OCT-B-9
THE START OF OUR NEW WEEK OF CLINICS IN
SIKKIM,
BEGINNING WITH OUR BASE IN MANGAN,
TREATING A GROUP OF INDIGENOUS TRIBAL
PATIENTS
IN A PICTURESQUE SETTING
October 13, 2003
It is spectacular! The white and dazzling Kanchenchunga Range, when finally seen, is right above my primitive room here in Mangan, but only really seen once I got out on the run early this morning.
I tried to ignore the sounds of gnawing things in the night, and a couple of biting smaller creatures that lived in the coverlet of the sheetless platform that is my bed. I did worry, however, how I might continue on in my day without a few necessities that usually follow any early morning run; like: water, preferably hot; soap, preferably not laundry detergent; a towel, preferably not the sweaty shirt I have just run in; something to change into, preferably not the shirt just used to run, towel off, and is now being worn to dry it out! None of these potential problems were resolved, but I took off anyway, the Air Force FP resident Jackie joining in. We ran up the road on a steep slope, and as I crested one hill, I saw a deeply forested ravine and a peak in front of us that had clouds swirling in the valley and a bit of snow dusting the summit. It was a good picture of a lower mountain range and a valley with a white water river coursing through it, so I took the picture with the camera that I had remembered to carry—although on the last four runs I had not used it to take any pictures. This time, it was Jackie who regretted not carrying a camera and she went back later to get hers—too late—since those swirling clouds had risen to the summit of what I saw around the next bend.
There is not only the massive peak of Kanchenchunga, but the whole of its white range, reflecting back the early morning sun like a parabolic mirror! It is quite a sight to see, and a short lived one since the clouds were already rising toward its peak. All along the road way where there were bends in the side of the hill into which the road had been cut, there are admonitions or elements of praise—if not to the road builders who had built these roads in boastful sloganeering, then a forest of prayer flags and stupas which mirror or mimic the magnificent mountain view behind them.
I took a few photos of Jackie to send her, since when she returned with her camera, the mountains were already obscured by clouds. I got a couple of pictures showing the deeply forested darker wet slopes below and the glacial summits with the white water rivers from the snow melt coursing down these steep riverine (not large glaciated U-shaped valleys as I had just left in Alaska, by contrast) valleys. It is a beautiful place, and would be great trekking and white water rafting country, but with the caveat that these mountain are the northern barrier to all the rising Indian Ocean air coming up from the south, and that they will be dumping that water more than half the time in rain and will be condensing it most of the remainder in clouds that obscure this view. If you add the leaches on the ground eager to jump on you as you pass near their wet leaf habitat and fix themselves to ankles or any other warm-blooded spot, you may have some of the disadvantages of this site over the high dry alpine desert that I am used to trekking in the Western Himalaya as in Ladakh and Zanskar.
I got to thinking of the last full moon as this full shiny moon had climbed up and over the peak of the Kanchenchunga crest. I had taken a photograph of the last full moon as it hung over my tent site in the Yukon Delta of Alaska’s tundra. The one before that had hung up and over the clear cold night air of the Zanskar Range right over Lingshed, making the mountains on all sides stand out in a cold glare of the kind of light that the Petzel headlamp of mine shines on whatever gets in its path. If I continued back any further, I would be reminiscing about full moon views over the thumping drums of the curing ceremony in Malawi, about the only one of the full moons I have seen recently that I would not be wishing to have someone there to share it with me!
FROM ROMANCE TO DATA ACQUSITION:
WHERE AM I IN THE EASTERN HIMALAYAS
TO CONTRAST WITH MY MORE USUAL WESTERN
HIMALAYAS?
I had marked the arrival at these new sites upon leaving the first week’s activities in West Bengal and in its central hilltop city Kalim Pong. As we went through the police check point along the Teesta River at the border of Sikkim and West Bengal I marked us at TEES 27* 18. 27N, 88* 31. 54E, and then we went to the capital of Sikkim, Gangtok, GANG 27* 18. 27N, 88* 35. 37E, which, for your reference purposes is 7,767 miles from DCAA (Washington DC) at 348*--i. e. just west of the North Pole over the top.
We are now in Mangan, a village in view of the Kanchenchunga Massif overhead so it is MANG at 27* 29. 59N, 88* 32.04E. For reference purposes, Delhi is 701 miles at bearing 279*, HOME is 7736 at 348*, Kathmandu, Nepal is 197 miles 275*, Kaza in the Spiti Valley is 706 miles at 300*, and LEIL (Leh Ladakh) is 795 miles at 308*--all of my Western Himalaya landmarks are about 800 miles along the Great Circle Route which would mean that the road trip mileage would be alt least four times that distance; even flying there would be two days or more by even the best of connections, most of which would be by going south to Delhi and flying north again.
So I am “Inside Asia”—about dead center, in fact, wedged in between China and India, and claimed by both. It was headline news that China has just now stopped listing Sikkim on its web site as one of its provinces after half a century under India's control. The same kinds of claims exist in conflict on the western Himalayan front but with the additional claimant of Pakistan in the unresolved Kashmiri problem.
