Week one:
A lot of people keep asking me what I'm doing in Amritsar for a month and I really don't think I can even begin to describe it. If I say I'm working in a kitchen, people are usually like...why. I am working in a kitchen, but not an average kitchen. I am working in the kitchen of the Golden Temple. If you pull up wikipedia and type Golden Temple in the search bar, it will tell you all the basics: its formal name is Harmandir Sahib, it is the holiest Sikh temple, and they serve a langar. Well what is langar?
Langar is a communal meal. But at the Golden Temple, the communal meal consists of lentils, a potato dish, roti, rice, and kheer (kind of like an Indian version of rice pudding). Every morning I leave for the Golden Temple at 5:30 am. The first thing you do at the temple is designate someone to check your group's shoes for you. In the Sikh religion, it is an honor to turn in someone else's shoes, but it is also an honor to have someone take your shoes. The basis behind this is by doing service for others, one is able to get closer to God.
Langar is a communal meal. But at the Golden Temple, the communal meal consists of lentils, a potato dish, roti, rice, and kheer (kind of like an Indian version of rice pudding). Every morning I leave for the Golden Temple at 5:30 am. The first thing you do at the temple is designate someone to check your group's shoes for you. In the Sikh religion, it is an honor to turn in someone else's shoes, but it is also an honor to have someone take your shoes. The basis behind this is by doing service for others, one is able to get closer to God.
This is the entrance to the temple. Not pictured to the left is the window where you check your shoes. For the duration of your stay at the temple you are completely barefoot. Before you are allowed to go through the entry way (pictured), you must walk through a small pool of water and clean your feet. Everyone walks through this same pool, which creates a sort of unity between all the visitors.
Most days and nights people camp out on the marble floor in front of the entrance to the temple.
Most days and nights people camp out on the marble floor in front of the entrance to the temple.
The view of the Golden Temple from the front entrance.
At 5:30 in the morning, my group goes straight to the kitchen. But we don't eat right away. We let other people serve us in the langar hall. Before 8 am, the kitchen serves chai and biscuits. You have not had chai until you have had it here. This is the main langar hall of the Golden Temple. We sit cross-legged in a row along the carpets facing the other row directly across from us. People enter the hall with kettles and fill your bowl. I don't know why the material of choice for the bowls were metal, because metal conducts heat (which makes the bowls absolutely scorching hot), but I've learned to work with it. This is also the hall that we eat the traditional langar meal in.
The main Chefs work 24 hour shifts every other day. Although thousands of volunteers (like myself) come in every day, only a couple designated chefs do the actual cooking. As you can tell, all the cooking is done in massive, wood fired pots. They are filled with water very early in the morning (like 2 am) and take hours to boil.
The first two pictures show the mixed yellow and brown lentils used to make the daal dish. They are removed from their packaging and rinsed repeatedly to remove all dust. They are then boiled and combined with a combination of spices (such as tumeric), garlic, ginger, and onion. They dish turns out dark green in color which looks extremely unappealing :) but tastes great, I can assure you.
The next two pictures illustrate the chefs making the kheer. Honestly one of the best dishes I have ever had in my life. Water is boiled, rice is added and cooked, then combined with dried milk and sugar. They then add slices of coconut (so fresh it is literally cut from a real life coconut) and slivered almonds. It's like warm rice pudding.
The chefs also make plain rice everyday..so you can only imagine the quantities of rice that I eat on a daily basis. I feel very very ill. If the phrase "you are what you eat" was interpreted literally, I would most definitely be a singular grain of rice.
The first two pictures show the mixed yellow and brown lentils used to make the daal dish. They are removed from their packaging and rinsed repeatedly to remove all dust. They are then boiled and combined with a combination of spices (such as tumeric), garlic, ginger, and onion. They dish turns out dark green in color which looks extremely unappealing :) but tastes great, I can assure you.
The next two pictures illustrate the chefs making the kheer. Honestly one of the best dishes I have ever had in my life. Water is boiled, rice is added and cooked, then combined with dried milk and sugar. They then add slices of coconut (so fresh it is literally cut from a real life coconut) and slivered almonds. It's like warm rice pudding.
The chefs also make plain rice everyday..so you can only imagine the quantities of rice that I eat on a daily basis. I feel very very ill. If the phrase "you are what you eat" was interpreted literally, I would most definitely be a singular grain of rice.
We also practice seva outside of the kitchen. Along the circumference of the golden temple are people making various things for the temple. EVERYTHING USED IS MAN MADE, which is one of the most beautiful parts about the temple. The above two pictures show me working with a group of men making brooms. They make a batch of brooms everyday and each broom lasts approximately a month. Although the men and women do not have designated jobs, they tend to divide up in terms of gender anyways. I was super bad at making brooms. How surprising.
And then I found my home with the women. TG. In the above picture, we were cleaning metal bowls with the ash. The woman across from me was eyeing me down hard. Probably because I was equally as terrible at this. It's hard doing these jobs well when you're with women and men who have been rolling Roti's and peeling garlic since they were in the womb. But then again their is a certain beauty to learning from people who have been doing service in the Golden Temple for so long. It is the best way to understand and build relationships with new people. After a couple minutes, they started to love me ^^ (not pictured)