Suzie Pearce had been submitting the popular ‘Day Trips’ column in the Ensign. Recently, however, she undertook a journey that took a bit more than 24 hours.
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One thing leads to another and another, and on it goes.
In 2005, Benalla’s Joy and Graeme Budd travelled to India as part of a Rotary Friendship exchange.
Later, they decided to visit somewhere remote in northern India.
A small advertisement led them to General Jimmy Singh, a retired army officer who had started a travel agency.
Remarkably, in 2007 he established a school to teach English in Samthar, a small mountain village in north-west Bengal.
One meeting with the General and subsequent visit to the school started a near 20-year friendship and close relationship with the Benalla Rotary Club.
It plays a major role in funding the Awake and Shine School for children from Prep to Year 4. At one time, over forty of the now 170 children were directly funded by Benalla Rotarians.
A group of 16 friends and Rotary members have just returned from another visit to the school.
They also had an opportunity to travel throughout West Bengal, Sikkim, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and more.
Over the years, more than 100 ‘new friends’ have visited the school and been updated with the children’s progress.
These little children learn three languages: Hindi, Nepalese (their common village language) and English. We were impressed.
We learnt that the school plans to buy more land and build classrooms for Year 5 children because enrolments are increasing, in preparation for higher education elsewhere.
Rotarian Margot Sherwill visited the school in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2018.
She was inspired to create better English teaching aids for them.
So she wrote and published 145 books, with illustrations, which we saw being used. They are now critical teaching tools used in all the classrooms.
Education is now a national goal for all children, but we were the ones on a steep learning curve.
Last year’s group met and were endeared to a new guide from Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.
He took them to the site of the 1984 Union Carbide industrial disaster, which had affected his community with ongoing consequences.
This year, Graeme presented him with a substantial donation from Rotary Benalla for the Sambayana Trust Clinic, which helps rehabilitate disabled children who suffer the effects of the disaster.
Before our trip, some had read Freedom at Midnight, a book about the period leading up to, and the consequences of, the end of the British Raj.
Others had read Inglorious Empire, a book about the East India Company.
Not many people know that there are now 28 states, eight union territories and 705 Indigenous communities in India.
We visited many of them, including India’s first all-sustainable Indigenous community.
Sikkim, bordered by Nepal, Bhutan and China, became India’s 28th state in 1975.
Sikkim/Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom by Andrew Duff tells the extraordinary true story of a handsome king and pretty young American that is more surprising than fiction.
All of us are now on a reading mission to learn more about where we have been, to better understand the long and complicated history of India, its people, cultures and religions. It was the original home of Buddhism.
William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road tells the story of how India transformed the world and reveals the subcontinent’s 5000-year history.
Our travels led us to be intrigued by India and how it’s managing the world’s largest population, its environment and nature, especially in light of climate change attributed to causing severe floods, landslides and terrible roads.
We were conspicuously the only tourists everywhere, as much photographed by the communities as we photographed them. Everyone, no matter how remote, has a mobile phone.
We were welcomed into many and varied temples, their special features shared with us.
We witnessed the festival of Diwali celebrated in numerous ways.
Our accommodation ranged from simple homestays to palaces and a tiger safari lodge.
All our accommodation revealed a fascinating story, including the integration of princely India as depicted in Dethroned by John Zubrzycki.
In Sikkim’s tea-growing area we had pre-dinner drinks on the verandah (an Indian word) of our homestay looking at snow-capped Mt Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, and lunch at a heritage-listed Elgin Hotel with its beautiful garden.
Kanchenjunga Whispers is a mystical read by Rea Oberoi, daughter of the founder of the Elgin chain and niece of the founder of Oberoi hotels.
Our last stay, at the Hilton in Gurgaon, Haryana, was due to a cancelled flight.
It, surprisingly, overlooks India’s cluster of call-centre office blocks, a modern touch to finish our journey.
Our India trip has prompted a thirst for knowledge and for many a desire to return and see more.
— Suzie Pearce