We arrived
in Lalitpur after our latest Mussoorie trip on Friday last week. We stepped out of the train just before noon
into a sauna. You have to feel the heat
here to believe it. It feels like… well,
you get the sense that if I marianated myself with some curd and ginger-garlic
paste and Amma’s secret curry powder – I would be a tasty tandoori treat. As it is the sun (ok the UV rays from our
nearest star) already turn my melanin-deprived skin into various shades of red
from rose to salmon to stop-light hues.
So I look the part a tandoori-chicken on the outside too.
The saving
grace was noticing that the ground outside our house was soft. It had rained in Lalitpur the previous
night. We could feel the humidity of the
previous rainfall and see the splash marks in the dust.
We
continued to bake for the next 3 days, and then what we hoped for took
place. It rained. And it rained again. And it rained a third day in a row. Not just a few splashes of water, but steady,
goodly stuff. Not quite buckets being
emptied out from the sky, but certainly enough to gush all over and bring a
delicious coolness to everything.
Our friends
tell us that we have already had more rain in these few days than Lalitpur had
all year in the scanty monsoon of 2015 – and that too being a second year of
drought in a row!
Most of our
work in the community for the past year has been in the shadow – or should we
say the unsparingly harsh sun-shine - of drought. We have structured a lot of our work to
respond to this through facilitating ‘cash-for-work’ activities. These allow people in the villages to earn
through manual labour on land-treatment activities linked with water conservation. With cash in hand, we were hoping to help
some of our families stay in the village instead of migrating for work.
What a
beautiful relief to have these delicious drops pouring down. We got so much rain that our dear “Papaya”
(nano car) has been stuck in the mud in its parking place.
The rain
has not come back accident. God says in
His word that He sends the rain on the just and the unjust. We have been praying, as have folks all over
our nation and in other parts of this dear planet… for rain. And we need to keep praying, as the full onslaught
of the monsoon has not hit us yet. The steady
constant sheets of water that we are looking for have not yet been tasted, but
we hope – and pray – that they will.
Mr.
Baswaraj, who has come for a month to help us out with the watershed management
work, has said that the small ‘bunds’ (earthen ridges) which some of our
villagers have built on the edge of the beneficiaries’ fields are doing their
work: water has been gathering which
previously had just flowed away, not recharging the water table and carrying
away precious top soil. But now it has
the opportunity to percolate down – and farmer’s fields are staying with them
too.
Having felt
answered prayers as wet splashes on our faces – we don’t want to stop. We want a full monsoonal deluge – with the
right amount of rain over the next few months for farmers to get a bumper crop
and for the ground water to be fully recharged.
Getting
enough water this year will help us avoid this:
(note the Eicher tractor!)
This is a water tanker that one of the villages had
brought from another place so that their households would have drinking water
early last month.
We know
that the impact of our watershed management activities in the 15 villages we are working
in will be very modest. They will have some impact,
we believe, but are far away from covering all the landscape. However, we do hope that their impact will be
felt locally. We hope that wells near
the farm-bunds and gully plugs will fill up faster. And our desire is that through the hard work
of working together, our local village watershed management committees and
self-help groups will grow in confidence and be able to access bigger tasks and
opportunities in the coming days.
The rain
has come. We hope, and pray, for
more.
What a joy
to already see a thin shade of light green as new grass is already sprouting
from the soft earth. What a pleasure to have
house where everything is not glowing with heat. Beautiful rain. Welcome monsoon – you wet blessing from our
dear Lord Jesus who loves our India so very much.
No comments:
Post a Comment