Namaste, all!

Namaste, all!

Goodness, where to begin? It has been nearly 8 months since I’ve arrived here in Nepal, and yet I find myself still amazed that this magical place happens to be my new home. So what is new? Everything and nothing I suppose – life in village seems both utterly quiet and peaceful, and yet always full of things to do, people to meet and of course hillsides to scale. My daily routines have coalesced such that I find myself often waking up before the sunrise to run up the hill that I live on (Nepali’s are amazed at my lack of fear of both venturing out alone into the woods, and embarking on a journey before first light!) and making my way back home just as my host mother is finishing up morning puja (worship – which involves lighting incense and oil lamps, ringing bells, saying prayers and generally blessing up the homestead) during which time I am able to jump under our tap for a quick “shower” (chilly these days! The winter is certainly upon us – hats and socks and shawls abound!) before drinking morning chiya (tea – fresh water buffalo milk style) and then heading out to my garden to water (have managed to get my hands on some ‘Ameriki saag” seeds – spinach, kale, chard, arugula, as well as Romanesco and I have even started some asparagus starts from seed provided by Peace Corps – so cool!) before having dhal bhaat around 10:30 AM. Depending on the day, I might spend it around the homefront, (my garden projects are myriad – there is always more work to be done! Or washing clothes, or perhaps helping with some of the corn or millet processing around the house).

Most days however, I head into the center of Durlung (my village) to work with my best friend – Kopila didi - on a number of projects we have been starting up…two days ago we inoculated a bunch of shitake logs from a tree we downed in her woods. It is awesome to have found someone in village who is totally gung-ho about working with me, and whose work ethic far surpasses my own. She is most definitely my best friend here, when I am with her and her husband, I truly feel at home and able to speak my mind (no small feat in village, or in Nepali language!) despite the cultural chasm that we have to bridge in order to understand each other. I mentioned in my last post the prospect of trying to start a community seed bank in town, due to the lack of access to seed up on the hill. However, after meeting with an NGO (LIBIRD – really cool organization that has helped facilitate the starting of multiple community seed banks here) in Pokhara a few weeks back and hearing about their trials and tribulations in getting these sorts of projects together (5 to 7 year timeline for successful and sustainable seed banks!) I have realized that the scope of that project may be too big for the likes of my Peace Corps service. However! After speaking with Kopila, and the women’s group for which she is the secretary, a new, more scale-able project has bubbled up – a community nursery! We are dreaming up ways to make this feasible on her land, the steps of which may include building a few plastic tunnels (in order to be able to grow seedlings through the rainy season and not have them drown from the downpours!), figuring out how to irrigate said tunnels (the tap by her house often runs dry during the daytime of the non-rainy season – so setting up some kind of gravity fed drip system that could get recharged when the tap is flowing will be indispensable) and generally developing some sort of seasonal calendar for seedling production, as well as a ‘work-for-seedling’ economic model in which women from the community could donate time in the nursery and receive starts in return (a way to cut out the money factor all together – something in decidedly short supply in village in general). Yes! Lots of steps to be taken to get this project underway, including involving my district agriculture service center (who provides the plastic for the tunnels at subsidized rates) and also possibly writing a Peace Corps grant to get some funding for all of the other overheads this project would entail. We’ll see, for now this project is still in the conceptual phase, though this visioning stage is very important and lays the groundwork for future manifestation magic!

In the more immediate future I am soon to start making improved cookstoves in village – a process involving mixing dirt and manure and rice chaff to make bricks, and then layering the dried bricks (of which some have holes for chimneys) and creating a stove that will shunt all the smoke from the fire outside the house. I have also started a small youth group that now meets every Friday at the local government school. Our first project – making personal identity mandalas. I was stunned when my students didn’t know what a mandala was – despite the fact that Nepal may be the motherland of them! For our second meeting I brought in a bunch of beautiful prints of intricately painted Buddha mandalas I had bought, and upon unveiling them some of my students instinctively touched their foreheads and chests in observance with their religious practice (like how a Christian would cross themselves upon passing a cathedral, for example). Needless to say, I was touched. Having the students first start out by just drawing a mandala of their own design, we then moved onto making mandalas about ourselves – our families, dreams, what we love in life, and also what we want to improve upon. Fostering the sparks of creative self expression and also ever so gently pushing these (mostly) girls to conceptualize their place in the world and the power they hold in their lives proves to be nourishing (and fun!) work. (Whether or not any of that was actually imparted in my little lesson is unclear, but perhaps identifying these underlying values is only important for me as the teacher, after all ;) Anyhow, it has been really sweet to begin to get together a group of youth with whom I hope we can start some larger community based service projects in the future.

I go back and forth between feeling fully integrated and part of my village and community here and also feeling totally other and quite often lonely. The dearth of meaningful intellectual and spiritual connection in town is marked to me – not only because I don’t have the capacity to talk about such concepts with clarity in Nepali (yet?) but also because I am still not sure exactly how a Nepali brain works, or how their perspective of their existence is even structured. Learning more and more about how truly different our outlooks are on life is humbling and frustrating and also a call to strive harder to find those common grounds on which we can connect. I have also been continually battling the dark energy around the caste system. The more I work with my friend Kopila (from the untouchable caste) the more I realize the struggles that people from this caste face in their day to day. The fact that these systematic, oppressive and socially enforced structures are still alive and well here is baffling to me. And yet, we can see the seeds of change upon us! On all fronts! Young people are ever more tuned into their electronic worlds (facebook is a household word here! 3G is accessible and so cruising the newsfeed is just as much a part of daily life here as it is in the Bay Area, go figure!) such that the youth are imminently able to see the structuring of other societies and cultures from the media at their fingertips. As a result, their adherence to the caste rules is falling away slowly. However, along with it, lots of knowledge and long held practices like processing rice, weaving corn husk mats – all of that incredible knowledge that has been passed down for millennia from great grandmothers past to present is also necessarily lost. It is certainly remarkable, the mash up of global and local culture in which we now are able to choose how and what to spend our time doing. I am ever in awe of human’s ability to hold these seemingly disparate parts of our world in concert.

In other news, I have recently been lucky to receive a very special visitor at my site – my best friend (and now partner!) of years – Nir. Having him at my site for 2 weeks was an amazing treat – we took lots of time in the garden together – him imparting his vast knowledge about soil microbiology and compost production to me, while I taught him the beginnings of Nepali – all of the most quintessential phrases for life in the hills. Having someone from my own culture to witness both the hard and the beautiful of my day to day with was incredibly validating and sweet. We even learned a few Nepali duets on guitar and voice, which were heartily received by the people on the homefront. I am still baffled by how such a love story is unfolding in the midst of this travel novel already underway, but am also super stoked to be in the throws of such a lovely, mutually symbiotic relationship yet again. Of course, there is plenty more to muse upon when it comes to matters of the heart, but for now I will leave you with that. Nir is still in Nepal, and we will be meeting up again come Christmas/New Years. Yow.

Well, dear friends, I hope all of the sailing on your seas has been smooth, and the summiting of whatever mountains you have been climbing, rewarding. I miss you all dearly and would love to hear any words you have from your life back in the US.

As ever,

Aja