START UP TOWARD OUR FIRST SIKKIM CLINIC
AN HOUR AWAY FROM OUR MANGAN VILLAGE
BASE
What are the probabilities that two individuals assigned as random roommates would turn out to have the same birthday? I know that one can figure the statistical possibility which turns out to be a lower number than expected, but Patrick was born on January 19. I pointed out that this is the same birthday as that of Robert E. Lee, and he added that it is the day of the invention and introduction of the front snap bra; I believe an invention of Howard Hughes who had invented it for Rita Hayworth who became the pinup poster of WW II. So, we are famous for more than just the South Rising Again!
WE CROSS THE TEESTA RIVER BRIDGE
INTO A “PERMIT ONLY” AREA
TO A SPECTACULAR FOREST REST HOUSE
NAMED “ NAMAPRIKDANG”
FOR A FASCINATING VIEW OF A REMOTE
ETHNIC GROUP
OF TRIBAL MINORITIES NAMED “THE LEPCHA”
FOR A CLINIC DAY IN A PARADISE-LIKE
LOCATION,
DOOMED BY “PROGRESS” FOR THE TEAMING
URBAN MASSES OF A MORE DISTANT INDIA
This was a change of pace day. We were dealing with a very special group of people for which we had to have special permits to cross the one land suspension bridge called Sankalam that divides off the Zdungu Valley Region. We all piled into three of the local knock-off jeeps to make the switchback descent into this spectacular Shangri-La type valley rimmed by steep green sloped peaks. As we left Mangan, I saw a sign that announces that Mangan is the “Large Cardamom Capital of the World.” So, this is where all that cardamom flavored coffee the Saudis drink all day comes from!
When we drove down the switchbacks ( a series of road switches that is not used here as much as the use of them as the “Zigs” in the areas of Western Himalayas such as Spiti; here they make bridges and the road descend under itself in a 360* spiral down the mountain) we saw the Teesta River ahead. As we came closer, we could see a suspension ridge with a picturesque waterfall sending rust-inducing spray up into the underside of this one-lane bridge. The Army and police guards who had to examine our permits stopped us there for some time as they wanted to make sure that not anyone had counterfeited a permit to visit these special “protected people”—one of three groups in India, and I had one of the first permits to visit the others in Tso Morari area of Ladakh. We were let go over the bridge (a big sign warns “no loaded vehicles”—and surely we did not count in this small jeepoid jitney with seven of us crammed in besides the driver!) one to a time to get to the village of Zdungu. One hundred percent of this population is Lepcha—an ethnic minority group protected by the government.
We drove forward along the Teesta River to reach the end of the road at a “Welcome Arch” painted with a man and woman in traditional costume. We drove a little further, and saw a Lepcha Traditional House, constructed by the Ministry of Culture and dedicated by the Sikkim chief minister in August of 1997. Outside the stilt hose were three stone pylons wrapped with Katis as tributes to the ancestors. Ahead lay an idyllic retreat called Namaprikdang at 27* 31.14 N, 88* 31.53 E. The name means “the place of (a bird.”)—the specific bird name could not be identified as to species. The site is a “Forest Rest House” situated at the fork of the confluence of the Teesta River with a tributary, the Tolungchu. It is stunningly beautiful, an idyllic retreat in a paradise of tropical plants in a garden with steep walled canyons covered with climbing bines and trees that go straight up out of mere cracks in the rocks, covered over in bromeliads and other aerophagic plants. It is a nearly ideal nirvana of wilderness beauty in a nation which is more typically characterized by the teaming masses of Kolkata or the slums of Mumbai and the press of flesh in crowded Delhi. Here is a verdant oasis of natural beauty in an unlikely host nation, dedicated, as the plaque in front says, by the chief minister of Sikkim, and here for our perfect retreat and a site to which the Lepcha patients can come for car by walking through a verdant forest, itself a therapeutic experience. I was glorying in this beautiful place—almost a repeat to f the experience I once had when I was with Ivo Paulo Garrido and had come to an abandoned Catholic compound in a Mozambican jungle with a high mountain behind the clinic and hospital adjacent to a school and church and the living quarters of the staff all neatly arranged around a central plaza under overhanging mango trees. When the Portuguese pulled out and the Catholics were ordered out, this wonderful mission station was left to the rapacious destruction of those who needed to steal the pipes that carried the spring water out of the mountain behind the clinic to make muzzle loaders and the magnificent mangoes fell to those who wanted a bit of firewood—and the idyllic site looked like it had been sacked as a “Paradise Lost.” Later I heard the plan for Namaprikdang, and I contemplated the ever loosing struggle of such places of beauty and natural purity against the heavy and never ending demands of subsistence and survival of densely crowded urban populations, often far away and unaware that such a place could even exist on the same planet in which they are groveling in the hard scrabble carnivorous world of survival of the quickest and fittest.
