Mango Languages

Travel Tuesday: Driving Across India in a Beat-Up Rickshaw

Today’s blog comes from Scott Brills, a world traveler and a close friend of Mango’s for years. In September, Scott and his friend Mike traversed 2,000 miles across India in a rickshaw to raise money that would provide clean water and polio vaccinations for children in India. Learn more about his journey here.

“What in the world have I gotten myself into?”

That was the first thing I thought of when I woke up in my cheap hotel room around 6:00AM. I had spent the last few days in Shillong, India—a medium-size city in the northeastern state of Maghalaya. I was there because I had signed up to drive a three-wheeled rickshaw 2,000 miles across the country for charity. Today was September the 11^th—launch day.

This wasn’t even close to my first time abroad—it wasn’t even my first time doing a crazy charity rally—but this time things were a bit different. First off, this was India, home to some of the craziest drivers and worst roads in the world. Second, neither I nor my rally buddy, Mike, had test-driven our rickshaw yet. Seems as though our vehicle was still in the shop—hopefully it would be ready in time to start the event in a few hours. It was going to be a steep learning curve.

Mike and I joined the rest of the participants at the start line. It had started to sprinkle out, and the clouds weren’t looking good. Thirty minutes later, right as we all headed out onto the unforgiving highway, a torrent of water opened up from the sky, washing away the dirt road and drenching us in the process. We caught up to some other rickshaws just as the rain subsided, just in time for the one in front of us to lose a wheel. It flew off as the team was driving, and the rickshaw leaned over to the left, sending a shower of sparks our way as the rear brakes made contact with the pavement. They just barely made it to the side of the road without tipping, and we, along with some other teams, helped them get the wheel back on, making sure it was tightened properly this time around.

The next five hours of driving down the mountain towards the city of Guwahati would be some of the most stressful of our lives. Needless to say, I learned how to pilot that rickshaw pretty quickly, and by the end of that tumultuous first day I considered myself a pro.

* * *

The next two and a half weeks would be filled with crazy experiences of all times: breaking down over a dozen times in one day, getting lost (every day), trying all manner of new foods (lamb brain anyone?), dodging cows sleeping in the middle of city streets, avoiding rickshaw-sized potholes, losing our registration and insurance documents, forging said documents to attempt re-entry into India, and driving the last leg of the journey in 2^nd gear the entire way.

The first few days were the toughest, but every day provided us with a new set of challenges that we had to take on if we were ever going to get to the finish line in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan. After rebuilding our engine from scratch on day three, we were good to go as far as propulsion goes, but just about every day a new problem cropped up (the rickshaws weren’t in the best condition, to put it lightly). We pretty much totally relied on the kindness of strangers along the way, neither of us being rickshaw mechanics. Within minutes of breaking down we could count on someone to stop and offer assistance. Some could speak better English than others, but seeing as our Hindi (or whichever of India’s 22 major recognized languages was prevalent in the area) wasn’t quite up to par, it had to suffice. Regardless, through body language and bits of English alone we were always able to get by. We met a whole load of interesting characters along the way—some more helpful than others, some more wanting of a “tip” than others—but we were thankful to each and every one of them. We traveled quite a way, and saw many amazing things, but the people we met along the way were definitely the highlight of our journey.

Seventeen days later we completed the trip—two thousand miles or so from where we had started off. It had been one of the most difficult, strenuous adventures of ou

r lives, and we were both kind of glad that it was finished (and definitely ready for the post-trip to Thailand to unwind for a bit). One can only do so many twelve hour days in a ramshackle rickshaw in a row!

I’d love to return to India again someday, but next time I’m going as a tourist—not a rickshaw driver.

For a full recount of Scott’s rally across India check out his blog at www.rickshawrunguys.com

Have you ever had an extreme adventure like Scott’s in another country? What was the most challenging part? What was the most rewarding?

I made it rain Mangos

We were excited to host Social Media Club Detroit this week at the Mango Languages headquarters with special guest speaker Mallory Brown from World Clothes Line. She had a great Mango story. We couldn’t resist sharing.

Be sure to check out Mallory Brown’s organization.  For every piece of clothing you buy, they donate one to folks in need all over the world. VERY cool!

Haiti Needs Your Support

Over the weekend, I was at the Boston ALA Midwinter Conference and every time I had a chance to look at a newspaper or the TV – pictures of the absolute devastation in Haiti due to the Earthquake flashed across the page and the screen.

The images are devastating for any part of the world, let alone this already impoverished country. The pictures are almost too hard for me to look at or watch. It makes me sick to my stomach to see what these poor people are having to face. Losing their homes, families and I am sure much of their sanity in such a dire situation. We need to care.

According to Wikipedia -
Haiti has a very interesting history. It was the first independent nation in Latin America, the first post-colonial independent black-led nation in the world, and the only nation whose independence was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion. Despite having common cultural links with its Hispano-Caribbean neighbors, Haiti is the only predominantly Francophone independent nation in the Americas. It is one of only two independent nations in the Americas (along with Canada) that designate French as an official language; the other French-speaking areas are all overseas départements, or collectivités, of France.

