It seems that I am heading into the mountains of Humla on Thursday, November 30th. Humla is the most remote region in Nepal, a place where there is no electricity or even a road, where all travel is by foot, and where it is very, very cold this time of year. I am going to start the very gradual process of discovering where these trafficked children come from and if we can’t find some of their parents in the mountains. It seems I will be out of contact for up to three weeks – I’m trying to make it back by about Dec. 19th or something, and it seems that that should be doable.
I say “it seems” because even though I actually have my plane ticket for Thursday and I’ve arranged my whole trip (at least I have arranged to get to the region, then let’s see), I have completely stopped using the word “sure” here in Nepal unless it falls between “drinking tap water” and “parasitic worms.” Which is why, if I may say so, it was an almost unreasonably thrilling moment last Thursday to open the Washington Post website and see a photo of the President of the United States gingerly placing his arm around an enormous turkey. Thanksgiving had arrived – right on schedule.
Thanksgiving is far and away my favorite holiday – I love all the hoopla surrounding the turkey bird itself almost as much as I love tearing its cooked flesh off its bones with my bare teeth. Apparently this particular bird featured in the photo was raised specifically for this exact moment with the President, selected for its docile nature. I can say with authority after living in Kathmandu for a month now that the President should thank his lucky stars we don’t eat monkey for Thanksgiving – those things will rip your beating heart from your chest and hold it up high while letting out one of those terrifying monkey screams. Let’s see him put is arm around one of those bastards. That’s front page material – the President pardoning a wild monkey only to have it claw at his eyes before the Secret Service can it down in a hail of gunfire.
We celebrated Thanksgiving here, kind of. There are a couple of volunteers here working with the Umbrella Foundation (our partners and caretakers of a couple hundred children), so we went out to mark the occasion at the Northfield Café in Thamel, the backpacker/trekker/tourist area of town, with a Thanksgiving buffet which rocked except that I’m not sure the chef didn’t interpret “sweet potato” a bit too literally (imagine a cook squinting in concentration at a potato and murmuring “Sweet potato?”) and the pumpkin pie was green, as is the nature of pumpkins in this country, which was a bit unusual – then again, it could have been made of chunky dandruff and poison, I was so hungry I could have sucked the whole fucking pie through a straw.
Thanksgiving wasn’t just a taste of home – it was also a sure thing. It was definitely going to happen because it is always the fourth Thursday in November, and on that day you’ll always be able to turn on the TV to see the President first making some serious policy speech about Palestine or something in the Rose Garden one minute, leave to polite applause, and a few minutes later burst back outside grappling live fowl and screeching something about a Presidential pardon.
Point is, sure things can be hard to come by.
Admittedly, in this life there can be something wonderful about waking up every day and not really having any idea what is going to happen that day, except that at around 8 a.m. you’re going to be eating daal bhat with forty kids who will point and laugh at you because the vegetables are “little little spicy” which, in the vernacular, means you’d do well to have a fire hose already pointed at your mouth.
It is hard to imagine too many other places that can teach you patience like Nepal. I will refrain from using actual examples because of the work-related nature of what I’m talking about (it’s not hookers or anything), but for the sake of argument, let’s just say, for instance, that I asked somebody to buy me some bananas from the small shop next door. In fact, let’s say that I asked them to buy me bananas a week ago – and I then reminded them hourly over the next few days. Got it? Ok – so I ask for about the billionth time, right? Most likely the person will respond with something to the effect of: “It will definitely happen today – I swear to you on the life of my son, your bananas will be bought today, in the next hour for sure. Erase all doubt from your mind. In fact, it is actually done already, even as we speak it is being concluded, as sure as the sun rose in the east this morning those bananas have been purchased. They belong to you now, the shopkeeper has no rightful claim to them any longer – you can open your mouth now in preparation for consuming a banana, which is now here, right now, it’s in my hand and on its way to your mouth so I hope that you are ready to enjoy this fine banana. Your teeth may now begin to close, the banana is here. How does it taste? Is it very fine?”
What that person really means is: “Which bananas?”
