Encouraged by my dear friend Kuni, who tastefully requested that I write shorter blogs so he can read them before bed (I think he actually meant retirement), and inspired by my newest intriguing friend Zane, who managed to post brief but witty blogs while walking the entire Pacific Crest Trail in less than 5 months, I shall keep this blog short and concise.
I’m off to a great start.
The following are a list of things in my Bhutan-life I would like to draw your attention to.
EATING ROCKS
Rocks in my rice. Curse my spoiled and pampered food existence prior to moving here: who picked all the rocks out of my imported rice in Canada? I want to know, because this is a noble job. There is nothing more frightening than enjoying a bowl full of tasty rice, chomping away, when all of a sudden your eyes are vibrating because your teeth are grinding on what feels like something that should never be chewed, ever. Trying to discreetly find a small rock in a mouthful of chewed up food is not possible either.
NUDGING COWS WITH CARS
Charly does this.
I have never actually met anyone else who does. It plays out exactly as it sounds, with Charly inching forward slowly to nudge the stubborn bulls, cows and even calves that don’t like moving off the road for anyone or anything. Out of all the methods I have tried or seen used (yelling, honking, waving hands out the window), cow nudging is by far the most effective.
TOURISTS- THE ICKY SIDE
To the random tourists who snap photos of my students without asking, as if you were observing exotic life in an aquarium, I wish you were aware that my students “want their pictures back”.
And to the wife of a doctor who reached across a group of yearlong volunteers to bring the plate of Swiss cheese and apples closer to her because “we had no idea how long it had been since she had eaten these things”... A weaker person than I might have slapped you. Um… Two weeks? That’s about how long your tour is here, right?
TOURISTS- THE AMAZING SIDE
To the Alaskans who brought Carson and I out for beers, enthusiastically encouraged us to keep traveling, teaching and loving each other, and even offered their hotel shower to me when I was living without running water- you were my first and most positive experience with other foreigners in Bhutan.
To the group of Canadian ex- ambassadors and doctors who fed me, took a genuine interest in my experience here, loaded me up with school supplies and even ran out to their car to get me their newest Macleans and Walrus magazines in an effort to keep me connected to my home country- you are amazing.
To the warm Montrealite who surprised me this morning by coming all the way up to the school just to meet the crazy Canadian teacher posted here, and to the Mexican/American Reiki Master/Chef whose support and warmth in one night was angelic in nature- beyond earth and sky, I thank you.
TREKKING POLE SPINACH
I understand vertically suspending a trekking pole from florescent light bulbs above a ceramic heater in order to dry spinach for the winter is in no way similar to the traditional way of laying spinach on bamboo above the woodstove. But I would like to state for the record that it works.
THE RAT
I believe it was just one intruder, one time, which makes me luckier than Lynda or Jigme, who have both amicably decided to co-reside with their rodents. The rat snuck in while I was off traveling the countryside with Carson and his brother. The rat stole one of my best pairs of underwear, a potato and a tomato. The rat took a small bite of the potato, hollowed out the tomato and pooped all over my underwear.
My sinkhole is now covered with two heavy rocks.
My underwear is in the trash.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Landslides and Leopards
Jigme told me about the leopard he saw last week outside of Lhakpas’s shop. It was night, and the massive cat climbed up past the community water tap, crossed the road and passed by Gyen Sir’s house while he and his children and wife lay sleeping.
Now, Jigme works for the Royal Society for the Protection of Nature, and as such has a great capacity for understanding the nature and behavior of wildlife. He seemed to think the leopard probably just came down for some easy pray like dogs or chickens. He told me this as we drove a rusty van through the dark, past the same water tap the leopard crossed. We both stared into the dark, looking for a pair of eyes.
I found news of a leopard in my village somewhat unsettling, given the number of times that I have walked home through the mountains in the dark. What was even more unsettling was that when I tried to tell other people, they already knew! Why was I the last person in the village to find out, when really, I am the only idiot marching around at nighttime?
