I wrote pretty much everything you are about to read here to a friend yesterday, and he suggested I post it on the website blog, and I thought it was a good idea...so here goes:
I thought I would write a little more about the retreat because my first mail to my friend was dashed off pretty quickly in-between getting home to our little apartment at DM (in the Menla garage building) and doing yoga before rushing to another meeting. It's been hard to maintain a practice here with all of the caretaking work but luckily my lovely and extraordinary wife Orit is not only a yoga teacher and a registered nurse, but also pretty tough about maintaining the practice, so she won't give me a break just because our schedule is crazy.
I had written to my friend that we were working hard out here- and then later I wondered if that seemed at all mysterious- it's hard to imagine that it could be that much work to get together some food and propane and drive it up to the retreat cabins every week, right? I am totally surprised how much it is taking....we have a full-on army supply depot running here, and it is taking 10-12 volunteers pretty much all week to keep it going. Tianna Lewis has taken over the "Commissary" and is doing an admirable job, and it's like running a good-sized restaurant. The big room at Jamyang House which used to be a classroom and living room, has been converted into a storeroom and we keep food bins there for every cabin. There are a couple of chest freezers in there and we are moving a large commercial glass-front refrigerator in there soon. There is a large walk-in cooler in the courtyard of Jamyang now which pretty much takes up the whole space. Every Wednesday we have 10-12 people going up into the retreat valley for 5-7 hours in 6 vehicles to deliver food, propane, produce, packages, mattresses, shelving units, furniture, building supplies, etc. etc.. and to do maintenance, which lately has been like disaster recovery. Most cabins get a big food bin, a big blue Ikea bag full of produce, some freezer bags full of frozen items, a propane bottle or two, and assorted packages that were mailed in for them from the outside. We haul out their empty food bins and bags from the previous week, along with trash and an assortment of other odd things they send out. In the first month we filled two 30-yard trash dumpsters full of construction debris and garbage that we brought down the hill on our return trips with the pickup trucks. We have two Toyota pickups...one newer and one 1992 with 280,000 miles on it. It looks terrible but has a big heart and will climb anything. I have written to the Toyota corporation of America in Torrance, CA to ask them to open their big hearts and maybe give us a new pickup truck! What can I say....we need it. I am also interested in approaching GM and Ford....and whatever trucks we use out here need to be tough and not too wide- the narrow two-track roads we drive on to get to the cabins are very rugged, and some of them don't even look like roads!
Every wednesday, three of the six vehicles do nothing but deliver food and supplies, and the other three are a guerilla maintenance team- 5-6 people moving as fast as they can all over the valley to fix broken items in the water system or at the cabins themselves.
When we bring the empty bins and bags back down the hill to the commissary, a crew working there checks in the food orders from the retreatants for the following week and spends hours transposing those documents into the beginning of a master food order for shopping for the following week. That master order takes until Thursday night or Friday to complete. Then there's a bit of a lull in the delivery work on friday where we try to recover and work on projects around the campground or other buildings, service vehicles, etc. Rob Ruisinger, the president of the DM board, and some others start shopping on the weekend and drive a large rental truck to DM on Monday loaded with all of the food on pallets, in cases and in coolers on ice. We unload everything Monday evening into the various storage places at Jamyang House, depending on whether it needs to be refrigerated...and then tuesday a crew spends all day reading individual orders and packing the bins and bags. ....Then Wednesday morning the process starts all over again.
The freezes really hit us hard....it was dangerously cold down here and water systems were just wrecked everywhere near here. So many components of the retreat valley water system were broken or destroyed that it was overwhelming....and it happened twice. The second time was the coldest by far and it just crushed us. It was amazing to see how complex pipe systems were destroyed beyond recognition...I've never seen anything like it. We are becoming experts on what will break in a freeze. We have brought in skilled labor to help on the maintenance days since there has been so much to do. Technically we are not allowed to do any maintenance at all during the deep retreat periods, like February, and so we were not supposed to do anything at all during February but we felt we had no choice but to sneak around a little bit trying to stop the hemorrhaging of water....we lost so much through broken pipes when things began to melt, it was scary. Water is especially precious in the desert, and we lost a lot of it. None of the valves in the system could be shut before the thaw because they were frozen too!...so when the ice began melting, the water began running out.
One retreatant actually came out of their deep retreat to stop a massive flood from the main well that started in the thaw...They noticed it but nobody else did, and the well could have run for days and pumped out an unthinkable amount of water from the underground spring...so that person is kind of a hero. Most of the huge main holding tanks ran out completely -nothing but some sediment in the bottom. In the (2) 1,400 gallon tanks above Menla house and garage where we live, I found a solid layer of ice across the top of the 8' diameter tanks with nothing but air below when I went to investigate why our water had stopped....so it was clear that they emptied in a matter of hours...the water below the ice ran out before the ice layer had enough time to melt and fall to the bottom. That's 2,800 gallons of water that ran out just down the hill right below where we live, because it happened faster than we could notice. Some areas of black ABS water line in the retreat valley were like lawn sprinklers from being split by the freeze....little fountains shooting 4-5 feet into the air every 20 feet or so. We had to shut the entire system down and begin rebuilding it from the well up. Orit and I were without water at our apartment for a week or so but that's because we were able to fix the damage....but pretty much the entire retreat valley was without running water up until yesterday....so many retreatants hadn't had a shower for a month. To cook or bathe they dipped buckets into their own holding tanks -if they still had water in them. We have taken 5-gallon jugs in to many of them but we only go in once a week. In the last few weeks, we were beginning to get panicky-sounding notes from some of them....some were getting a little freaked out, not understanding why we couldn't restore their water. It was hard to take, we felt bad, but even with using every available moment for maintenance it took forever to get anything done, and it was expensive. Nicole Davis has been trying to manage the operations and trying to stay ahead of all of it, and she's been at Her wit's end.
The good news is that as of yesterday we believe that most cabins' tanks are filling, so many should have water back again, but we have wiped out our money "buffer" to get to this point.
Aside from that we are working on the Great Retreat Teachings in July, and we are trying to teach and practice. Orit is a registered nurse, and is the medical person for all retreatants and so She is busy making sure everyone stays healthy.
Orit and I recognize the insanely beautiful seeds of serving here, and we're really grateful for it. We have a strong feeling of the perfection of it....why it's a perfect place for us to be for the next three years. I just hope we can raise enough money to keep it going.
We have been doing everything we can to stay ahead of the wave of water system repairs and the retreatants' needs, and to be honest I don't think it ever occurred to anybody to start sending out an SOS about the water emergency....I have been working on a different video to show people what it's like in the caretaking process, because we are falling way short with Dollar-A-Day donations, and we can't go on for very long without a major uptick in donations...so I hope to help people see the value of what's going on and sign up for DAD.
Then finally we went to Phoenix this weekend to meet with Geshe Michael and to shoot video of Him, and so we made the appeal video that is on the front page of this site and also sent it out to everyone we can think of on facebook- so thankfully it's beginning to help, but we have a long way to go.
That's it for now.... I thought it might be good to tell more of the story....
scott
