Day 3 in the Valley

Today I made a third visit to the area my project is focusing on.

 

On the way, along the Gilgit River, I saw a man balancing precariously atop a telephone pole anchored to the river's bed.  I was straddling the top cross bar and held a phone receiver in his hand, apparently trying to make a call.

 

The sky was overcast today and rain briefly washed the jeep we drove in.  The wind picked up when we reached the main town of the district.  An engineer from the area office there joined us and we proceeded back towards Gilgit for a short ways and then turned onto a stunning new Chinese-built suspension bridge.  Once in the project area we started the process of finding the person we sought, one of the village organization leaders.  First we asked a group of men on the street (men generally group on the street or in a chai shop or somewhere, doing nothing in particular, ready to be asked about anything).  They told us to go back a ways and then up a side road.  We stopped the jeep at the intersection and then engineer took off up the dusty street.  He was gone for about 15 minutes. In the mean time, another villager approached us, engaged my driver in animated conversation (in Shina, the local language of the Gilgit and Ghizer districts).  He seemed to know where the man was whom we sought.  Presently, the engineer returned with the man and we got back in the jeep.  On the way up into the side valley, we picked up two more "notables" of the village.  And then there were four people crammed into the back of the jeep, all talking at once, in great earnest about the channel we had come about.  The conversation was all in Shina.  Shina incorporates quite a few Urdu words, but other than these I understood nothing.

 

Suddenly the engineer pointed out that I knew Urdu so they tried to switch to that.  The VO rep talked to me at length.  I understood about a 1/4 of what he said which reflects only the poor state of my Urdu.  But he did get his message across to me.  We stopped at a couple of places along the road and it was explained to me where the village proposes to build a new water channel which will irrigate as well as supply water for the proposed micro-hydel.  We eventually arrived at the point upstream where the current channel starts.  A weir is built there to divert some of the river's flow into a channel that rises up out of the river and then continues parallel to the river but at a shallower grade.  We got out of the vehicle and all four men tried to explain to me why they require a new channel.  The current channel passes through a number of private properties and those property owners demand compensation.  Providing this compensation is problematic for the village.  So they want to re-route the channel around these properties.

 

We followed the proposed course of the channel around the back of the village through a huge boulder field, up against the ridge that borders the river on that side.  The sky looked troubled and the wind picked up, kicking up dust.  When we rejoined the road, I could see dust billowing along the Gilgit river bed, obscuring the main town on the far side.  The clouds had descended into the mountains above the Gilgit river. 

 

Once we got back to the vehicle, the VO rep explained again to me why the channel was important and that everyone would be happy and eternally grateful if the channel was rerouted.  I told him we'd perform the survey as planned and do what we could.  He was sure that as an engineer I'd know what to do.  I was not.  But it will be fun to play civil engineer.  That will probably start on Monday.  Actually probably just be holding the stick thing (if I was a real civil engineer I'd know what it's really called) while the real civil engineer determines at what level the new channel will flow based on where they village wants to start it, upstream on the river.

 

Speaking of the stick thing, I know what the other part is called: a theodilite.  In my senior year of high school, after exams, my physics teacher gave me and my classmate (there were just two of us in the physics class) a lesson on how to survey manually.  Out of an ancient wooden box, he produced a manual, optical theodolite.  It looked like something George Washington used on his first job.  Along with the precision optical instrument, we used an equally ancient tripod (equipped with a plumbline for levelling) and the aforementioned stick thing.  My classmate and I, using a pencil and black leather-bound notebook took measurements in a circuit on the hillside on which our school was built.  We managed, to our great delight, to come within 10cm in our final measurement.  I couldn't think what use the exercise had been.

 

To and from the project site I observed the corn harvest that is going on in earnest these days.  Most of the corn is cut and stands on the fields in shooks.  In circles, in the middle of the fields, women sit husking the corn and throwing the liberated cobs into a huge pile in the centre of the circle.  Golden corn dries on the flat roofs of the village houses.  The scenes are quite picturesque.  The men are nowhere to be seen.  They're off standing in groups, in the bazaar, waiting to be asked anything.