Sometimes I wonder what we would ever do in the mountains without our 'DOKOS', our huge cone-shaped baskets fashioned out of bamboo. Woven into these baskets is the wisdom and experience of years of load-carrying in the Himalayas. When negotiating our treacherous, steep mountain paths, you have to have a very good view of where you are putting your feet. It is also important to be able to free your hands when the climb gets - as the Nepali phrase puts it - ' a nose-bumping steep'. From childhood boys and girls -- mostly girls as you see! -- carry loads in this way. They develop strong necks and backs and carry heavy loads with a minimum of strain and a maximum of smiles!

Compost is SASAC's black gold. With it, we grow instead of 40, 400 carrots and onions in 1 square meter bed! And 200 spinach and Swiss chard instead of 20!! Besides it has made our garden pest free. The extreme heat in our compost piles kills soft-skinned pests and most weed seeds. Earthworm   fortunately takes hot, so we don't lose that 'gardener's best friend'. At SASAC if we see a leaf chewed up a bit, we get a mini-heart attack! There is more value added. The best ingredient in compost is 'ban Mara', a precious weed, called 'killer of the forest'. Tree saplings can't get a start with 'ban Mara' around. So while growing more food, our compost is also growing more forest. Double for your money, say I!!

To make compost in 3 weeks, we cut up ingredients. This saves the voracious micro-organisms that eat, digest and 'evacuate' the nutrients, a lot of time and energy. Within hours the compost piles heat up. After a few days when the temperature begins to drop, we turn the pile. Up shoots the temperature. We use drilled bamboos to aerate the piles - the more oxygen, the merrier our mini-gourmets are, the faster they gobble. Compost is our RandD department's success story! Simple when you know how, but none of our poor people knew how. I can't think of any more appropriate way to do quickly but naturally what Mother Nature does leisurely. After all she counts time in millennia, but gardeners count time in months!

Few of our projects for the poor give me more joy than compost does. It employs so, so many unemployed who had no hope of getting steady work. And the work is so worthwhile. My old student, Jay Deep, has succeeded so much in tea because he keeps careful records. It was while doing surveys at SASAC that he learned how helpful statistics can be. A lot rides on the results in his garden. In our SMVG, we have increased vegetable growth ten times. I'm positive as I can be -- without being wrong at the top of my voice -- that  his tea bushes will re-act as our vegetables have. If so, scores of big Darjeeling tea gardens will be after compost. That will mean more poor people getting work that will improve our environment.

Mother nature is a sweetie. She 'fixes' the nutrients in compost so after months it retains its plant-feeding potency. We pack compost in old cement bags. (SASAC is a re-cycling institute. Waste paper, even shorn hair, goes into compost heaps so that they can end their days feeding carrots!). Bagging work is appropriate work for our old, handicapped and for mothers with children old enough to be mother's little helper. Watching a child holding its mother the twine we use to sew up our bags reminds me of how delighted I was to pass nails to my dad perched on a ladder doing some carpentry job. That memory is still as vivid as a video -- though it was centuries ago when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.

It's a blessing that huge Darjeeling tea planters are going organic. Pesticides will no longer kill Himalayan honeybees and the many species of butterflies that were as plentiful as stars when I came in '48 and now are almost extinct. No longer will artificial fertilizers degrade our soil so it ceases to be a sponge holding water and preserving nutrients. But not only bees are being blessed 'organically', our poor are too. SASAC compost could make table legs sprout leaves. We sell tons of it to a highly successful tea garden manager in Darjeeling (and, Ahem! one of my former  students!) an orchid exporter also wants tons. What joy that our poor can make so important a contribution to our Himalayan environment!

When I was principal at St.Alphonsus School (SAS) I didn't realize how many  students and how much our work would be helped in later years by the surveys we conducted. Every second year we had surveys: All about Kurseong, All about Tea,All  about Food Production, All about Forests, All about Mother Nature. After every exhibition, government officials came to ask for a copy of our statistics. An army of students with well- trained teachers can garner a lot of facts and figures. At SASAC we are doing research in compost, silage, bamboo propagation, biogas, forest-waste fuel, mountain vegetable gardening and simple solar water-heating system. Saraswati is reaping for us the fruit of her school days!