Namate y'all!

Namaste all!

Greetings from the East! It has been approximately 4 months since I departed California and found my way to the lovely and landlocked country of Nepal. About one month ago I arrived to my Peace Corps permanent site, also known as my new home for the next 2 years. Needless to say, the months preceding this move were spent in the suburbs of Kathmandu, studying language, learning technical agricultural skills, bonding with other volunteers, and slowly beginning to piece together a picture of life in Nepal and my humble place within it. I now find myself settled in the little town of Durlung, in the district of Parbat, south of the Annapurnas, among the misty hillsides carved into terraces, now drenched with monsoon rains and all planted with rice. I am approximately a mile high (elevation wise, but spirits are high as well!) and from my house, on an un-foggy day, the sparkling Himalayas loom in the not-so-far distance. Indeed, I often find myself washing dishes or working in the little vegetable garden adjacent to my house, looking up and pinching myself that this is actually where I live...

Things in village are grand, my host family has opened their home and arms to me with typical Nepali hospitality, and I find my forays out into the community just as welcoming. My language is such that I can explain my way through the agricultural systems in the US as compared to Nepal, or explain to villagers why it is that a (now almost old maid) 26 year old woman such as myself has not yet settled into the married life. It is all a great part of the process of community integration which, as Peace Corps has dually noted during training - is an indispensable aspect of our lives here - indeed, without it, the facilitation of future projects is utterly unlikely. Because of this, my days in village have been spent out and about, visiting the various clusters of houses nestled in the hills, drinking tea with neighbors, planting staple crops in the fields during one of many melas (literally translated festival, but functionally a work party in which rice or millet is planted by a group of family members and friends), learning to cook proper dhal bhaat from my host father (I never thought I could eat so much rice in my life, nor that the combination of masala and turmeric in the dhal could be so specific!) interviewing various farmers in the community about what grows and when, fumbling my way through explanations about the degrees of development in my country and why I am utterly contented to live in the hills, drink fresh water buffalo milk every morning, hand wash my clothes, wake up with the sun and generally relinquish all the modern "conveniences" that so many people look to as a measure of success and luxury in this wild and wacky world in which we find ourselves.

Yes, it is quite a lot to be here, each day a new adventure, a new acquaintance made and a new seed of future work to be done sown. Projects are slowly taking shape in my mind, school groups to start, community gardens to instigate, coffee nurseries to plant in abandoned terraces, mushroom cultivation trainings to give, saplings to be grafted, the whole lot. Yes, the prospect of two years time still seems like a long haul and yet, I am beginning to sink myself into the sense that this time is a precious gift, a wonderful chance to (literally and metaphorically) root down and put my hands to the work. All in good time, I suppose...hailing the Peace Corps proverb of "process as product" I am allowing myself the luxury in this beginning stage of my service to observe and take the time to just experience what it means to live the Nepali life, what it means to be a woman here, to live in the foothills of the Himalayas, both to adapt to the culture and community around me, while also maintaining my own sense of identity and cultural integrity. It is truly a blessing, and I am dwelling in this notion daily.

While life in Nepal is utterly far out, (indeed, I am reminded by friends every time I am surprised by some new aspect of life here that "Nepal Jastai Ho" - such is Nepal) I do think often of all my friends and family far away. I realized upon sending out a few email updates over the last months how much more fun it is to be connected than it is to be distant (however geographically far away we may really be...) and so have decided to begin cataloguing my group emails into what amounts to a sort of blog, a virtual account of some of my musings, and a few pictures to go along with them. I have retroactively posted a few emails from my time in Pre-Service Training, so if you are interested, they are now read-able for all. I will continue to send out group emails, so if you would like me to add your name to my list-serv, please let me know. Either way, I will post the emails to the blog and thereby you may peruse them (or not) at your leisure. Please note, it is a "password protected" blog, so while I encourage you to share it with other friends or interested parties, I do not intend for it to be a fully, world wide and webularly readable document...

ajalene.wixsite.com/nepal

password: namaste

Also, my mailing address has changed since I last wrote. Should you feel inspired to send some old-school snail mail my way, I can henceforth be found at:

Aja Mathews

c/o Peace Corps Volunteer

PO Box 89

Pokhara, Kaski, Nepal

A quick note about the mail system here that I have learned since arriving and which may explain why, if you previously tried to reach me via paper mail, I may not have received your well-crafted words (apologies all around): letters alone do not make it here! Thin paper documents enclosed in envelopes seem to get lost in the intercontinental journey, but packages with a little more bulk - anything like a padded envelope to a real 3 dimensional box - do seem to make it here fairly reliably (and I swear this is not just a shameless plea for bars of dark chocolate...;)

So, before this email becomes way too long winded, I'll wrap things up for now. I sincerely hope that all is well in y(our) world, and that the work and play your find yourself doing is fulfilling and brings peace to your heart. As ever, I am always curious to hear about the happenings from afar, so don't hesitate to drop a line...internet can be scarce, but with patience connecting up is imminently possible!

With much love and metta,

Aja/Jaya (my new Nepali name!)