Mairéad Ní Chaoimhspent a month volunteering with a charity as a farmhand in the remote northern Indian region of Ladakh. Living with a family in a village, she learned as many lessons as she taught
'SO WHERE can I wash?" I asked the man of the house. It was day three of my attempt at living the simple life on a farm in a far-flung corner of the Himalayas.
The man, whom I addressed as Abilay, the Ladakhi for "father", pointed vaguely in the direction of the mountain stream behind the house. I wandered down there, gingerly carrying a bar of soap and a towel, longing for a wash, as I had been hiking up and down hillsides for the past few days. So, furtively glancing around to make sure I had no onlookers, and nervous of what the local etiquette was, I plunged in to bathe.
During the month I spent as a volunteer farmhand, living with a family in Ladakh, in northern India, this was one of many instances when I had to sacrifice home comforts. I was one of 40 volunteers taking part in the annual Learning from Ladakh programme, organised by the International Society for Ecology Culture, a UK charity. The project aims to help locals take renewed pride in traditions and customs that are in danger of dying out.
Ladakh, on a beautiful and remote desert plateau up in the Himalayas, bordering China, Tibet and Pakistan, is the spectacular setting for this project. One of the highest, driest places on earth, it is inaccessible by road nine months of the year, when it is blanketed in snow.
To get to my village I undertook the bumpiest jeep ride of my life, from the Ladakhi capital, Leh, with the other volunteers. The land was parched, and the farther from Leh we got the rougher and more potholed the roads became. After nine hours in the back of an open jeep on rough terrain my body was aching. I felt as though I had landed on another planet. The landscape was lunar-like and utterly barren, with sheer crimson- and chalk-coloured cliff faces. We spiralled up and around mountain after mountain, holding on to each other for dear life as the jeep skimmed alongside cliff edges.
Amazingly, in this parched land there is life. Having negotiated our way past a number of jagged mountain passes, we came upon a ribbon of villages strung out along the bed of a valley. One of these villages, Hemis, which in the local language means the Land of Big Rocks and Juniper Trees, was to be my home.
When I arrived I was christened Dolma by my host family, as Mairéad was too complicated for them to pronounce. They welcomed me with open arms and treated me as one of their own.
The mother of the family had a smattering of English, but the granny, Amale, had none; she loved nothing more than to talk animatedly to me in her native tongue, seemingly unaware that I understood not a word of her Tibetan dialect. After a while I started talking back to her in English, and even though she understood nothing she nodded away as I spoke.
Her appearance, to me, symbolised Ladakh, an odd mix of the traditional and the modern. She wore the traditional native dress but teamed it with a baseball cap.
The language barrier at times caused great confusion, and that frustrated me. It took me a week to realise that the gesture we use in the West to mean "Stay where you are" means "Come here" in Ladakh.
In addition to the language barrier, there was the seating issue. There were no chairs anywhere in the house. Life happened cross-legged on the floor. We ate, prepared food and watched TV on the floor. My knees and back suffered daily, and the work was doubly hard as we were at an altitude of 3,600m, and I was frequently breathless.
The work itself - on top of two strenuous 50-minute hikes to and from the farm each day - exhausted me, especially as I had never worked on a farm before.
One day we were down on our hands and knees, pulling wheat out of the ground in the traditional way, when I paused to stretch my aching back, encouraged by the women. I moved my knees up and down slightly, and next thing they were urging me to dance.
So there I was, in the middle of a wheat field several kilometres above sea level, presenting my version of Riverdance to great guffaws and applause.
One morning towards the end of my stay the family entrusted me to herd its two cows to pasture. The unpredictability of animals terrified me. I was feeling so proud that I had almost managed to get them to pasture when the cows got a crazy notion and bolted. Panicking, I followed them across a stream, saturating myself in the process. The cows were out of sight. I arrived at the farm red-faced, trying to explain through gestures what had happened. Amale laughed heartily and placed a cup of butter tea - a not-very-tasty local speciality of extremely buttery sour tea - in front of me, and that was that.
The variety of the work was refreshing. Picking apricots formed the bulk of the work. We stoned the fruits by hand, then spread them on sacks on the roof of the shed to dry. In winter they would be traded for salt and wool.
They were the most divine apricots I had ever tasted. There were over 30 varieties, and each tasted different. The key was to choose one at optimum ripeness for maximum tasting pleasure.
Although tired out by the work, I was enchanted by a landscape that was so unsullied by the hand of man. On our uphill hike home the light would change and the tips of the mountains in the distance would slip into various shades of lilac, then a breeze would whip up and wave the sheaves of barley in the fields.
In the evenings we prepared food freshly picked from the ground. The electricity would come on at 7pm and the family would gather round to watch Indian soap operas on the TV.
My host family lived a self- sufficient life, totally in harmony with nature. There was a very strong sense of community in the village. When one of the irrigation channels needed to be repaired, a large group of neighbours got together to mend it. Great emphasis was also placed on the family.
One day I got an opportunity to visit a local gompa, or Buddhist temple, and see monks in maroon robes perform ceremonies involving mystical-sounding trumpets, bells and gongs.
My experience was a deep and rewarding one, and it gave me access to a culture that a regular tourist would not get a sniff of. Sadly, this way of life is fast dying out. All the children of my host family have left the farm to attend school in the city, leaving the huge workload to the older generation. The future is uncertain.
Ladakh, also known as Little Tibet, the only part of India not to be colonised, was untouched by the modern world until the 1970s, when it was opened up to the outside world. This brought an influx of tourists, development and western consumer culture. Since then the shift from the traditional to the modern has been rapid.
Ladakh now faces huge environmental problems, severe rural depopulation and urban unemployment. It creates a malaise among a people at a crossroads between the lure of modernity and the strong values of their forefathers.
At root my experience worked best as a cultural exchange. I learned of the value of community, family and tradition, as well as about how to live off the land, while encountering a gentle, welcoming people.
The most memorable image I have taken with me is the night sky of Ladakh. Up that high you really are close to heaven; the clarity of the mountain air is astonishing. On the roof of the world the stars are a blanket right above you, so close you can almost reach out and touch them.
The International Society for Ecology Culture is at www.isec.org.uk and 00-44-1803- 868650
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British Airways (www. britishairways.com), Air India (www.airindia.com) and Virgin Atlantic (www. virginatlantic.com) fly from London Heathrow to Delhi, from where you can take a Jet Airways (www. jetairways.com) flight to Leh, in Ladakh. Aer Lingus (www.aerlingus. com) and BMI (www.fly bmi.ie) fly from Dublin and Belfast to London Heathrow. Aer Lingus also flies to Heathrow from Cork.