The village of Rumbak

Alternative Incomes Help Village Women Save Snow Leopards

By Darla Hillard, Snow Leopard Conservancy

This past summer was the second season for our Traditional Ladakhi Homestay Program. In August, I led a group to Rumbak village to experience a homestay and to make two day hikes with the newly-trained village-based nature guides. Our group consisted of Alicia Falsetto, Program Manager, Wildlife Conservation Network, and her husband Doug, two teen-aged girls, Kunzang Dolma and Deachen Angmo, from the Moravian Mission School’s nature club, and myself.

Our four-day trip got off to a good start, on the way in by car, when Jigmet Dadul, Snow Leopard Conservancy Program Assistant, who was accompanying us to the trailhead, spotted a herd of five or six urial (Ovis vignei), one of Ladakh’s four species of native wild sheep and goats. They were high on a hillside across the way, and looked a lot like light brown rocks, that moved. None of us would have seen them on our own.

A pack man met us at the end of the road, and loaded our gear onto three small but sturdy ponies. He was in a hurry to join another group beyond the village, and we three adults were slow; still acclimatizing. So he went ahead and left our things in Rumbak.

As we neared the village in mid-afternoon, we stopped off at the Parachute Café for a cup of tea. We noticed that they weren’t using the solar cooker to boil drinking water for sale, We thought at first that it must be because of the cloudy weather. But no. They’d brought in a stock of bottled mineral water, for which they got a bigger profit margin, and intended to use that up first. Uh oh. One of the reasons for using the solar cooker was to cut down on the number of plastic bottles, which are impossible to recycle in Ladakh. Clearly the Snow Leopard Conservancy needs to work on this, to educate the visitor about the importance of avoiding plastic bottles, and to increase demand for the safe, solar-boiled water.

The quality of handicrafts made by the village women had improved since my last visit, and we bought a selection of knitted caps and sweaters to offer for sale at our next fundraiser.

My room was on the top floor of Tsewang Dolma’s house, furnished in the style of a traditional Ladakhi sitting room, with four mattresses, including one with a colorful woolen hooked rug spread on top, and a choktse, which is a table about 16” high by 12” wide by 24” long. The choktse is just the right size and height on which to place a cup of tea and a plate of food. Tsewang Dolma was in the fields, and her mother brought me sweet milky tea, a plate of Tibetan bread and fresh cottage cheese. When Tsewang Dolma returned, she emptied a handful of fresh green, tender pea pods onto a plate, sat down beside me and popped a pod, urging me to do the same.

“You like?” she asked.

“They’re delicious,” I replied.

She asked my name, and I asked hers, and that was about the extent of our ability to communicate, apart from laughing at our failed attempts at conversation.

For dinner I had skew, a thick soupy stew of vegetables and dollups of home-make pasta about the size of a fat quarter. Yum! I was a bit disappointed that the food was brought to my room, as I was hoping for a visit to the family kitchen. That would come on my last evenings in the home.

Later on, we asked our three hosts what they thought about the Homestay Program, with Kunzang and Deachen translating. They told us they prefer the guests to take their meals in the room, even though the guests like to be in the kitchen. Perhaps they get in the way. Tsewang Dolma told about her first official visitors, two women who offered to help her make the skew. Apparently it was their first experience with the dish, because they made the pasta dollops more like pancakes. They would never have cooked! She laughed heartily at the memory, and went on to list communication as the hardest part of providing homestays, as did the two other women. But they also listed interaction with guests and trying to communicate as the thing they liked the most, after the money of course. Tsewang thought that receiving guests once a week would be ideal, but Rigzen, who hosted Doug and Alicia, said she would like to have guests every day, no kidding, as long as her mother was willing to cover her chores.

Outside my door were several pots with blooming orange marigolds and pink cosmos. The grandfather used a room nearby, and I awoke each morning to the sound of his chanted prayers and the smell of juniper incense. The household activities began by 6:30, with a quick cup of tea or hot water. Once the livestock had been seen to, the irrigation channel diverted, and the water fetched, it was time for a wash and breakfast of tea, bread and yogurt freshly made from the milk of the family cow.

I met my companions right after breakfast on our first day in Rumbak. Tsewang Dolma and Rigzen Angmo had taken part in the recent training for village-based nature guides, and they were eager to get some practice. Each participating village had been provided with a pair of binoculars, bird and plant guides, and I noted that already the plant book was well thumbed. As we walked up the Rumbak Valley, Rigzen scanned the hillsides for signs of wildlife. She and Tsewang had memorized the Latin names of the most common plants around the village, but as we walked out into the wetlands near the stream, we had to spend some time with the book, looking up Pedicularis longiflora and Geranium wallichianum. Yet by the end of our second day, we had identified twenty-five species of plants and ten of birds, and Rigzen had spotted two herds of blue sheep. By then, we had learned that the two women had actually only been able to participate in the final two days of field training, and had missed the classroom sessions. We were truly amazed by Rigzen’s natural ability, her tenacity in searching the book for any plant she didn’t know, and by both women’s enthusiasm and attention to detail.

These two beautiful young women, both in their mid-twenties and unmarried, are clearly engaged in and challenged by their new, cooperative business ventures. They like running the Parachute Café and the village homestays, and now they have the opportunity to explore in a new way Rumbak’s natural attractions, and to share them with visitors from near and far.

I think Khunzang and Deachen spoke for all of us when, at the end of their report on the first nature-oriented field trip of their lives they wrote:

It was 25th of August when we had to say good-bye to Rumbak. Really! We weren’t feeling like leaving, but we had to. We packed our bags and Darla came and she took some photographs. We had a cup of tea with her. And with a heavy heart we said good-bye to Rumbak and came back. On our way to Leh we saw an animal called pica. We looked for snow leopard’s scrapes and luckily we found some and we were happy.

With nature guides now trained in Ladakh and Nepal, the Snow Leopard Conservancy welcomes donations of high-quality binoculars of at least 7x35. Please e-mail us if you can help.

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