Udaipur 4
Out to visit a traditional plant medicine hospital today with Annie, 22, from Virginia! She was going on a site visit, and I got to tag along! We are both not in spectacular shape, suffering from Udaipur Poopaipur, but Annie’s got it worse than me. Nonetheless, we both troop out to the center, then get a bumpy medicar ride with two local gunis (traditional healers) out deep into the hills to the guni ashram, where they are trained, and where local medicines are made. Most villages have a guni, who can be a man or woman, who are trained to address common illnesses like diarrhea, colds, joint pains, but also tuberculosis, and typhoid. The health center pays villages to grow certain medicinal plants, and the process of medicinal production does not go through many middle people to get back to where it is needed, and used. The medicines are order to the guni ashrams, and today, we run deliveries to villages. Two good hours of jostling later (Dr. Arjay calls it the ‘jumpy’ road), Annie and I (or as he calls us ‘Handy’ and ‘Sand’), the beginnings of the desert landscape begin to be apparent. Brambly cacti and shrubby trees line the way, and villagers transporting all manner of things on their heads are common along the roadside.
Annie and I (we are called 'Handy and Sand') stick ourselves into the packaging process.
We load up on prepared medicines, and take along some taggers-along for the ride, dropping them off respectively at their villages. Everywhere we stop we are met first by the children, the girls wrapped in all manner of colors and patterns. I can’t stop looking at them, or taking pictures. Luckily, these people love having their picture taken, and posing! And once they got a taste for it, they kept wanting more and more photos of themselves! Even the older women who at first stayed distant watching the younger ones start to edge forward, then crowd into the picture, then all reach for my camera (some snatch it right out of my hand!) to see the result.
People traveling between villages hitch a ride in the Guni Medicar.
Schoolgirls and boys follow start following us as soon as we get out of the van.
At one of the villages, we are shown the town charka (spinning wheel), and tools that look like they belong in a museum. Everything is made of pieces of scrap wood, but it is all functional, and the people are proud to show them to us! They do a brief demonstration while more and more villagers crowd around us, all agape with smiles. They children giggle uncontrollably looking at these two oddly dressed foreigner women (‘Gora!’).
It's Charka time! Spinning cotton is harder than it looks (and Gandhi makes it look easy).
They self-assembled into this pose, I swear.
In between stops, we pause by the side of the road to be shown wild medicinals and plants used for dyeing cloth. Dr. Ratore plucks a sprig of Caltropics Procela (sp?), a desert plant that is currently being used to treat HIV! The gunis take the medicinal plants wherever they find them – growing a tree behind a village house, on a bush in another guni ashram, by the side of the dusty desert road, and just toss things into the boot along with us, and the medical supplies.
Harvesting a medicinal vine from a tree.
As the sun begins its descent, we are at our last stop, at another ashram. A langhur monkey is sitting in a tree above, four camels graze the shrubbery off in the fields, and two little girls about five years old who have followed us from their home about a kilometer away are dancing shyly just out of distance from us, their pockets and shawls full of rocks they’ve found at the ashram. I can’t believe this was my day, and that all I had to do was ask to be a part of it.
Girls at our last stop pose for a picture, and the youngest one recites us a poem she learned in school.
These two ladies followed us quite far down the road, pockets full of ashram rocks.
A jumpy bumpy ride in the desert night later, we are deposited back in town, and I just have to process it all. Hang out at Dream Heaven and meet a couple from Montreal, and treated to dinner just for sitting with them, then take a few steps down the hilly street to say hello to the good people at Millets of Mewar. I’m happily surprised at how easily I’m finding a sort of routine in all of this rich newness, and how effortless it is to connect with some locals and travelers alike. I’m enjoying Millets to much that I think I’ll do some volunteering in their kitchen (missing my Santropol Roulant kitchen shifts at home!).
