FEBRUARY

• The plane ride to Ladakh was so exciting. We were zooming along through the sky and suddenly we would fly over a hole in the clouds and up looms a vast brown mountain!
   
• When the plane landed I woke up abruptly. I looked out the window to see these great snow covered mountains around us. This was going to be my home away from home for quite some time. I love it, the people at SECMOL have welcomed us warmly. I want to get to know each and every one of them. From things that are their pasts to the things they are aspiring to be. These kids come here for a year or two and only see their families a few times a year. Well, that's what a few girls told me. They must be very strong people.
   
• I still feel tiny every time I go outside.
   
• The spirit these people have continues to surprise me. Seeing them dance, (and Tashi!) was so GREAT! They all got so into it, even the younger boys. It's as if we've entered a magnificent safe home placed in the middle of nowhere.
   
• Finally we're at SECMOL. I am quite glad to be able to call a place home rather than continually being shuffled from place to place. The students here are amazing… The view here is just too picturesque. The multiple mile high peaks dusted in a layer of snow are almost too much to accept. Nothing excites me more than the notion that we will soon be climbing these mountains.
   
• I can't believe it's been a month since I left. It's hard for me to evaluate how I've changed since then. I think when I return in May it will be much easier to be objective about my experience here. I wonder how I'll live differently. I'll probably live more simply, not eat as many sweets, be more aware, live more in the present.
   
• Home, that's what I keep calling SECMOL. It's hard to believe but it's true, this is my home.
   
• This place is amazing to me. The attitudes of all the people. The calmness, fun, work, and laughter. Although I will probably not choose to live my entire life here, I want to know it still exists, know that this place is still the same. That is the selfish part.
   
• In a land where clambering friends piece together memories of a fort forgotten, where wind nips at their exposed heads, where a flag made from trash flutters harshly, where the sun disappears behind SECMOL mountain at 5 o clock, leaving the valley shrouded in the calm evening light, where poplars soar over scrubby willows, where the Indus weaves in and out, in and out...
   
• I am sitting by the Indus River, listening to it flow by. The noise is calming and it gives me time to think. Time to think about the reasons why I came here and what I wanted to learn along the way. So many decisions and choices in life, what brought me to this one? I can only be happy with everything that I've done and that has happened in my life because maybe other things would've brought me here. I am so lucky to have this opportunity to come here and experience a place like this. Ladakh is unlike any place I've been to before.
   

MARCH

• I love hiking. Maybe mindfulness means being aware, but more me, I can stop thinking when I hike. The opposite of mindfulness, maybe. But I like that, a kind of meditation. Hiking makes me feel very peaceful.
   
• Today we had the first day of the trek. I'm not going to lie it was definite struggle for me, but the feeling after you accomplish it is so nice. I just kinda stepped into the house we were going to stay at and thought, how did I tough it out through that? During the trek I try not only to think about how it's going to help me physically, but mentally as well. I relate the treks to my life a lot actually. Like how different things that make me just want to fall down and give up on the treks make me want to go all that much harder and stronger. I can't just fall down in life and give up anymore, I have to push through it because no matter how bad things seemed for me back home they always got better.
   
• As we started out today on the first day of our Sham Trek I was incredibly aware of all that was happening around me. I have always been someone who likes to be mindful of my surroundings. I love to notice the littlest aspects of the natural world around me as I walk past it. Today I noticed little continuous bushes above a stone wall to our right, soon after the beginning of our trek. Snow was clinging to their tiny branches, and it gave them a frosty delicate look.
   
• Today I was mindful of a fried egg, warm water, and a baby girl. Being mindful is allowing yourself to let things or people make you feel good. Never has a fried egg tasted so good.
   
• My experiences the past few weeks have made me realize how lucky I am to have the education I have. I always complained about school at home, it was boring, my school's falling apart, the teachers were lazy, there was a lot of wasted time. In short, I didn't want to be there. But seeing the kids in my homestay walk two hours each way to school each day and the one room cement schoolhouse sitting in a mud yard with no heating and the kids at the Tibetan Children's Village attend classes in crowded rooms and hearing the SECMOL students talk about how important it is to them to pass their 10th class exams has made me think differently.
   
• Do you ever think that this place has some magic in it? Sometimes I think it might.
   
• We played capture the flag yesterday. I had this thought: Ladakhis are much better at sports than Americans. They never really get angry and never take things too seriously as smiles are always close by.
   
• Every day is a fabulous day here. Especially when you get outside and explore. On Thursday, after Becky mentioned a spot past the spring up to the left that had some old human bones, we decided to immediately check them out. Emery borrowed Pheylan's speaker, hooked up her ipod and we listened to techno as we headed out along the road. The little valley with the stream has always been a place that has called out to me, saying "explore me! explore me!" I always thought it looked like a magic road leading to somewhere special in between two sandy mountains. I was so excited to hear that beyond it lay the mysterious land of bones. Even if we hadn't found the bones, it would still have been a great adventure.
   
