Nepal

Keith and I have a dear, dear friend who has spent the last year in Nepal.

 

He was one of our housemates in PA, the best man at our wedding, Keith's college roommate, the kid who played Gargoyles with Keith in his back yard when they were 11 years old.

Now he's a nurse practitioner with people's lives in his hands.

They are very capable hands.

So we've come to visit him in Nepal. Vibrant Nepal.

The smells are so smelly! The tastes are so tasty! The colors are so, so very colorful after monochromatic Palestine.

In Palestine I grew accustomed to seeing great distances over short shrubs and the occasional olive tree.  In Nepal, everything is tall, and close, and hovering. 

It would take a very holy person to block out the senses in this highly sensual country. 

So it makes sense that the Buddha was born here. In Lumbini, where we met Josh.

He (Josh, not the Buddha) took us around the park that houses the birthplace of the Buddha.

Like the Church of the Annunciation, with the world's portraits of Mary, here several countries get to show off their unique flair with a temple to the Buddha.

We made our way from site to site on bicycles.

Long ago, there was a kingdom along the Himalayas that was ruled by King Suddhodana and Queen Maya.

When Queen Maya was pregnant, she asked if she could travel to the town of her youth to give birth. 

On the way, she saw a beautiful blossoming tree. She went to touch the tree, and her son, Siddhartha, the prince, was born.

It was prophesied that the prince would either become a great king, or the Buddha. His father wanted him to become a great king, so he pampered his son, and never let him leave the palace. He protected him from sadness and death. 

My favorite story about the Buddha is when he was a young man, and ventured beyond the palace walls. There he saw suffering for the first time. 

He began to feel sad, and turned for the palace. On the way he saw a monk. He asked the monk what he was doing, and the monk said, "I am seeking a way of salvation". 

Instead of going home, Siddhartha decided to seek an end of sorrow, suffering, and pain. 

There's no escaping suffering. That's what I thought when I left the oppression of occupation that was so apparent in Palestine and while the oppression of poverty hit me like the humidity right off the plane in Nepal.

I do not mean to make these places sound horrible or exotic. I process through writing. But please remember that nothing I write could sum up a country or a people or a person.

Taking a taxi from Lumbini to Tansen, where Josh has been living, I began to understand the road hierarchy. Like Britain and Thailand, people drive on the left side of the road. But the line in the middle seems to mean very little. A line of cars may span the entire road, moving the same direction, towards a line of cars on the other side. And before everyone collides, it is all worked out by the hierarchy of the road. 

The fastest cars go the furthest to the other side of the road. Slower cars and motorbikes come next. Then buses, then bicycles, then walking pedestrians. 

When you get further from cities, the hierarchy expands, to include lawn mowers pulling carts, oxen pulling carts, and herders with their goats or water buffalo. 

Then there are the things that wander into the road: stray dogs, baby goats, hens and their brood, etc.  

I'm used to living by rules. Rather than thinking, I go when the light turns green and stop when it turns red. I stay in the lines. I go the speed limit. When you see it done another way, you realize that it is another way we are an individualists society, where a place like Nepal is communal. People work together to get places. They depend on other drivers to see them and anticipate their needs. Following rules like we follow in the States makes driver interaction less necessary, and we only tend to notice others when we feel we are in competition with them, rather than collaboration. 

Floor Hockey with Josh's Colleagues

Post Floor Hockey

The ride to Tansen was full of new sites. New clothing. New hair styles. Cranes as tall as I am, and snakes twice as long. 

Like Israel and Palestine, Nepal (or any country) seems to be working on a two state solution: Civilization and the wild. The people, like Israel, have access to advanced technologies. They build walls and barriers. They use poisons and constantly push back the boundaries. And, like Palestine, the wild always pushes back, not willing to give up the land it once possessed.

Josh lives above the clouds.

You look down from his home into a valley. You look up from his home towards tall mountain peeks. 

It is monsoon season in Nepal, and we did see a few storms coming in.

 

Normally in July, it can rain for a week at a time.

 

This has been a very dry season. As soon as the rains came, the dark cloud above you would begin to squint, and you could see the sun and blue skies on the other side.

A common friend came to visit Josh two months ago, and after touring Josh's home, he said, "So it's like you live at a camp." And by our experiences, it seems that way. 

Josh's main living area is down a flight of stairs. It has a large common area and two bedrooms. The house is plainly decorated, mostly because that is Josh's style. 

Down some more stairs is the shower room, the toilet, and the kitchen.

In between is a beautiful garden where Josh planted marigolds and potatoes.

The Nepali government limits electricity to save energy. There are many times during the day that the power will go off. And during monsoon season, storms may take the power away from a day or more. 

We went out to dinner one night, and the power was off during our dark walk home. Life did not turn off with the power. The streets were still very much awake. As we walked along, our eyes were drawn to little pockets of light - a crowd gathered around a religious man, a group of women sitting together on a porch, vegetable vendors selling squash and peppers under the inspection of a buyer's cell phone light. Children ran around dark corners, and lightning silhouetted the distant mountain tops. You could see that those on the other mountain had electricity. Their homes dotted the dark shadowy mountain like the starts dotted the night sky above. 

One day we hiked from Tansen to the next town over. A long brown road snaked along the green mountain.
 

Nepal is known for trekking, and it is easy to see why. Even this small hike alongside many people on their daily commute was filled with incredible views.

 

Arriving at the town, Josh brought us to a little tea shop. A woman greeted us with the Namaste and pranamasana. 

Namaste means, "I bow to the divine in you". It can't imagine a better practice. 

The woman stood up from beside her cook fire and brushed off the table at the entrance of her shop. She brought us a serving of potato cakes and Nepali tea. 

The shop is directly along the road, with no wall in front. On the other side of the road, directly across from our table, there was a gap in the buildings, allowing a view of the mountains. 

It is easy to marvel at the height of what you see, but what really awed me was the depth. While from our vantage point the mountains before us seemed incredibly high, f you walk to the other side of the road, you will see that you yourself are already quite high.

 

The drop on the other side of the road was accentuated by a family of starlings which were swooping and diving below the street level. 

On our hike back, we saw the rain coming in like a white hand reaching over the mountain. We were at once surrounded by bright blue skies and deep grey clouds. 

We met up with a man who spoke with Josh for a while in Nepali. It is strange to see someone you have known for so long in your shared world do things that they do in another world - like speak Nepali, or practice medicine. 

The rain picked up, so we sat on someone's porch, waiting for the worst of it to pass. It is hard to talk when it rains so hard, but there is something wonderful about giving the rain your undivided attention. 

As the rain subsided, a family taking shelter alongside us invited us to join them, and when the rain picked up again, we were each hurried under their umbrellas. 

It is often the case when I travel that I do not realize what an oddity I am until I get home. I am very aware that I am different in language, culture, etc., but it isn't until I get home and see pictures of myself with others that I realize how mutantly tall I am. On this walk in the rain, I was reminded. 

All three of us bowed, doubling in half, to fit under their umbrellas. The woman holding my umbrella, the matriarch of the group, couldn't stop laughing as my head bounced back and forth between the pole of her umbrella and its top. Keith's back bumped up against the umbrella of the man sheltering him, creating a drainage point for all the rain water. And the umbrella Josh was housed under kept snapping shut on his head. 

The experience was new and exciting and rich! Thank you Josh. See you again in September.