The Elephant Man (Not For The Faint Hearted)..

That quick pinprick pain on your foot. You know the one. When a small critter sinks his teeth/stinger/dagger right into you and for a split second the only thing in the world that matters is slapping the hell out of the affected area. Well I had that today, and after it happened my sweet Winnie Wild Flower said "Well, lets hope it doesn't get infected like last time." What she was referring to took place almost exactly 12 months ago when I woke up one morning and felt a slight pain on the corner of my lip.

I spoke to Oodbilav about it as he was a Triage Nurse before moving to India but he couldn't see anything wrong with it and so he sent me on my slightly less than merry way.

A day later the very corner of my lower left lip swollen and was painful to the touch.

A day later it was half of the left side of my bottom lip, it was hard as a rock and my 2nd back molar was giving off quite a bit of pain. I googled it and the verdict was pretty much unanimous; an abscess under my tooth. Now this is bad news regardless of what country you live in, but in Varanasi this news means having to see a dentist, and that is almost as bad as it gets.

We rang around and found the best dentist we could and went in to see them right away. Her office was clean and so was her equipment so that felt like a good start. I told her what the issue was and she took her scraper thing and poked around for a bit. But then it got all India. She took her little mirror, the one that's attached to the end of a little metal rod and turned it upside down so that she was holding the mirror in her hand with the metal rod sticking out from her fingers. Using this metal rod, she then gave a strong and decisive WHACK, right on the sore tooth. I gave off a shocked and slightly pained shout but by that point she was already taking off her gloves and walking away, totally satisfied with her work. She said "You need a skin doctor, not a dentist. If that was an abscess you would be crying on the floor right now, and you're not, so it can't be an abscess." 100 bucks says they don't teach you that in any Dental school in Australia! So off we went to find a skin doctor.

I'll skip past some boring bits like plenty of searching around and sitting in waiting rooms and go to when things began to pick up when we finally got in to see a really great skin doctor. She told me that what I had was an insect bite of some sort and most likely from a spider, and that it had turned into Cellulitis and thus she prescribed a ridiculous lot of tablets. It was a Friday afternoon and she told me to come back after the weekend if there wasn't any signs of improvements.

To be taken 2 or 3 times daily

Saturday morning the growth was so bad I could hardly speak.

Sunday morning turned out to be worse. I woke up early but found that I was unable to speak a word. The skin on the left side of my face had stretched as far as it could outwards and so had began to stretch the only other direction possible, inwards. I couldn't put the teeth on the left side of my face together as my cheek had swelled about an inch into my mouth in a giant painful bulge. On this morning for the first time you could actually see a small white headed pimple right at the spot where I first felt the pain and so I began to do what one does when they have a pimple, I squeezed it.

What came out is almost too distasteful for me to describe.. but I will, cause hey, that's the kinda guy I am! Wave after wave of thick, off white, semi solid puss oozed out from deep within my face with each squeeze. The process was intensely painful but with each squeeze I could feel the bulge inside my mouth lessening and the ability to open and close my mouth was improving and so I'd give myself a few moments to get psyched up to get through the pain and then would just keep on squeezing. On a couple of occasions the tiny hole became blocked and so I sterilized some tweezers and literally pushed them into the hole in my face and pulled out semi-solid masses of puss. After about 40 minutes I had filled up a small glass cup about a third of the way.. I offered to show it to Wild Flower but surprisingly she was not even slightly impressed with me.

Hellooo Ladies!

Oodbilav made a call and took my to see the Doctor again that morning as I was in too much pain to wait another day. She saw me sitting in the waiting room and called me straight in and I must have looked quite a sad sight as she didn't bother with any examinations but instead told me that she was going to have me admitted to the hospital immediately.

Going to hospital in Banaras is never good and in general I will avoid it at all costs, however today I really felt that I had run out of options. The hospital she wanted to sent me to was not a good one, in fact it has a terrible reputation and Oodbilav voiced this concern with the Doctor. She replied "in all Ponds there are good fish and bad fish. The hospital I am sending you to is filled with mostly very bad fish, however the specific fish you want to see is the best fish there is!" She had proved herself to be a very capable and trustworthy Doctor up to this point and so I took the gamble and trusted her.