Sikkim’s history is involved in how this enclave of jungle wilderness came to be still present, even if threatened with extinction. Sikkim was the last province to join in to the Indian nation, and that happened in 1975. Before that, Sikkim was a Kingdom. The King died as did the first son of the king, and the heir would be the second son, who became a Lama, taking him out of the pursuit of royal ambitions. A long time earlier, a specific tribe of peasants named the Lepcha had migrated from Nepal, with their own language (not mutually intelligible to other Nepalese speaking peoples) dress, and a different species of religion, akin to Buddhism. They are short in stature and look quite different—I had said they look a bit like Mongolian Hawaiians. This group had hid out in the forests as the other Sikkimese got more powerful, and they were driven into the high mountain waterfall-rich and jungle terrain habitats. The Sikkimese eventually recognized them and made them a protected people, with a special permit for anyone who wanted to enter their terrain. Some of the Lepcha wanted to live in isolation, about 8,000 of them who live in this Zdungu Valley, and no one is permitted to come in to see them, except for such as us, and only two other young women who had been given a permit by the administrator with whom I talked. They were comparing the Lepcha who had come out of the enclave of the Zdungu Valley with those who had migrated to Gangtok, the Sikkimese Capital, or all the way to Kalim Pong in West Bengal—a rather ideal anthropologic laboratory. So, we are seeing a “protected” people in an area in which a special permit is needed, unlike the “restricted” areas, which are largely politically or militarily sensitive long disputed borders—the kind of places I come and go regularly. This would be an ideal anthropologic inquest, and I get to do it, not just once—here at the “lower jungle” in the Zdungu Valley enclave of the “lower Lepcha” but also in the “higher jungle” tomorrow in another group of the Lepcha, also “protected” as a minority which is shielded from the outside world’s interaction if they continue to seek this isolation.
I spoke with the Lepcha administrator of this whole area, who is fluent in English and identified himself first as a Christian, saying that quite a few of the Lepcha were Christian due to the influence of early missionaries who are no longer permitted. The others are spread out in a variety of religions, including the majority of them who practice a kind of animism and ancestor worship. With another group that practice a modified form of Buddhism.
We set up in the cool tree-shaded canyon with the roar of the white water Teesta River and its tributary stream in our ears. Before many patients made it to clinic, I walked a little trail into the jungle and came to the upstream part of the Tolungchu River. Big boulders striated with marble were next to white sand beaches from the glacial flour of the greenish stream. Behind the rapids and little waterfalls of the Tolungchu I could see in the riverine “V” of the valley a stunning view of the white top of Kanchenchunga before eth clouds swirled up and covered it over. Birds and butterflies flitted up and swirled around in the understory of the jungle canopy. I had my telephoto lens on and chased a rather ordinary looking sulphur butterfly, frustrated that the camera would not autofocus on the butterfly. Just then, I saw a large iridescent blue “Morpho” kind of butterfly flit by, and after missing it on a number of tries, I caught it in the telephoto as it hung upside down on a flower of a jungle vine. This is a wonderful natural history setting for the biology and anthropology of a virtual Garden of Eden!
I returned to the main hall of the Forest Rest House, and as the patients trickled in, I supervised about four teams as they reviewed the patients and their problems. I began to see a pattern in their anthropologic appearance. Only after noon when the administrator sat with me and actually volunteered as translator did I pick up the additional information about what had happened to bring these people here, and what was likely to happen to this area and its people who were threatened with displacement. As a small minority group without a lot of political clout or a high volume of noise that can be made from their isolation from the rest of the demands of a noisy billion urban Indians, it seems this place, and they, are doomed to an inundation and assimilation.
We saw the usual groups of patient complaints, from stomach to joint pains, one with an eye destroyed by a celebration of the Diwali festival in which fireworks he was setting off hit his right eye. We saw a young girl with bowlegs and a hint of a rachitic rosary, who coincidentally had a cleft palate. We had enough patients to give us grist for the didactic we held before dinner, which had to include the last day of our overloaded clinic in Seva Sadan, because we departed immediately for the Deolo for our forgettable dinner, the one in which they tried to adapt a bit of the Indian cuisine for the foreigners and wound up with a nondescript attempt—but following all the beer at the pool table and wine at the pre-dinner table, it was not a time for the discussion of the clinical findings of the interesting cases.
The administrator and I then talked about the future of this place and these people—he being Lepcha and proud if it. He is also a government appointee, however, and as such, he felt he ought to give the government line on progress, which included the plans by the government to build a very large series of hydroelectric dams here—the third stage of which would be right here at the confluence of these two rivers in the deep canyon in front of the Namaprikdang—submerging all of this beautiful Eden under a hundred meters of water. This would also displace the protected Lepcha out of the Dzungu Valley. The big project is down in the valley and I can see the huge construction site from the summit of one of our switchback roadways. But, that is just the biggest of a series of four stages and the third stage was the proposed starting one—amid these protected people and right on this beautiful site of the Forest Rest House. The protests that were raised was feeble, but enough because of their protected status, that they began with the biggest of the projects down in the Dikchu Valley Dam now in progress—but no one believes that the pressures for the completion of this project will change in any way but toward the inevitability opf the destruction of this site and the displacement of these peoples. This makes for an even better anthropologic theme—the submersion of a unique culture in the homogenization of the lust for power of an urban mass of the world’s second largest nation! The outcome is not in doubt, however much hubris may be involved in its eventual “progress.”