Thanksgiving far from home

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday - not just because I get to see family, but because of the food. Everyone knows I love food, that I love the way it brings people together and that one of the things that makes me the happiest is making food that other people enjoy. This year, I couldn't help but be a little sad that I wouldn't be having a traditional Thanksgiving meal. However, I would have Thanksgiving off - one of the advantages for working for U.S.-located bosses is having U.S. holidays off. I was going on my first real vacation in India with five friends to Kerala, a state west of Tamil Nadu.

Going to Kerala was like stepping into a different country. It's run by the communist (Marxist) party and has the highest literacy rate in India. In fact, we passed a village that was the first in India to receive 100% literacy among its citizenship. The state is also really clean and very laid-back. Our first stop was Alleppey, the gateway to the saltwater canals, or "backwaters." The thing to do there was rent a houseboat and float lazily along for one day and night, so for $25 a head we spent an incredibly relaxing Thanksgiving day doing just about nothing on the boat - and it was wonderful. On our journey, we would pass schools and churches, and local folk getting around the way they were used to: by canoe. We floated blissfully on by, drinking beers, eating lobster grilled in chili and lemon for Thanksgiving dinner, and playing Scrabble. Our transportation out was fun, too: to get to our next destination, we took a public boat. It was essentially a bus that stopped at a boatstop every kilometer or so to pick people up and let people off.

For the second part of our trip, we did something completely different. We took a 4WD into the western Ghats, or hills, where the intensely green tea bushes are grown and the best wildlife park in South India, Periyar, exists. We were absolutely determined to see a tiger. One of many catchphrases of the weekend was "inshallah," which is an Arabic phrase used in Turkish and Hindi that basically means if God wills it so....usually said so you don't jinx the event from actually happening! We ended up seeing many leeches (we wore leech socks which were supposed to prevent them from crawling into our shoes and latching onto our feet and legs, but those persistent things still got through somehow) and a couple wild elephants! Elephants are pretty much my favorite animals, so this was a big deal. How did we find them? Well, in the middle of the road, we would see huge, steaming piles of..... fresh elephant poop. It was actually a pretty easy way to find them, because, well, if you've ever seen elephant poop, you know you can't really mistake it for anything else. Anyway, elephants seem like such docile creatures when you think abstractly about them, but in real life they are quite intimidating. We would creep slowly towards them and then run back because they started moving towards us. Later on, Ayesha and I got up close and personal with a real elephant because we couldn't resist riding one. Though I later decided I felt morally wrong about this activity, it was something both of us had always wanted to do. Something about actually getting up on top made me incredibly sad for this huge poor animal that was forced to spend it's life walking around in circles with people on its back.

What was really incredible about the weekend was that we got to squeeze every single thing 6 individuals wanted to do into four days - from a kathakali (native Keralan dance) show, to eating shrimp curry, to ayurvedic massage, to elephant rides, to spice and tea plantation tours, to canoeing on a serene lake, we did it all. Save the tigers...unfortunately God did not will it so! Apparently it is extremely rare to actually see one of the 50 tigers that reside in the park.

Three Cups of Tea

If you've talked to me in the last month, no doubt I've raved to you about this book, but I thought the blog would be a really good place to publicize it. I don't think it's very popular in the States (my dad claims that Border's doesn't carry it), but I've seen it a lot here. If you've read Mountains Beyond Mountains, about the doctor Paul Farmer, you will see that it's very similar to that book except Greg Mortenson, the hero, is such a regular guy and not such a saint!

Greg Mortenson climbed K2 (the second tallest mountain in the world) and didn't make it to the top, and he got lost on the way down in a village called Korphe in northeast Pakistan. Korphe's "school" was a group of children sitting in a clearing, under no roof, with no teacher, drawing with sticks in the mud. Greg promised to build them a school, and he did.

The great thing is, Greg wasn't rich. Greg lived out of the back of his truck while he was raising money to build his school. He wrote 580 letters to every famous person he could think of, and the only response he got was from Tom Brokaw, with a check for $100. The book is beautifully written and outlines Greg's progression from then to now, when he heads up the Central Asia Institute and will continue building many schools across Pakistan and Afghanistan. His determination and patience are things that I actually do often think of when I'm in the field encountering ridiculous problems. And he is an inspiration to anyone looking for an effective way to fight terrorism that doesn't include guns and endless military occupations. Buy this book today!

(I know I sound like an ad but I'm not selling anything. I just want everyone to read the book!)