6:35 AM. The first rays of early morning sunlight are just emerging from behind the mountains. We finish our morning tea and head up the road, past the old Buddhist monastery, towards the work site for our pre-breakfast work session.

It is the beginning of our second week on the annual Round Square International Service Project in Ladakh. Our home for the past week has been a riverbank in the village of Chemdey, a tiny community of no more than sixty families, nestled in a glacial valley to the north of the Indus River. It is one of many such communities that make up Ladakh, a sparsely populated region of India that sits just south of Tibet and west of Pakistan in the Indian state of Kashmir. Although the region is twice the size of Switzerland and is located in the most densely populated country in the world, it has a population of less than 120,000 and only two people per square kilometer.

8:20 AM. The sun is now out in full force as we pass mud bricks in our firemen's line up the hill to be laid in place by the local builders. To my left is Jonas, a nineteen-year-old German, and to my right, Ginny, a seventeen-year-old Brit. Above us a group of students with shovels fills in the foundation while others layer mud onto the structure in preparation for the next layer of mud bricks.

There were fifty-two students and leaders on the trip from fourteen Round Square schools in eight different countries. Julia Conway and I were the delegates from Deerfield Academy. The project began in the heat and humidity of the Indian monsoon, as we all convened in New Delhi before fly- ing, as a group, to Leh, the capital and most important city in Ladakh. There we spent several days acclimating to the altitude (13,000 ft.) and its lack of oxygen before heading off to Chemdey where we would be living for the duration of the project.

11:30 PM. "Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes." Seven boys training to be monks sing in unison and copy us as Brendan, a seventeen-year-old Kiwi, and I bend down to touch our toes for the nineteenth time in a row. The two of us have been in this third grade class of Ladakhi boys for over an hour now, playing games, reading books, and helping them with their English pronunciation.

We put most of our time and energy into building the village a community center, but there were also several smaller projects. We helped to run a three-day health camp where several doctors were brought in from Leh and treated over four-hundred villagers. We also spent time in the local schools teaching and playing with the village children. And we had time to visit the homes of the villagers, our chance to become more closely acquainted with a single Ladakhi family.

3:00 PM. As the third and final work session begins, my group heads past the work site where everyone else is sawing willows to be used for the roof and over to the health camp. We relieve the group that has been working since noon and split up into pairs. Then we disperse, some to the dispensary to help hand out necessary medicines, some to the "waiting room," and others to check in the villagers who want treatment. The locals have come not just from Chemdey but from surrounding towns; they suffer from a wide range of aches and ailments.

After two weeks in the village, the third leg of the trip began as we loaded up our bags and gear onto forty-two donkeys and embarked on a five-day-long trek through the Stok Mountains, just north of the Himalayas. We crossed two mountain passes atl6,000 feet and hiked about sixty kilometers.

5:30 PM. The three of us wait awkwardly as the Ladakhi woman lays out rugs for us to sit on, places three cups of hot butter tea on foot-high tables and indicates that we should sit on. Nishant, a fifteen-year-old Indian boy, removes his shoes and sits down, and Brendan and I follow his lead. Then Nawang, our host and the head of this family, comes into the room and joins us. As we sip our salty tea, he tells us about the village, his family, Buddhism, and the ways that Ladakh has changed since he was a boy.

After the trek ended we drove the short distance back to Leh where we spent the next few days shopping for souvenirs and white-water rafting on the Indus River. Then we hopped on a flight back to Delhi for several days of sightseeing in mainland India. We visited Agra, home to the famous Taj Mahal. and Jaipur, christened "the red city" for its beautiful old center of red-brick buildings. And finally, we drove six hours through monsoon rains back to Delhi for our departures.