First ElderCorps mission a success!

Elder reports from remote northern India, where the Declaration is put into action

by Guy Hawkins

With the support of Powell River’s Raging Grannies, I created the Declaration of The Elders in August 2004 (issue 115, The Republic). At that time I was planning a trip to India to help set up a medical clinic. I had been asked to help with this clinic by Rinchin, an Indian doctor who myself and eleven friends had put through the last two years of medical school.

He was working on a government contract in a small village in the district of Tawang, Arunchal Pradesh, his home community. I had received an email from Rinchin asking me to come to Tawang. The best time for this trip he suggested was October or November. I sold my truck and bought a four month return ticket.

He never contacted me again while I was making my arrangements. I had no idea of what he meant by a “clinic” or even of how to get to Arunchal Pradesh as this Indian state is a restricted area bordering Tibet and Bhutan in the far northeast.

I decided that my trip could be a kind of “ElderCorps-lite” as we have not yet achieved our aim of replacing Canada’s military in international situations. I would, however, be going on an independent, self financed, mission to a foreign country to help the inhabitants achieve a better quality of life—so this could be regarded as a training exercise in preparation for real ElderCorps work.

I arrived in Kolkata after a one-week stop in Bangkok to get my Indian visa which took eight days. I began my ElderCorps initiation in Kolkata, helping the street beggars. I got to know the beggars in the Sudder St area of Chowringhee district where there is cheap backpacker accommodation. It is possible to stay in a dorm room here for 60 rupees a night which is about $1.80 Canadian. These are clean rooms for westerners. I paid 100 rupees and had a private room. The immediate needs of the beggars seemed to be money for food, so I gave out money to the beggars.

This evolved into buying street food directly as well as chai and pop. The beggars and rickshaw runners would call out “uncle” as I passed and generally went out of their way to be pleasant. It wasn’t that each time I passed a beggar I was asked for money—there was some sense that I was helping out and, well, lets not drive him away with our requests!

Some times I’d stand on the side of the road and watch the beggars approaching westerns for money. It was really interesting to watch the many reactions from westerners. Some had read in “the book” that it was best to ignore the beggars, and this they did extremely well. Others would be involved in long conversations as they made their way along the street—usually ‘”newbies” as, after a few day, the beggars knew who everyone was.

It was definitely a community. After a couple of days a few women beggars with children on their hips would stop and talk to me, building a relationship. We westerners represent such incredible wealth to the people of India that it is hard for them to build a relationship of friendship that is not based on money flowing from us to them—but hey, that’s why I was there, to help the local people to have a better quality of life. I bought bags of rice, cooking oil, baby medicine, and saris for them.

One of the beggar women who was around me more than the others wanted to come with me when I went to buy my plane ticket, so I took her on the subway. She had never been down the subway and was absolutely frightened of the escalater. I had to hold her arm the whole way. Imagine being twenty-something in a city of ten million and never having been on the subway or riding an escalator. She accompanied me on other subway rides while I was negotiating my permit for Arunchel. I took her into a “fast food” (Indian style) restaurant where we sat and had a bite with her children. This was a very rare moment for this woman as beggars aren’t allowed into such restaurants. They have security guards at the doors to ensure that they do not enter.

The morning I left for the plane to Tezpur, this woman met me outside my hotel to walk me to the subway. She had wanted to come with me to the airport in a taxi but I said I was not taking a taxi but would ride the subway then take a power rickshaw. Later I realized that I should have paid the few hundred rupees more for the taxi as this would be a chance for her to see an airport, but that was an opportunity that I missed. When she said good-bye she placed a Saai Baba medallion around my neck.

I flew to Tezpur in Assam where I would get a shared jeep for the fifteen hour ride to Tawang, in Arunchel Pradesh. I had planned on taking the train to Tezpur but the rail lines were out due to monsoon flooding and it could not be predicted when the lines would be open.

I arrived in Tezpur where I was probably the only westerner in the entire town. I had trouble getting a place to sleep as the guest houses didn’t seem to want to put me up, but I eventually found a decent hotel. Early the next morning, I got into a shared jeep with nine other passengers and began the fifteen hour trip on a single-lane Himalayan mountain road to Tawang. I was riding in the far back seat. Think of a regular Jeep with an extra bench seat in the back so that ten passengers can be accommodated, two next to the driver, four behind them, and another four behind them. Sometimes we had five in my seat. When we reached the final summit pass about two hours out of Tawang, it was snowing. As I was wearing only the clothes I had for the warm plains of India, I found it rather chilly.

We arrived in Tawang about 9 pm and I ran to the nearest hotel to get warm. I got a room with a plug-in electric heater for 650 rupees, the most I ever paid the whole time I was in India, but this was remote Tawang and I was the only westerner in town. In the morning I tried to contact Rinchin by phone but could not get through, so I wondered around. Fortunately the air was warm enough in the day to go about with short sleeves, as that is all I had.

Rinchin later approached me on the street and we met for the first time. We went for tea and talked about the clinic. He told me there were no x-ray facilities in Tawang and people had to take the fifteen hour jeep ride to Tezpur to get an x-ray, so he wanted to open an x-ray clinic. He realized that it would take some years to raise the amount of money needed. He envisioned an x-ray clinic with a minor surgery and five to ten beds. He took me to his ancestral village 300 meters lower down the mountain where it was more peaceful and warmer than Tawang. He wanted to build the clinic there and felt the village would donate the land, which they did. We conducted our business and Rinchin had shown me around, so I decided to leave and continue my journey in India, as there was no way for me to begin fundraising while still in India.

I returned to Tezpur by jeep and then continued by bus west along the Indian plain and then north up into the Himalayas again to Darjeeling and into Sikhim. I descended to the plains again and my next ElderCorps adventure was in Bodiguya. This is where Buddha sat under the Bodi tree and was enlightened 2,500 years ago. Bodiguya is located in Bihar state, one of the poorest and most corrupt states in India. Stay tuned to this newspaper to find out what happened there.

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