Mostly you just have to be patient. I don’t know if that is the right word, but I think it is pretty much covers everything. Even my toaster, for pete’s sake – I could toast bread faster by putting it inside a pair of mittens. And that’s brand new! And for sure when speaking with the kids you have to be patient. And, let’s face it, with the adults. I blame myself – they are speaking my language and trying to make themselves understood. If I was living in America and some dude speaking all kaka kookoo got mad when I didn’t understand him, he’d get a taste of my boot. That kind of irritation never happens here; they are great, the Nepalis. But sweet criminy if I don’t sometimes need something repeated six or seven times, even asking them to break the sentence down word by word, and even then, when you put it back together, it just don’t make sense, even with their faces scrunched up in utter earnest, two inches from your face, as they yell-nunciate an assortment of nouns and adjectives – it sounds like word jazz.
The great thing about learning patience, or rather having patience forced on you like dog in heat, is that when something actually does happen, it catches you completely off-guard. It’s rare, to be sure, but it happens. Like Monday.
First of all, as usual, a million and one things did NOT happen Monday. For example, I tried for the fiftieth time to get a key made to my front door – a normal key – and every key maker that I could find looked at it like I’d handed him a Rubik’s Cube and clicked a stopwatch. I was told to come back in two weeks, as if by then they would have cracked the mystery of the pointy metal.
But to balance that out, I found safety pins after searching for – no lie – six days. In the narrow winding streets of Kathmandu, built too small for automobiles, there is a place called Ason Bazaar, a typical scene in old Kathmandu where five of these tiny streets meet in a head-on collision, producing a pile of rickshaws, pedestrians and street vendors covering almost every square inch with their vegetables and incense and sacks of rice with a gorgeous and completely ignored pagoda right in the middle of it all. It was in this place that I almost tripped over a man selling the only safety pins I’ve seen in this country. They were so beautiful. He named a price, I cut it by two thirds, we settled on half his price, and I practically sprinted home with happiness during which time I completely forgot why in Christ’s name I needed safety pins in the first place, so I have a drawer full now if anybody needs some.
And! Just to tip the balance dramatically into the positive category yesterday, I received a very special key. This key opens one padlock that opens this absolutely gorgeous hand-carved door of Buddhist symbols, a door that opens… believe it or not…into our new orphanage.
Having learned never to count on anything as certain until it was actually in my hand, it was quite a thing to see that key in my hand. Farid, my friend and colleague from Godawari who arrived a little more than a week ago today and who is my partner in this whole endeavor, did the honors of opening the door. I’d been inside before, but now it was ours, first three months paid in advance. We’d even already bought mattresses, cushions, kitchen equipment, pillows, etc., (all from your donations!) that were over at a nearby house (we are part of the Umbrella Foundation, which already has four houses within minutes of each other, and the stuff was in one of their houses). The boys, there are over two hundred kids, carried all the stuff over, dumping it in the house and we all ran around the place together, three floors and two rooftop terraces, yelling happily. (Some of these kids will likely be in our house.) It was, like I said, quite a thing.
If you’ve seen the NGN newsletter, you’ve seen a photo of the house already. And we have a name for the house. It is in the tradition of the Umbrella Foundation (with whom I’ve been working closely because they are awesome in ways that are difficult to fit in here without minimizing the font) to name their houses after mountains in Nepal – thus they already have Sagarmatha (the local name for Everest), Annapurna, Gauri Shankar, Machhapuchhari, and Langtang. The name of our house will be Dhaulagiri (pronounced Dola Giri), which is the seventh highest mountain on the planet and which is totally awesome even though it means that my proposed name was rejected (“The Who” House was my suggestion…fuckin’ love “The Who”).
Farid will be managing the house and will be there when kids start moving in. Here’s how it will work: we are hoping to be able to rescue certain trafficked children from a bad guy soon – in fact, we are already trying. When these kids are rescued, some will come into our new house, and others will be given homes in the other wonderful orphanages, three of which are literally next door. We will take into our home some of the children who have been rescued recently but who are in the other Umbrella houses. For example, the six children we rescued that I’ve talked about a number of times – they’ll be in our house. Umbrella was able to take them because they knew we would be opening a new home next door to where we could move them to avoid overcrowding.
Because Nepal is a difficult place, we are having difficulty rescuing certain other trafficked children despite police and government support (as usual, it’s difficult to share the details because of the nature of the work), which is almost too frustrating to bear. On the other hand, we came to Nepal precisely because it is hard, not because it is easy, and this is life for children in this country.