But on January 12, 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, with its epicenter 16 miles west of the capital and largest city, Port-au-Prince, which was devastated. Approximately two hundred thousand people were killed and counting, although it will take time to determine the exact number of dead; the Presidential palace, Parliament and many other important structures were destroyed, along with countless homes, businesses, hospitals, schools and shantytowns.

How can you help? We are suggesting you go to the Unicef website and donate money to help this country but more importantly to help the people rebuild their lives.

If you know of other ways to help please comment here!

Global Education

I’ve just returned from a 10,000 mile, nineteen country charity rally from Detroit to Ulaanbaatar. My mission was to raise money in order to help build a kindergarten in a rural area of Mongolia (along with Mango Language’s generous assistance. We succeeded in completing this task, but not without a few challenges along the way!

After reading about the Mongol Rally in a magazine in the winter of 2008 I had set my heart on being a participant. The rules were simple: get a small car with an engine under 1.2 liters and newer than ten years old, no GPS devices, and each team must raise at least $1500 or so to be donated to charity. There is no set route and absolutely no support along the way–you just have to do your best to get to Mongolia some way or another. I was lucky enough to get a spot during the brief sign-up period last fall, and from that point on I devoted a good chunk of my time and money towards preparing for the task ahead.

The ten months before the rally began went by quickly. I setup a website, began gathering supplies, researched potential routes, applied for visas, read past team’s accounts, searched for and purchased a vehicle (a 2001 Chevy Metro), spent a ton of time fixing the car up, shipped the car by boat from New York, and did a good amount of PR work and fundraising (we appeared on several radio stations and in a few area newspapers and publications). Even in the faltering economy we were lucky enough to far exceed the $1500 minimum fundraising amount and so we decided to search for an additional opportunity to help out somewhere. That charitable opportunity turned out to be a kindergarten-building project begun by a Rotary Club in Mongolia and later assisted by the West Bloomfield, Michigan Rotary Club, of which I am a member.

After picking up the car near London we drove across Europe pretty uneventfully. Our first troubles started when trying to go from Moldova to Ukraine. We were held for ten hours at the border because they had never seen a U.S. car with U.S. documents and only one license plate. We eventually got through and ended up spending my birthday on the beach in Odessa. From there it was a massive 36 hour drive to Volgograd, Russia (during which we were pulled over by a cop who tried to shake us down for $100) before another long push towards Kazakhstan. Our next border hassle occurred at Uzbekistan where we accidentally showed up one day before our visas were set to start. We spent the night in no-man’s-land and had a memorable dinner outside with some truckers. From there we visited the silk road cities of Bukhara and Samarkand before entering the mountainous expanse known as Tajikistan. We made it more than halfway through the country and were in the middle of nowhere on the Pamir Highway when our car went kaput. It was a bad situation, but we were able to get it towed back to town.

We decided that it wouldn’t be feasible to repair all of the problems and ended up selling the vehicle to a local family. From there we ended up grabbing a taxi back to the capital, Dushanbe, and then a flight to Almaty, Kazakhstan. While there we took a side trip to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan by taxi before my partner had to leave back home because of lack of funds and time. It was then up to me to fly to Russia and board the Siberian Express train for a three day trip to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. While in Mongolia I had dinner with ambassadors, was invited to meet the high lama, and took a 16 hour taxi to the Gobi Desert where I ran a full marathon without any training, experience, or proper equipment. It was an amazing end to an amazing trip.

While Mango hasn’t yet added Mongolian to their considerable repertoire of language learning modules, I was able to get quite a bit of mileage out of the Russian module Most of the journey took part in former Soviet republics, so almost everyone knew Russian in addition to their local language. My rally partner and I both tried our best to get the basics down before setting off on the trip, and Mango luckily made it easy for us to do exactly that. You can only do so much beforehand though. Tip: make sure you have maps listed in both Russian and English! We didn’t, and we had quite a time getting around at first. I suppose one good thing to come of being in that type of situation is that we had quite a bit of motivation to learn to speak Russian and read the Cyrillic alphabet that it’s written in. We had most of the Cyrillic letters committed to memory
within days.

In all we ended up raising almost $9,000 dollars for charity. The kindergarten is still being built and will be finished later this month. We met so many interesting people and made many new friends and also saw some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. We were truly lucky to be able to participate in such an adventure. Taking a trip through so many countries and cultures like we did you really realize that people all over the world are essentially the same–everyone wants to make enough money to support themselves and their family, everyone cares about their children, and everyone just wants to be–in one word–happy. Such concepts transcend race, religion, culture, and arbitrary country boundaries. It was a challenge at times, but I would do it again in a heartbeat–and I’d recommend it to everyone. There’s nothing quite like travel to open up your mind about the world we live in.

As Mark Twain once wrote:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Thanks for all of your support Mango!