A short story...

Something that happened here at SECMOL campus to our cow and the beautiful endless effort the buddhist ladakhi students put forth together with the VISpas.....

Here on the campus we have two cows for milk and a calf that roam freely everywhere. The calf's mom Diskit recently passed. It was the most horrific and at the same time beautiful death I have ever witnessed in life and probabally will be for the rest of my life. The carpenter found her stuck in the mud by the Indus river a little ways from the road. We spent 7.5 hours until 11 at night in the cold mud pulling her up - sliding boards underneath her head to hold her head above the mud as she would sink further and further. There would be almost 14 people using all their might be pull the sacks we would dig underneath her stomach. The mud was freezing - so cold that when i would take breaks and lose a croc, i wouldnt even realize my shoes were missing bc of the numbess. It was unimaginable to think about how she felt but after a while the shaking stopped. When there was no hope left for us to get her out, the ladakhis called a machine with a crane to come dig out a channel from her body to the river so the water would seep out. In doing so the crane cut her body and made the mud go red. Every time the crane would attempt to pull the rope that cradled her body we could hear cracks. So much suffering for any being on this earth. I think there was a lot of internal damage that happened as a result of every trying to pull her body out. It was def. the hardest and most difficult time ever in being cool and collective leader. Finally at 11pm at night she was pulled out, a fire was made for her. And she died, her head in nate's hands. Some of the students found it very difficult to watch and I left earlier because I couldn't deal with it. The beautiful part of it was that she was finally in peace when she died and 35 people spent almost eight hours working together in freezing conditions refusing to give up for one second. So now the calf is motherless but prances around so happily. Sometimes ill be brushing my teeth and she'll be ruffling through the garbage right next to me.