I'm not really sure I ever left.

Remembered Truth: Order arising naturally from chaos brings balance. Order unnaturally imposed on chaos brings conflict.

Learned Truth: I get by with a little help from my friends...

Monday & Tuesday: Boring Travel.

Wednesday:

Today I followed three dog catchers. They were looking for stray dogs to vaccinate for rabies. One had a burlap bag with a rope, one held a syringe loaded with the vaccine and the other chased the dogs. Also with us was Arvind the guy organizing the hunt. He runs The Dharamsala Dog Rescue, the only veterinary clinic in all of Incredible India that cares for stray dogs and one of the few who cares for dogs at all. The other veterinary clinic mostly cares for owned cows and sheep.

Few Indians care about the welfare of dogs and many detest them. During a recent rabies outbreak many stray dogs were killed on sight. Arvind was inspired to start the dog rescue in 2007 after a previous rabies outbreak led to the death of hundreds of dogs though poisoning. He said the sight of so many dogs walking around like zombies or laying dead or dying on the street led him to do something.

The primary task for the dog rescue to is vaccinate stray dogs for rabies. This is how Arvind convinced the government to give him land for his clinic and a little bit of money. Much of the rest of the needed money comes from Piyara Kutta, the organization ran by my friend Deb who I met in India last year. While they are out looking for stay dogs to vaccinate they keep an eye out for dogs who are sick or injured. If they find one they will take it back to the clinic and treat it. Veterinary doctors are at the clinic one or two days a week to handle anything Arvind and his mostly untrained staff cannot handle.

Arvind and his dog catchers attract a crowd of onlookers wherever they go and Arvind takes advantage of this by handing out literature about what he is doing and also about the facts of rabies. He’s just begun to publicize the clinic now that it is mostly up and running. For the past two years news of it has only spread by word of mouth. When someone sees a sick or injured dog they will get word to Arvind who will come looking for it. He’s familiar with many of the dogs in Dharamsala. Some dog owners will bring their dogs to him as well.

A local man came by with his dog who’s tail got caught in a barbed wire fence. Arvind cleaned up the tail and disinfected it. He also noticed a lump in the dogs groin and had to tell the owner that his dog most likely has cancer. The owner seemed distraught and he was trying to deny it, repeating that it must be from the fence, it must be.

After Arvind was finished cleaning up the dog and talking to its shocked owner we went out on a vaccination run. I followed the dog catchers as they rounded up around ten dogs. Some needed to be caught in the bag but most were friendly enough to come when called. Each dog was marked with paint to indicate it had been vaccinated. Arvind coordinates the locations where he vaccinates the dogs with the local government so, theoretically, if someone is bitten in a given area the hospital can find out with some level of certainty that the chance of contracting rabies is low.

After our time with the pack of newly vaccinated strays we headed back to our apartments. The accommodations are pretty nice by Indian standards and a bit below Hotel 6 for Western standards. There’s only running water between eight and nine in the morning. There’s a kitchen but no refrigerator or even a toaster. They don’t even provide matches to light the mini stove. The bathroom is without any sort of towel, paper or otherwise. Its a good thing I’ve been here before and remember the Westerner’s mantra to maintain inner peace in India: “Have no expectations, only hopes”. So far I have my bearings and have acquired everything I need fairly quickly. Basic stuff is kind of easy if you know where to go. The towels I bought are literally waterproof. They do not absorb water at all. They will come out from being submerged in water almost totally dry. I wonder what the point of waterproof towels is? Towels that will actually remove water is one thing I need to find and that seems to be hard.

Later in the day I went back to the Tibetan school where I volunteered last year and met up with a bunch of friends. One was volunteering with me last year and the rest are all Tibetans who I helped teach or just hung out with. The volunteer from last year, Heidi Minx, is kind of famous in the Punk underground. She’s known as the Punk Rock Domestic. She has a few cookbooks, her own clothing lines, two active blogs, a monthly column for a tattoo magazine, a web based show on MTV.com and she runs a few non-profits. I don’t think she sleeps. She’s here now with a cameraman in tow filming a documentary about the Tibetan school. I guess I’m going to be in it. She’s done a short, on camera interview with me and plans to do more. She’s going with us tomorrow to the clinic to do a quick interview with Arvind for her MTV.com show.