Getting checked into the hospital was a typical Varanasi bureaucratic nightmare. A forty-something minute wait at the front counter to pay your first pointless "welcome" fee. Another long cue to pointlessly hand over your receipt at another counter in a different part of the hospital and pay another fee. Another long wait with the thousands of other sick patients on concrete benches in a cavernous underground room that apparently disdains natural sunlight in order to see our specific Doctor. Finally seeing the Doctor and being assessed by him at the same time as he assessed two other patients with horrible (and smelly) skin infections and then offending the Doctor by asking him to please use new gloves before he put his fingers into my mouth after he had just been poking an open wound on another man's leg. The list goes on.

Angelina Jolie Sold Me Her Lips

I was finally admitted to a private and quite decent (decent by Banaras standards of course) room with the help of Oodbilav who really was my hard working hero throughout all this. They brought in an IV drip with some cocktail of antibiotics and after a couple of failed (and painful) attempts managed to get it into a vain, and slowly things started settling down. Or so I thought.

I had fallen asleep around 11pm and at midnight the nurse came in, woke me up and asked what every single other person who had entered my room that day had asked; "Where is your family?" This question was fine, it was the second question that was really the kicker; "Where is your medicine?" I did my best to wake my mind up and managed to grumble out "huh?" She asked again. I naively responded through swollen lips "My family is sleeping at home, and aren't you the nurse? Aren't you suppose to bring me the medicine?" And here came my introduction to the Indian medical system!

You see, in Banaras when someone is sick or injured and is admitted to a hospital this turns out to be a whole family affair. And for good reason! You see, the sick person lays in bed while the family members do all the running around as Indian hospitals don't provide you with food, or water, or medicine, or medical tests! This is all to be done by your family members! And as I didn't have any family members with me and it was too dangerous and unthinkable to call Wild Flower and get her to wake up Little Feather and make the trip this late at night, I had to go for a walk, with the IV still attached to my arm out of the Hospital and up the street to the nearest store that sold medicines. I didn't get to sleep for another couple of hours.

The next day was pretty uneventful. The swelling seemed to have stopped and maybe even come down a little and so I watched a couple of movies on the computer and read for a bit. At one point the nurse forgot that she had turned on my IV and so about an hour after it had finished I went wandering through the halls looking for someone to take the tube out. At one point blood from my arm started flowing out and down into the tube so I squeezed the tube to prevent further flow. When I found the nurse and she came back to my room and took the tube out, I asked her if she would get me a new tube to which she rolled her eyes, said she would clean it, then walked to the corner of he room then held one end of the tube up in the air to let the blood splash out onto the floor in the corner. When Wild Flower and Little Feather visited I made them keep their shoes on and sit on my bed.

That day I made sure I had all my medicine in advance so as to avoid the post-midnight stroll into town to buy some and was settling in for a quiet evening. I ate some dinner (sweetly brought in earlier by my dear wife and daughter), watched a movie and curled up and fell asleep. But sure enough, jut after midnight, in walked a young student doctors who wanted to take some blood samples. His first question "Where is your family?" His second question "So who will take your blood to get tested?" Yep, at 12:30am I was told I would have to walk out onto the street, hop in an auto rickshaw, traveled to the next suburb (still with my IV in) and drop off my blood samples to get tested. Oh India!

The next day was Wednesday and it was a pretty drastic improvement. It was my third day of being routinely treated with IV antibiotics and by midday the swelling had come down to the point where if you didn't know me you might not have noticed any swelling at all. The little hole in the corner of my lip (from where the puss had made it's grand exit) had now opened up a little and if I pushed it from behind with my tongue the skin would open up just enough that you could actually see into a cavity inside my face! Very bizarre. They gave me an extensive list of medicines to continue using for the next couple of weeks and to my great joy discharged me sometime later that afternoon. Getting out of there and arriving home was a huge relief and thankfully within a couple of days all swelling was completely gone and I was the Elephant Man no longer. 

So tonight, as I'm sitting typing this up and looking at the little bite mark on my foot I'm rather thankful that I'm not sitting and thinking "hummm, so which hospital would I like to stay in this time!?"

Composting Hendrix..

 

When I last left off talking about the Resurrection Garden I'd been sharing about the terribly poor soil condition and all the hard work that went into clearing it of rubbish and non-organic debris. That same day after paying my day labours I stood in amongst the (kinda) freshly tilled soil and there was one thing was glaringly obvious; if I wanted this garden to become a thriving slice of paradise then it was going to need an influx of organic matter, and plenty of it!

