*Eeps! The following post was supposed to publish itself weeks ago, and it didn’t! Put it in your timeline of my life at around April 13. Sorry!*
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Escaped for almost a week to the edge of the Kathmandu valley. The hills in Nepal take every wonderful thing about the cities, scrub them clean of garbage and exhaust, and color them over with green and mist and quiet. After an hour listening to the birds and the baby goats and the distant voices, surrounded by building-tall bamboo as big around as my arms and trailing away at the tips into smooth, barbed-wire arcs, the least pagan among you would convert to the religion of April!
My friend Ilka and I wanted to see the mountains, who spent the first few days of our vacation as modestly dressed under their layers of clouds and fog as the Nepali women under their saris. So we did a rain dance on the roof of our guest house, waving scarves and singing African songs to clear the sky, and the resulting thunderstorm, (which started the next day around hour 7 of my favorite pastime in Nepal: Hiking Up a Very Large Hill) blew down trees and power lines, shook the city, flooded the streets, confused the chickens… and the next morning we woke up to orange sunrise and mountains in every direction.
The Maoists overwhelmingly took last week’s election. How can a place this beautiful be also so desperate?
For the last two weeks, every other day I’ve gone with a doctor to watch an old man die. I sit vigil with four of his sons and their wives and their children, as they talk about his cough and his chest pain in voices below his hearing. The words float, just river sounds to me, punctuated by the occasional splash of an English medical term; infection, ampicillin, injection. I watch the IV drip for two hours and remember a woman, when I was four years old, teaching me to walk like a ballerina along painted lines on the ground. Heel to toe. Drip… drip. And as the old man breathes, his ribs look so much like a tree trying to break out of the paper of his chest, away from his failing lungs, that his breath becomes to me the wind through leaves and branches, and I wonder what he could possibly think of me, a stranger in the corner, drinking tea and watching him die in another language. He and his children are Newari Hindus, and I think it’s difficult to fit my ambiguous age, gender, and ethnicity into their universe of rules and castes and ritual cleanliness, but they seem to appreciate that this way his death will write itself outside the walls of the apartment and they won’t carry the weight of it entirely alone… Because outside, the only things marking this apartment as different from all the rest are the fifteen pairs of shoes lined up in front of the door, from the largest (mine, and his son the farmer’s), to the tiny sandals of his youngest grandson.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: hair cut, kathmandu, nepal, plague, Shanti
It’s been a bit of a rough week for my immune system, which I probably should have expected, working in a very foreign clinic… but I bet I’m the only person you know who’s ever had a cold, head lice, and amoebic dysentery at the same time!
On the bright side, (much easier to see now that I feel healthy again) I think the diseases worked to cancel each other out – I spent the week drinking so much water and tea to rehydrate from the work of my little amoeba friends that the cold ran off in fear. And, since there’s a lab at the clinic, it took about five minutes for them to figure out exactly which bug illegaly resided in my intestines and to prescribe me (amazingly cheap!) medication. Evil entemobea army, your days are numbered. They are numbered 9, in fact. The head lice, which every kid at Shanti carries around, gave me life’s most perfect excuse for a haircut, so this morning I sauntered over to the local barber shop and asked them to shave it all off.
About 20 times. And then we played charades.
It’s remarkably difficult for a girl to ask for a head shave in Nepal, but man does the breeze feel good!
Filed under: Uncategorized
I woke up one morning into a whole life here, by surprise.
After breakfast during the week I walk half an hour west to Shanti Shewa Griha, a school/free clinic/rehabilitation center. As soon as I peek through the gate, five or six of the thirty or so little kids that live there yell ”Namaste, Didi!” (didi = ’sister’, the respectful, friendly way of addressing any woman). So we play, and draw pictures, and do a little physical therapy, and I spend most of my time with the four children who can’t speak, or walk, or feed themselves. Just hanging out. They’re teaching me to love!
I have the afternoons and evenings to myself, and would not have believed how easily and joyfully time passes without appointments, or deadlines, or four hundred people to see. I bought some colored pencils and a sketch pad at one of the tiny Nepali ‘book shops’- roadside stands of random school supplies that, as far as I can tell, do not actually sell books. Every afternoon around four we have a huge thunderstorm that floods the streets and shakes the guest house and makes everything smell bright and clean and new. When I start to feel restless I go for long, destinationless walks, just to smile at the holy village cows and jump over puddles; if it’s a Saturday, I take fresh Tibetan bread with me. One of the local women sells it at the edge of the temple for five rupees a piece… she sits there for a few hours each morning guarding towers of fist-sized, round, flat loaves, wrapped in cloth to keep them warm, jammed in boxes to keep them from tipping over. My clothes are transforming into layers of bright scarves and blankets, and the dog at my favorite bakery just had six puppies, so I sit snuggled into myself in the evenings with a piece of chocolate cake and watch them roll over each other and jump on their mother in a silly, happy, squirmy mess of fur and tails. Bodhinath is small enough that a few people recognize me now, and let me practice my fifteen Nepali words on them, and ask me if I’m going to marry a nice local boy and settle down. When we feel sociable, my neighbors at the guest house come on adventures with me, or just sit on the porch to watch the rain and talk, but mostly I enjoy the peace of my own thoughts, and books, and pen. (And the company of small bear too, of course!)
I am falling in love with Nepal.
