On Being Charitable.

Kids driving the cows home to my beautiful 'home' village.

Chai time at an elderly meet in the Himalayan foothills.

As most of my classmates are painfully aware, I went to India before I got accepted into this course. For four moths, give or take a week. There, I spent two months at an NGO doing a spot of volunteer work, and then another couple of months travelling around and sussing out other NGOs. I was right up north, amongst the Himalayas - it was absolutely stunning, and I fell in love. Not only with the place, but with the people, and their beautiful traditional culture. What I didn't fall so in love with was the Western-style development that my NGO was promoting. I really struggled with it, and was on the brink of condemning myself to a lifetime of critiquing all things development, when I came across ISEC, up in almost Tibetan Ladakh. I've written an article about it all, which I'm in the process of trying to get published, so I won't rave on about it here...yet. The ODT just turned me down (tragic! and why?!) but watch this space!

What I really wanted to talk about was my attempt to raise money for them. I'm starting from no experience, and I'd welcome any suggestions. My first attempt is going to be sold in the Dunedin Fringe Festival's Midnight Gallery. All proceeds from the sale are going to go to ISEC, to help them out with the super work they're doing for Ladakhi people. It's just a large canvas print, I guess, but I think it's beautiful. Leh (the capital of Ladakh) has this huge old castle perched above it - a minature Potala Palace, seven storeys high. It's been deserted for the last couple of hundred years, but it's still intact, and you can go inside. It's completely dark, and the only light sources are low-roofed stairwells through which high-alititude sunlight spills eerily. You can feel the ghosts of Ladakh's royalty hanging heavy in the air around you.

Ladakh - high altitude desert, completely dependent on glacial meltwater for agriculture.

Leh Palace dominating old Leh, seen through a web of powerlines.

Those stairs I'm going on about.

My second project is even more a step into the unknown. I'm producing a 2007 calender - a charity calender - which I'll be selling at Christmas time. I'm hoping to make enough money to set up a programme of cultural reinforcement in one of the schools at my original NGO. To me, it would be heartbreaking to go back in 10 years time and find that, instead of appreciating their own culture, my beautiful Himalayan village was speaking nothing but English and wearing nothing but mock-up Reebok, Nike and Lacoste.

So if anyone has any advice to offer me on the subject of raising money for charity in this way, please hit me with it. At the moment I'm floundering in a mire of red tape - and sometimes I find it hilarious in an ironic way that really, my bank account is a charity case in and of itself!