At the time, we had 2 large compost bins on our community that were each built out of beautiful stone slabs that all up were about 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5m in size and were pretty much full of good composting materials. We have a couple of very large trees on the property that give off a never ending supply of dried brown leaves, also plenty of grass clippings, kitchen scraps, garden refuse, coffee grinds, eggshells, cardboard and the list goes on. It was monsoon and so the piles were getting a decent soak from time to time and to my mind they should have been plowing along nicely, turning all those rich nitrogen and carbon based goodies into a sweet smelling, rich black soil which would be 'so good you could eat it' (ala Peter Cundall). 

However it was not to be. They were Cold Compost piles and none of us on the community had the time to turn the piles to aerate them with any sort of regularity, and so they were progressively becoming more and more compacted and thus anaerobic; completely shutting down the decomposition process. Shoonkdedy bloom is my gardening buddy and it was to both our surprise that even though the compost bays had been filled for between 6-8 months, the deeper we dug down into those compost bays the less and less things had decomposed. This was a rather deflating discovery to make.

Knowing that it wouldn't be long till monsoon ended and that it would soon be the perfect time to plant all my crops, I wanted compost, lots of it, and I wanted it now! I began devouring any articles on speeding up the composting process that I could get my hands on (and during this time I began to realise that the Gardening Australia website/TV program essentially do the exact same story on compost every other month, just with a different host. I guess there really is only so much you can say about throwing kitchen scraps into a pile hey!). But in all my scouring of the web I did come across one very interesting article that was set to change everything, it was called 'Hot Compost; The Berkley Method.'

Little Feather helping Papa Bear gather leaves for the Berkley Pile

This article outlined the method of Hot Composting developed by the University of California, Berkley, which promised to naturally turn 1.5m³ of raw materials into a rich, highly fine, pathogen free compost in just 18 days. That's right, 18 days. Initially I was super skeptical to say the least, but as I read over the process a number of times it seemed to make a good deal of sense, so I figured why not invest some hope into it and give it a try.

I won't bore you with every step of the process in full detail (that can be done here), but the basic premise is that by getting the right sized pile, stacked in a specific way, comprised of a specific balance of high Carbon materials and high Nitrogen items, getting the right amount of moisture, then exchanging the outside of the pile for the inside (and vise versa) every 2nd day, you'll have created the perfect environment for the bacteria who are responsible for the composting process to pretty much go nuts, and 18 days later you'll be in compost heaven.

Day 1 (Still with about a foot or two of raw materials to be added)

I had desired to be really specific with the whole process and really test the '18 day' claim, but being married with a 2 year old, adapting to a new culture, learning a new language, having only a small window of opportunity to work in the afternoons when the heat isn't too intense... well, I'm guessing you get the point.

Day 4 (Fairly noticeable change already occuring)

Building the pile took around 4 hours (hauling everything around in 8L water buckets as we didn't have a wheelbarrow) and I was quite specific in following the details. Turning the pile turned out to be a much bigger task than first anticipated and all up would take roughly an hour and a quarter each time. In the first week I did great, turning the pile exactly as instructed, but in the subsequent weeks I could only managed to find time to turn the pile at least once every 4-5days and it didn't take long before I could no longer be bothered turning it the time consuming way by exchanging the inside for the out (and vise versa), and so the process was definitely thrown of track and clearly effected the outcome.

The process itself is quite remarkable though. The pile heats up so much that you are able to put pretty much anything in there and it will break down (including weeds with seeds, pathogens/diseased plants, roadkill, etc.) and I discovered on around day 8 that when a section of it falls on our foot you actually get burnt! I've since read all sorts of things that people do to utilize this naturally generated heat - my favourite being building your pile around a coiled pipe that is connected to your water system that you can feed water through in order to take a naturally heated hot water shower. I love this kinda stuff!

Week 4.5 (The final product)

When it reached the 18 day period it was clear that my Berkley pile was not the glorious mountain of humus I'd dreamed of, but there was no denying that those lil bacteria had found a great place to be getting it on as a tremendous amount of decomposition had taken place. I kept the pile going, turning it as often as I could and somewhere around the 4.5 week mark monsoon ended and it was time to put some seeds in the earth and so I began shoveling out the compost. As you can see in the above image, there's still a little ways to go before it would have been completely done, but to make this quality of compost in just 1 month.. Shabaaash! ("excellent" in Hindi)

So if you have the garden, the time and most importantly the desire, I would most definitely encourage you to give the Berkley Method a crack. It was a lot of hard work, but the benefits of this style of Hot composting Vs. Cold composting are obvious and numerous (apparently you can even Hot Compost your old cat!). And the change that adding this much organic matter to the soil made was instantly noticeable (you can see the difference in soil quality in the above image between whats on the shovel and whats beneath it!) and led to a far superior growing season. But I'll be saving more about that for next time!

