This week, I celebrated the festival of Sair with the women’s group in Khaniyara village. We took a holiday from class on Wednesday, and I visited the houses of a couple of the women. Sair is a harvest festival in which the villagers offer up their first fruits in thanksgiving and pray for continued blessings on their crops. As part of the celebration, they invite friends into their homes to share a meal. At both houses I visited, the women insisted on serving me hot tea and some food in accordance with the hospitable tradition.

The custom here is to eat with one’s hands, but I tend to fall back on utensils when they’re available. For my meals in Khaniyara, that wasn’t an option, so I tried my best to imitate the precise method of eating I have observed so many times. There is a definite technique to mixing the various soup-like foods into the rice in just the right amounts to create a dense ball that is easy to pick up and guide into one’s mouth without shedding pieces of rice everywhere along the way. I was moderately successful.

One of the Cross Cultural Solutions staff members drives me to Khaniyara each morning during the week for the women’s group. The road is extremely steep in parts and varies in quality from worn pavement to mud and gravel. Despite the constant bouncing as the car battles the potholes, I look forward to the drive. The road crosses the river a couple times and provides a closer view of the mountains along the way. The river swells dramatically after heavy rains, and it takes on a brown color from the mud washing down its banks. Once the rain stops, the river filters itself to a clear color once more, and the women of the area can be seen washing clothes and then spreading them on the rocks to dry. It makes for a brilliant collage of color.

The driver drops me off where the road ends, and from there I walk a short distance to the house where the women’s group meets. I usually arrive a bit early, so I remove my shoes at the door and wait in the front room until the women arrive. We then move into the back room and sit on the bed for the lesson. On rainy days when it’s chilly inside, we wrap up in blankets, drink hot tea, and sometimes eat a hot snack.

The group lasts from 11:00 to 1:00, which is relatively short, but it has been a challenge to prepare material for the entire time and make it interesting enough to keep everyone’s attention. With practice, I’m getting better at planning lessons with a variety of different exercises and enough hands-on activities to keep people engaged. Magazine cut-outs are always effective in sparking discussion, and word games such as Hangman, crossword puzzles, and B-I-N-G-O have proven very popular.

Though the language barrier is still frustrating at times, I am getting to know the women better each week. In my time with them thus far, I have been very impressed by their strength and character. They tend to duties in the home before and after our classes, and most of them have not traveled far from their village. At the same time, they are very well-informed and up-to-date on happenings within India. They often surprise me by sharing well-developed opinions that are not always in support of Indian cultural norms.

The women’s group has been my primary focus this week due to some holidays in the Buddhist community that have stalled my research progress a bit. I have made a few new contacts with whom I’m hoping to speak this weekend, though, and I’m still very much enjoying my Tibetan language class and my volunteer work at the home for Tibetans with disabilities. My next goal is to find a female translator, which is proving to be a challenge, who can help me talk to the non-English-speaking shopkeepers in Mcleod Ganj, the upper part of Dharamsala where many Tibetan families have settled.