My name is Matthew DeLorme,
and I am a professional photographer.
With sort of the way the world is morphing right now
I think telling other peoples stories
and feeling a little bit more compassionate
and conveying that passion through your work
is kind of key for human connection right now.
The Pan Himalayan Grassroots Foundation
has been doing work in this province
for about 25 years now, it's their 25th anniversary.
It was started by Kalyan and Anita,
and they moved up here in a time
when things up here were different.
We formed Grassroots in 1992
but we started living in the mountains in 1987, and
those initial years actually we
just walked and talked with mountain communities because
We had never lived in mountain communities,
we didn't know what the issues were.
But then to get a nice exposure on what the challenges are
for these mountain communities, we spent a lot of time
just interacting.
Based on these conversations
we kind of had a little bit of an idea that we
wanted to do sustainable mountain developent,
and that led us to kind of initiating a holistic plan,
aimed at improving the quality of life for these people here
and also address some of the challenges
that are important to be looked at in the long term.
By far the biggest problem people were facing,
communities were facing when we came here in '92,
we did a survey of sixty villages over here
and it came out that the top priority was the drinking water crisis.
People had shortage of drinking water to the extent that
almost seventy percent of the Nola's,
the natural, the traditional water sources,
they had dried up.
So people are at a huge, huge, crisis regarding drinking water.
We believe that to improve quality of life
there has to be some technological inputs
some changes have to be brought and it can't be business as usual.
Apropriate technology means something which
can be managed by people, it's small, it's appropriate.
Could be implemented easily
and handed over to the communities to be able
to take it forward and sustain in future.
We came across this gentleman called Dr. Tim Rees,
so he was a geohydrologist,
and Dr. Rees conceptualized, designed, and trained,
people like us on how to build an infiltration well in the mountains.
So it's a classical take off of the traditional nola.
With his technical knowledge,
we started making the infiltration wells
so we could get enhanced quantities
of safe drinking water,
and Grassroots actually started becoming
popular with the communities
because of this appropriate technology.
Because the vegetal cover in this river basin
and many others were changed during the colonial times.
It was predominantly the oaks
which is a broad leafed, evergreen tree over here.
But during the colonial era because of the exploitation
and removal of the oaks, what has happened is now
80-90 percent of the landscape
is filled with pine trees.
So what the oaks do is because they've got
a wide canopy, so when the rain falls
so it helps reduce the kinetic energy of the rain
and it helps in renewing the hydrology
because it allows the seepage of the water
unlike the pine trees.
The thing that's impacted me most about this trip
is that, it's really been the women
we've met, and how strong they are.
They are incredibly strong.
They're vibrant, vibrant people,
they're tough as nails. They're not only
you know, maybe, like
mentally and emotionally strong,
they are physically strong as well.
Unfortunately our women are still dependant on firewood
as the main source of domestic energy.
And today we've reached such levels that you even
little bit that we are withdrawing from the forest
for cooking our own food is also now harming
and the fact is, it's not there
people are trudging as far as
four to five kilometers, spending
four to six hours a day just getting
wood to cook thier food.
It just doesn't make sense.
So biogas is, every farmer
will have some amount of cattle right,
so cattle means there is cow dung available with the farmer
and thats the manure, thats the farm yard manure
that they use.
So we use the methane out of the cow dung.
To turn it, to do the combustion of that
and that turns into gas which a farmer could then use
in their kitchen for cooking.
None of these things are part of the traditional wisdom
at the village level, you know.
I mean traditionally in India,
people didn't need it. They didn't need a biogas digester
and therefore the masons in our villages, they don't know
much about a biogas digester.
So, this new quarter of people whom we train
to take appropriate technologies down to the grassroots,
we call them Barefoot engineers
because they are not trained as engineers.
Most of them haven't even been through school
more than a couple of years.
I think that the biggest impact I've seen
as pertaining to the women of these villages is the
the empowerment.
They've taught them to become leaders
and they've taught them to become connected,
and they've taught them to rely on eachother for strength,
and they've taught them community,
and that's huge.
See Grassroots is supposed to be the spear head team.
You know, so we spearheaded an idea
it took it's roots. The women were ready to shoulder it.
So they've taken our help in creating their own organization,
Umang, as a producers company.
They are 100 percent shareholders of that business
and they are capable of running it.
Right now we are in this village called Naini,
and this is the headquarters of Umang.
In order to generate livelihoods
we started by hand knitting.
It's a skill we thought which existed, kind of
for people doing it for their own use
so we kind of upgraded that skill a little bit
and made it a little more friendly
which could be linked to the market then bought.
So if you really look at the role of Umang
it's not that you're giving out
'x' number of dollars that's important to them,
for these women it's also become an identity over the years.
That identity for them is very important.
And so the holistic approach of
giving these people a means to make income and to take
these self help groups, these networks of women
they knit, or they farm, or they plant trees
and they clean up their environment, it's huge.
It's not just fising one thing, it's teaching them to fix
all the things around them, to plant trees so that the land
can retain water, that their wells fill
and they have clean sources of water
and they have the money to pay for this,
and they're connected as a community
and they have a sense of community.
They're teaching them to take action for themselves,
and that's why it's important.
I think this model of small organizations
playing a catalytic role in the communities that they're living
looking at a community as a wholistic kind of unit
and not just doing one intervention
is something that we could definitely share with others
and that process has begun.
The backbone of these mountains
you know the economy, the ecology,
the security and everything over here
it rests on the shoulders of these women
and it has been so for a long, long time.
They want these people to take the initiative
to continue on, to spread what they've started
throughout, and to continue to heal this land and
their environment and look at it as, 'we live in a beautiful place',
'we have a good life, we've done this'
'we're going to carry this torch'.
