Page 143 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

Calling out the Names

Anne Bergeron

Journey

Four years ago, in the midst of monsoon season in South India, my husband and I were homesick and

cold. The rains had knocked out power days earlier, and one interior wall of the house was crumbling

into a heap of stones. In the kitchen, a thick, golden sambar soup flavored with pungent mustard

seeds, fresh curry leaves, and grated turmeric simmered atop the propane hotplate. Each night as rain

slammed into the windows, we huddled by the light of the open fireplace, sipped the sambar, and felt

warm, safe, and happy. The arrival of the intense rains was good news, but this downpour had begun

several weeks later than usual, and that worried the farmers who depend on rainwater brought by the

Northwest monsoon for planting rice and other crops. What no one knew then was that the rains would

remain erratic for four consecutive years, interrupting rice planting and harvesting, drying up groves of

drought-resistant coconut palm trees, and sparking fears of shortages in drinking water. The biannual

heavy rains that take down power lines and wash out roads mean survival for every person, animal,

and plant who call the Western Ghats home.

Glynn and I had been working for an NGO in Tamil Nadu in the fall of 2011, and the return to our

home in rural Vermont coincided with the Winter Solstice. Eager to reunite with our friends and to

share the spicy soup that had kept us warm during the rains in India, we cooked up a sambar on the

first night of winter and welcomed the return of the light with forty neighbors and friends by the warmth

of a roaring fire on our hilltop. In late summer, Glynn and I had been reluctant to leave our land and

the home we had built together to work in India. However, that work, which focused on the health of

young children of subsistence farmers, gave us a deep awareness of how the changing climate was

affecting food production in a country of a billion people, as well as our own food production in

backyard gardens in Vermont. More than a decade of hit-or-miss snow and rainfall in Vermont had

brought us growing conditions that were too wet or too dry, as well as seasons of blight to some of our

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