But even in all that, isn’t it pretty cool that we’re opening a house? Farid and I were actually measuring the place for carpets today and working out which rooms which kids would sleep in. My own apartment is about 100 yards (meters) away. We’re going to be taking care of children who have nobody else to take care of them.
It kills me a bit that I won’t be here for a lot of that, but then again I was supposed to have left a couple of weeks ago for Humla, and things work this way for a reason and in this case I’ve been here to help open the house. And now I can leave it in Farid’s capable hands, and when I come back we’ll have kids in that house. Kids! Real ones! Who we will be responsible for looking out for and who will need sponsors so that they can eat real food, them being kids and whatnot.
So just an idea – if you’re totally dreading Christmas shopping for people who already have, like, tons of shit, I’m going to go ahead and recommend telling that person that you’re giving a hundred bucks to feed a child in Nepal. I guarantee that person will be thrilled about it. Or at least pretend to be thrilled about it, because really, what can they say? It’s not like they’re going to be all pissed, and they sure as hell can’t return it. (Though that would be something to see, somebody coming to Nepal and grabbing rice off an orphan’s plate and stomping off. Would kind of be worth it, actually.)
Anyway, I’m just talkin’ here.
Hope y’all have a great December, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks or whatever – hard to say, since it depends on the terrain and weather and flights and stuff. Either way, I’ll be back before you know it. Literally. In the meantime, I’m going to include a few photos here if I can find any – I haven’t taken a picture in a long time.
Some photos:
You remember I mentioned the whole Peace in Nepal thing? This headline is classic. Check out the radical proposition made by the draft peace treaty – you wonder how long it took the table of wise men responsible for peace in Nepal to come up with this particular idea:
Here’s another whole thing going on here – we (NGN) are working with the Umbrella Foundation on this project in this rural area north of the Kathmandu Valley, rejuvenating a school out there and a ton of other stuff. The future of Nepal is in the villages, not Kathmandu, after all, especially for these children trafficked from the mountains. Anyway, this was on a trip out to the village (a hell of a journey). I’m on the right, and on the left side with the long grey hair is Jacky Buk, the French country director of Umbrella, who I live next to and with whom I spend most of my time and who is one of the more amazing guys I know.
There’s a lot of stuff I haven’t mentioned in the blog about what we’re doing, but just to note here briefly, we discovered that the brother of one of our kids in Godawari, Navaraj, who was also trafficked, is actually living in a nearby village, so we took Navaraj to see him and we’re keeping them in close touch. That’s Navaraj on the left and his brother Deeray on the right. It was kind of awesome, that reunification.
Dhaulagiri! Me and Farid standing outside our new home. Named Dhaulagiri. (One month’s rent: about $180. We’ve been able to pay the first three months, again from your donations. Go You!)
Ok, I have to share this – when we rescued those kids we were looking for, they were very, very sick. This was after I got them home from a scary couple of nights in the hospital. I mentioned in an earlier entry with photos that there are pictures that I can look at and get a lump in my throat knowing what was happening just days earlier to these kids. These pictures help illustrate a little bit why I feel so grateful to be here in Nepal living next door to four orphanages with wonderful kids – all the kids took care of our little kids:
The older kids (12-15 years old) took care of the kids around the clock.
The younger kids made get well cards for Egaraj and Dharma when they got out of the hospital.
I love this picture because it was Dharma’s first day of studying for school on his third day home from the hospital – he’s on the left, lying down, and a girl is rubbing his head.
That last photo is a bad one, I know, but I have to tell you that this one, and the preceding two, will forever remind me of those days when impoverished children with no parents of their own took care of two new children who were even worse off than them. In all the other horrible stuff going on around here, those moments are like sunshine and remind you that there is so much good in this world that the bad doesn’t stand a chance, I swear to God. You just have to offer it a chance.
In addition to Dharma and Egaraj, I’m just going to include three more pictures of some of the charter members of the new orphanage – the children who disappeared who were the inspiration for the whole thing to begin with.
Anga Debi:
Himal:
Bijay:
All of whom will need sponsors eventually. You know, to eat and buy them some warm clothes and stuff. I’m just sayin’.
Ok amigos, talk to y’all when I’m back from the mountains. If it’s too cold I think I might just bag it, so I’ll probably be back in a few days. Gotta look out for number 1, know what I’m saying?
