EXCHANGING the peace and serenity of the Lowden bush for the chaos of an Indian village in Uttarakhan, a northern Indian state in the Kumaon Himalayas, in is a labour of love for Scott Bartholomew and Bonnie Flynn.
They are held to ransom by the faces of the village children so keep on returning, Scott said.
The village of Khati is on the confluence of three major trekking routes, 2500 metres above sea level and close to the Tibetan border. The village — reached after a 3000-metre pass — is a two-day walk from the nearest road, three days from the nearest hospital and has no basic amenities such as electricity.
Scott and Bonnie first visited Khati in 2004 and were inspired to return. The pair raised funds in 2005 and returned in 2006.
They were inspired a community-minded villager who asked them if they could help and corresponded with them by letter for some time.
“The letters stopped and we found out he’d died in heavy snow,” Scott said.
The couple’s first project was to renovate an abandoned building and turn it into a primary school.
“Teaching and the supply of education materials is ongoing,” Scott said.
“Each year we put together a school kit – a lot of the families can’t afford basic education materials.”
In 2007, Scott and Bonnie installed tanks, provided piped water to the school, built a bathroom and ran a hygiene education project.
Over 2008 and 2009 they provided 75 solar lighting units consisting of a solar panel, a battery and three lights to the villagers, who had previously relied on kerosene lamps.
The units were purchased in Mumbai for the equivalent of $110 Australian, a figure out of reach of the villagers.
“All of the lights were indigenously made,” Scott said.
“The women think it’s great because they can see when they cook now and the tailor in town can now work a few hours at night.”
The lights were helping to raise educational standards too because the children could study without straining their eyes.
“If one village got free lighting a lot of other villages started knocking, so we’re going back to do three more,” Scott said. “The area is mainly subsistence farmers, who are mostly out of the cash economy.”
Scott and Bonnie’s other function is providing basic health care.
“It started off with just treating minor ailments, but over time that’s increased,” Scott said.
Minor surgeries the couple have handled have included an axe through the foot and a scythe through the knee. They refer bigger medical problems to the
hospital.
They also obtained Hindi and English medical books to help the villagers understand how to treat certain ailments. “The locals had a tradition of treating wounds with cowpats and dirt,” Scott said.
The financial pressure on many villagers made it unrealistic for them to visit hospital. So he was often called on to perform miracles beyond his training or equipment.
“There was a 75-year-old Amma, who had been blind for years, who heard there was a white doctor in town,” he said.
“She walked seven kilometres with a guide to see if I could help — seven kilometres is a big distance in the Himalayas.”
Many of the health care problems were basic childhood diseases such as measles and chickenpox, which both went through the village last year, Scott said.
There are also many respiratory problems from the wood smoke created by open fire pits in the middle of the rooms, where the smoke fills the houses.
The village has a 40 per cent child mortality rate, with an extreme case in one family where only six of 16 children survived.
However, the younger generation was now more likely to make it to the hospital, Scott said.
Scott and Bonnie said they were ignorant of the caste system in the village for the first two years. At first they were invited to all of the lower caste houses, but not to the upper end of town. Then one day they walked in through the snow with an upper caste man and were then invited to all of the upper caste houses to the exclusion of the lower.
“We make a lot of cultural blunders, but being white we are somewhat exempt,” Scott said.
“The great thing is in the classroom, all of the kids mingle.”
Although there was no big caste tension in the village, temples and water points were segregated and there was no intermarrying, he said.
Scott and Bonnie intend to stick with their work in Khati for the long term, and will head back in mid-September.
One of their next projects will be fuel-efficient smoke-less stoves, and they have started a fledgling environment centre to deal with local issues.
Scott and Bonnie’s projects are funded through the charity work of an online travel insurance company, and they pay their own airfares and living costs.
They return to Australia periodically to generate funds, principally through working — and also to recharge their own energy after the chaos and busy-ness of India.
Anyone who is interested in finding out more about Scott and Bonnie’s organisation, People’s Environmental Awareness Khati (PEAK), can contact them on peak.himalaya@yahoo.com.au or 0409 107 432.
More of their adventures are on the internet.
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