Thursday:

This morning we headed to a coffee shop across from The Temple for a quick breakfast then headed down to Lower Dharmsala. One of the things Arvind is starting with help from Piyara Kutta is an education program. This has two parts. He wants to educate adults about how rabies spreads, what to look for in a dog that has it and what to do if a rabid dog is spotted or worse what to do if someone is bitten by one. He also wants to show little kids that dogs are not evil, disease ridden animals, which many Indians believe. For this he goes to schools and talks to kids and actually shows the movie “Air Bud” to which the kids seem to react well. He’d like to take puppies to the preschools to let the kids play interact with the dogs. This is something that would make for a great story and photos so we’re all over that.

To get into the preschools we went to the organization where Deb and I stayed last year. They can help get Arvind and the puppies into the preschools since they send volunteers to all of them and know all the teachers and the local head of preschools. We talked with the program coordinator for a while and he was more than willing to help out. They actually have five, month-old puppies. We played with them for a little while. Deb and Heidi couldn't contain their oohs and ahhs and baby talk. I mostly took pictures and put the puppies in photogenic situations.

Later in the day we went to the clinic so Heidi could do her interview with Arvind. Earlier in the day they found a puppy who was dehydrated and took it back to the clinic. It was in perfect health otherwise so Arvind decided to keep the dog. He’d been looking for a puppy to adopt for the clinic. He asked Deb to name it and she named it “Beauty”. Just before Heidi’s interview was to begin the dog catchers brought in another dog that had a skin disease. They will treat it there and when it gets better they’ll return it to the area where it was caught. There was already another younger dog being kept for treatment of what seems to be the same disease.

During the day, Heidi also had the task of finding a terabyte hard drive because the other drives they brought were almost full and they are no where near done shooting. Finding such a thing is something we take for granted but not here. It took a network of people and many phone calls to source the drive then it took another network to get it up to Dharmsala from Delhi. Seven people are all in some way involved in getting this hard drive to Heidi and after a day’s worth of phone calls its on its way. The only “business” that is involved is the store where it was found. Everyone else is just a friend or a friend of a friend. I kind of realized that you really can’t get much done here without a network. Its good that everyone I knew last year remembers me so if I need something I can activate my network and much of it overlaps with Heidi’s so if that network can get a terabyte hard drive up here it can get anything. I need to send feelers out for an illusive Dalai Lama shot glass actually.

I took Heidi to the tattoo artist who did my tattoo last year while he did some touch up work on me. Heidi interviewed him while he was working on me and that footage will be in her documentary. Ashok, the artist, was very happy to get the exposure. Heidi may also write about him for one of her columns. That’s kind of the way things work here. Everyone helps everyone else.

As the sun was setting I went back to The Temple. They’re doing some minor construction work and of course its being done by Dalit migrant labor from Rajastan. It seemed as though they were waiting for something because they were doing the dance of futility in order to make it seem as though they are working. This dance involves two women and four men and two piles of rocks about thirty feet apart. Two men are at each pile and the woman carry the rocks from one pile to the other. The men pick up the rocks, put them on a woman’s head, she brings it to the other pile where one of the men takes the rock off her head. This goes on until there’s one pile then, if there still is nothing else to do the whole thing starts again. I’ve seen this a few times in India. The whole concept is quite typical. There’s a whole lot going on and little getting done. Construction projects that were ongoing last year are still ongoing with little apparent progress and much activity.

The Temple was very peaceful, well mostly peaceful. There was one little boy who was running around the temple having lots of fun while his father prayed. He ran with the people who were circumambulating the temple while praying. This is tolerated without the slightest agitation. I came across a monkey who liked to have his picture taken and I took many while his parents who seemed to be grooming themselves watched. As the sun was setting and I was taking pictures of the event a monk I knew from last year told me that the monks were about to debate downstairs and I should go take pictures. I already have pictures from last year but he was so excited for me I went and took more. What they call a debate is really a lesson. Two teachers stand while the student sits. One teacher gives the lesson while waving his arms and slapping his hands to drive his point home while the other observes and the student does all he can to understand, which from the look of many of them is quite hard.

Tomorrow is a non day. I’m assuming I get to post this then. I’ll probably just chill tomorrow and maybe look for that cobra that bit me so I can return the favor...

The chaos here still runs rampant but I understand this chaos and live well within it. An order does naturally arise from it and if one allows that order to arise they will do well here. Any attempt of imposing order will lead to disastrous results. More on that later.

Click here for pictures!