* The title of this post 'Composting Hendrix' kinda gives away a bit how my brain works..
To this day I can't hear the word 'Berkley' without immediately associating it with this moment and this guy!

Rough Days & Silver Linens..

I'll be honest. Today was a pretty shitty day.

The electricity supply from the city yesterday was hopeless and we ended up having about a 6.5 hour power outage in the afternoon. This is pretty common for Varanasi and you do your best to get used to it and get on with life even though it's in the mid-high 30's (that's Celsius) with 75-100% humidity. We've been fortunate enough to have an inverter which means that when the city power is on it charges up our battery and then when the city shuts the power off, we have enough charge to run small items like fans and lights, whilst big ticket items like fridges and A/C's have to just sit and wait. But there is one sound which strikes fear into my heart like no other sound can. The high pitch squeal of the inverter running dry. When I hear this sound, it's the starting pistol signalling that my life is about to get infinitely more difficult. 

Often no power means no water, and not knowing how long you’ll be without power and water is a major headache. About 3 weeks ago a big transformer in our suburb blew up and we didn’t hear about this till it was too late. We ended up having to move into a hotel in a different part of town until the power could be restored 3 days later. A week prior to that our Landlord’s stabilizer which powers the water pump blew up and we were without water for 3 days. In the last 12 months, the Bundar (monkeys) which terrorise our part of the world chewed through the main power cable to our house on 3 different occasions and each time it took 24+ hours to repair. A squealing inverter signals that these wonderful things are happening.

Wild Flower and I heard it last night at about 10pm. The kids had been asleep since 7:30 but once the fan are off it's generally only about 10minutes in this sort of heat and humidity before they'll wake up in a pool of their own sweat and not go back to sleep for sometime. And sadly that's pretty much what happened. We're fortunate enough to have our Ashram just up the path from our house and the inverter there still had a decent amount of charge and so we packed up our stuff (and two very sweaty little kids) and relocated in search of a functioning fan. 

It was not until a couple of hours later that both kids finally fell asleep and lets just say the rest of the night was hard. Lots of waking up from the heat, lots of weird noises outside, lots of little people tears. 

The next morning we were all up before 6am and thankfully found that the city power was back on and charging the inverter in the Ashram. Excitedly we moved back home but were dismayed to to discover that there was no power coming to our house.. cue more little people tears.

The electricity cable to our house comes via a Kali Temple (you remember Kali, she’s the goddess in Indian Jones & the Temple Of Doom, yeah, that one!) that's on the property, then via another house, then finally to ours. None of these had power and as has happened other times in the past, yesterday something blew up in the Kali Temple yet they didn't feel compelled to do anything about fixing it.

I went and spoke with the Landlords who said they had already contacted an Electrician and that he was on his way but left that conversation not feeling convinced. Lets just say that 8 text messages, 5 phone calls, 4 increasingly aggravating visits to the landlords and 11 hours later, the Electrician arrived. Taking a total of 3 minutes he pulled out 3 fuses, cut one piece of wire then twisted it back together again, stuck the same 3 fuses back in where they came from and cha-ching, we once again had power!

We did our best to keep the kids happy throughout the day (which in this heat was hard work) and are praising God right now that the A/C in our bedroom is working as we all slip into bed, but all in all it was a pretty lousy day. I'm dreading the next time we'll have an extended stretch without power (which will happen soon enough), and I'm dreading the sleepless nights with crying kids which accompanies it, and I'm dreading the ridiculously long day trying to get our power lines repaired, so you might be wondering where the Silver Lining is in this story? And it's these.

In amongst the pain of today we were able to witness this amazing procession of gorgeous coloured Saris after gorgeous coloured Saris blowing about in the breeze from the Sari dying building that borders our property. Sure it doesn't quite make up for the accompanying sleep deprivation and heat exhaustion, but it certainly broke up an otherwise terribly lousy day with splashes of beauty and glimpses of something transcendent, and for this, I am truly grateful.