beginning of May, but the whole process got delayed because of lack of good participation by the people. Basically several times our experience was that we would go into the village and people would be out in the fields, at weddings, or too busy to meet with us. This was very frustrating and made it very difficult to implement the microplanning module we had created. Ultimately I stopped working in Korchi and Izamsahay collected the rest of the information and we have been typing it up to create a book for each village's plan. We are going to submit the books to the government this week, as we have just completed them. They include a basic survey of the household information, income, number of cattle, and the needs the villagers have for forest material. In addition we gave an idea of the village's needs for development projects such as new wells, roads or buildings. Finally we have asked for training in new things, such as those found at Anandavan, would be provided for the villagers, especially the youth.

That's basically been my project work thus far. In addition I have managed to travel somewhere at least once a month during my time here. This includes going to a conference in Jaipur in March, staying on an organic farm and visiting the Gandhi Ashram in April, traveling to the beach off the coast of Bombay for an Indicorps workshop in May, and traveling to Prakash Amte's (Baba Amte's son) hospital for tribal people in southern Gadchiroli. In the next few weeks I plan to travel to SEARCH, Society for Education Action and Research in Community Health, an amazing health organization run in this district. Most recently I traveled to Bangalore for the National Association of People's Movements meeting. It was quite an awesome experience. I heard from great speakers such as Medha Patkar, the leader of the Narmada Bachao Andolan; Aruna Roy, who spearheaded the citizen's campaign for a national Right to Information Act; and P. Sainath, a famous journalist who writes for The Hindu. I was also able to meet with many activists from social movements all over the country, including some groups from Kerala and Bangalore. In Kerala they have been busy opposing the Coca Cola Company because it has built a factory that sapped drinking water from all of the villages in a 10 kilometer radius. With enough popular resistance, the factory was forced to leave the state. I was quite proud of my little state upon hearing the news.

Oh, and a few months ago I was sitting in a village during a microplanning session led by a group from UNICEF in which over a hundred villagers were in attendance. Just as I leaned back to rest against the wall of a house I felt a burning pain shoot up my arm. I jumped forward grabbing my arm and looking around, thinking someone had shot me with fire. Suddenly someone yelled out "Vinchu" and a lot of people jumped into action. One person grabbed a chappal and asked where the vinchu was. Upon discovering it they smashed it to pieces. By that point I realized what a vinchu was, and saw the smashed scorpion lying on the rocks. But before I could utter a yelp, I was being dragged to the back of the house where two villagers sat me down and one of the men proceeded to ask me (in Marathi), "Is it ok to suck it out with my mouth?" and I was like, "What!?". He pointed at my arm and asked me again. By this time I think my head was starting to spin and I was gripped with fear. I ok'ed him and he began to suck the poison out of my arm, through the tiny scorpion sting mark. Before long another one was vigorously rubbing my arm and reciting mantras to get the poison out of me. Then they gave me some traditional herbal medicine, a branch to put above my door to ward off more scorpions, and told me to sleep on the ground that night. They assured me that the burning feeling would be gone by the same time the next day. I was still in shock of the entire situation, but in no state of mind to argue with anything that had just been done to me. Needless to say I followed their every instruction that night (and was also provided some pain killers by my NGO director). The next day my hand was as good as golden, after burning throughout the night. The man who had sucked my arm told me the next day that his tongue was still burning from the poison. Although it was nothing near fatal, if he hadn't sucked it out my whole body would probably have been burning instead of just my arm.

The best thing about the whole incident is that my horoscope is scorpio, so I feel more in tune with my astrological sign than I ever have before.