Grassroots

Those of you who know me in my guise of a cushion propped up on a settee next to a steaming mug, picture this:

Imagine a steep and fairly loose mountain, clad with pine and strewn with slippery needles. The colours are intense- startlingly blue cloudless sky, intense green pine with silvery tips, rust-red trunks and floor. On the mountainside is carved a narrow path like a string tossed onto the mountain. Along it, moving ever-upwards, one hand always maintaining contact with the mountainside, are three people: a handsome, forty-ish man who looks every precise inch the Junior Engineer that he is, a painfully shy and painfully young priest-by-birth-development-worker-by-training, and a sofa cushion complete with tassels and all.

Two of the three are wearing expressions of ferocious concentration. The cushion is wearing a fatuous grin. “Hee” she is thinking, “This is me; I am here. I am a grassroots worker in the Himalayas walking 7 km to a mountain hamlet accessible only on foot to help establish decentralized governance. Wow. ”