• I am quickly becoming attached to the SECMOL kids, they are no longer just some Ladakhi kids, nor are they just sort of friends, they are part of my family.
   
• Books make more sense to me, they relate better, even when re-read for the 3rd or 4th time. Maybe it's the lack of oxygen. Maybe it's that everything I do here is more exciting than before. I guess I'm just glad to be somewhere so unlike Vermont.
   
• Pizza night was last night. That was definitely a good idea. The group had so much fun, and we worked together perfectly to make some killer pizzas. All day there were people in the kitchen, until our last monster pizza came out of the oven around 9 o’clock! We lounged around after we stopped eating and didn't even want to think any more about that delicious oh so familiar yet seemingly foreign food. I went to bed with a packed stomach, and woke with a pizza hangover, though now I lay here having eaten more pizza for breakfast.
   
• The weeks and days are starting to blur together and fly by and it scares me because this amazing experience has already started to go by in the blink of an eye.
   
• Dance parties are the most fun things. Even though the Ladakhis all know the words and the dance moves and we generally look like fools, it's still exciting. They don't mind…
   
• In class the other day, we were talking about how lucky we are to have so many modern conveniences in the US, how appreciative we will be when we return home to them. I feel the opposite way. In conversation with the Ladakhis I often begin to feel that life in the US is void of a lot of things. Or that we live in such an excessive world. So many clothes and computers and cars when really you don't need so much. Most people just want SO much. Walking to the bus stop as opposed to driving is not such a terrible thing…
   
• I've realized how attached I am to Ladakh and especially to the kids at SECMOL. I'm surprised at myself, I usually pride myself on not missing people or place, but I already miss Ladakh. It feels like my heart is being twisted and squeezed.
   

APRIL

• I remember thinking in February when I was still unsure of what this trip was going to hold, a little scared of the length of time ahead of me, that "when April comes, I'll be able to see the end and whatever homesickness I felt will be no problem." I was partly right, homesickness isn't a problem--it's quite the opposite. I never want to go home!
   
• At home I was usually pretty self-conscious and paid a lot of attention to how I acted around other people. Here I have not thought about myself that way, as if I were observing myself from another person's perspective. Now I realize how pointless that was. When I go home I will have to be careful not to slip back into that habit.
   
• I want to get closer to the SECMOL girls here. I want to climb SECMOL hill again and go screeing down. I want to learn how to knit socks. I want to go running everyday. I want to learn how to make timok. I want to draw. I want to finish two books. I want to learn more Ladakhi. I want to learn how to play the guitar. I want to find the feather from a magpie and the horn from a yak. I want to figure out how to make the milk tea. I want to become closer with the VISpa boys. I want to sit outside in the pretty area under the trees reading with the VIS girls.
   
• I almost cried yesterday, I don't remember exactly why and now it seems sort of lame but it was something along the lines of being happy to be here, because Ladakh is so completely beautiful and wonderful and amazing. And sometimes it's overwhelming and it reminds me of the end of American Beauty, when Kevin Spacey's just been shot and he's talking about how there's so much beauty in the world. It's the simple things that are so fantastic...So much time has passed since we left the Burlington Airport. I don't even know where to begin. When talking about things I've learned and experienced I can hardly remember what I thought SECMOL would look like before we got here, or the mountains or the villages or even before I knew all the VISpas so well. I hope this feeling of knowing this place never leaves.
   
• I can't believe we’re already this far into April. Where is the time going and how do I slow it down?! I just made the mistake of checking my stupid facebook, allowing me a painful glimpse of the superficial social world that is still existing in my unfortunate high school back home in VT. How can I rejoin that pointless world again in less than three weeks?
   

MAY

• We leave Ladakh in four days. We leave India in six. In one week we'll be back in Vermont. How have almost four months gone by since I left my tearful parents in Burlington airport? Am I different? Sure, I guess. My hair is longer, my skin is darker, my body is either heavier or lighter and certainly stronger. But I guess the only way to know for sure how I've changed is to go home.
   
• I don't think I've changed too much. Maybe my views on things or my methods of going about work have changed. I think it will be hard to say until I leave because I'm so used to seeing myself in Ladakh, it will be different in New England, I'm sure. We'll all be faced with different things we haven’t had to deal with or encounter for at least 3 1/2 months and I think that will be the true test of change.
   
• I know I'm going to be so sad. I also know that the sadness is worth it to have met these people, but I don't want my last memory of them to be through tears. But I guess these things are just two more to add to the list of things that I can't control.
   
• Right now Ella looks like a piece of food that some ant children have gathered around.
   
• In eight days, I turn eighteen. In seven days I'll be home. In the swift motion of the earth, life will have caught me up. In the attention paid to a set of arbitrary numbers, my adulthood will be upon me.
   
• As a writer once said, "Where is home?" It is our job, even our ambition, TO FIND OUT.