Everyone always asks me, aren’t I afraid to walk alone at night here? I would laugh and think about living in Winnipeg for 7 years, murder capital of Canada. But I guess I wasn’t thinking about leopards in the ‘peg… The thing is, my community has always warned me about leopards, bears and tigers living in the forests around the village. I just heedlessly dismissed those warnings like I dismiss any Bhutanese estimated times of arrival, departure, plan, prediction or deadline. My bad.
Now when I walk around at night, I walk around with a stick and I randomly shout out loud. If I wasn’t an idiot before … Yalama.
****
I came back from Carson’s village late on Sunday night. The monsoon rains have been washing the roads away; so to get to his village in the first place I had to climb the mountain. In the rain. The monsoons have also been washing the paths and portions of the mountain face away, so the path had completely changed and I could barely find my way up the mountain I have climbed so many times before. I had no idea if I was headed in the right direction, so while I had him on the mobile, I tried yelling up the mountain to see if he could hear where I was. Not successful at all, I was mostly just yelling into the phone. By the time he found me I was feeling disgusting, sweaty, soaked and incredibly cranky. We had to climb over landslides, me in my soaked boots that can’t seem to live up to their waterproof claim, and Carson in his barefeet. What a closet hippie.
I was supposed to get a ride home with some friends from my valley who were playing an archery match against Carson’s friends. As per Bhutan, but about 5 minutes before the little red taxi outside the school gate was about to leave, my friend Jigme phoned me up to tell me there was no room for me in the vehicle and I had “about 5 minutes before the little red taxi outside would leave”. I should take it, he said. So I frantically threw my things into my bag, and as I ran out the door Carson put a little plastic bowl of mushroom datse into my hand. I hate saying goodbye to him, and the drive down is usually a withdrawn and contemplative one. I watch my attachments to him and us come and go and then I eventually come to rest with the peace and joy of being who I am in this gorgeous country. This gorgeous country with perilous roads.
The taxi driver turned out to be the father of one of my students, so we had lots to talk about with a very limited amount of English. The two men in the back were all hopped up and possibly drunk after finishing their archery match. They were incredibly interested in the fact that I was sharing a taxi with them. I could hear them asking the driver questions about me, where I live, what I am doing here, how long I will stay, if Carson is my husband. They were trying to speak Dzongkha to me, but I couldn’t focus between my own emotional investigation post-Carson and watching with a tight throat as we skidded in the mud, slipping dangerously close to the edge of the mountain. I tried not to think about it as I looked down into the beautiful valley below, but there was often only a tire space between our own tire and the edge. Whenever I think that it is possible I could die on these roads, I just look up and out at the stunning Himalayas all around me and I think that if I died here, I’d have no regrets since I had seen the most beautiful place on earth. That thought may seem dark, but it’s strange how calmly I can approach death when I believe I am where I’m supposed to be in life.
Once we were on a main road weaving between mountains much lower down, I began to loosen up and talk with the men. They were asking personal questions about my salary and my family at home. The driver told me he needed to go to the town of Wangdue to pick up more passengers, in the opposite direction of my village. Given that it was already dark, I figured it would be a late night going back. But I jumped at the opportunity to go to the town, since I had a bit of cash on me and I was running out of noodles and other such fancy things.
We got to Wangdue, and I hopped out of the car, sprinting in the rain to my favourite shops. I grabbed cans of fruit, evaporated milk, mushrooms, and tuna. I filled a bag with cheap and crappy toilet paper and a bunch of Japanese sweets. I ran into a little shop filled with Indian civil engineers who all spoke great English and wanted to chat with me. I just needed to buy a few more buckets for toilet water and composting, but the little shop girl insisted on washing them first, so the Indian men got the conversation they were eager to have. They were here for one of the huge hydroelectric projects taking place in the country, a project that hopes to move Bhutan closer to financial independence in the future.
I wandered around the taxi stand looking for my driver and car in the rain. When I found him, he was a little upset. The passengers we drove all the way tin the opposite direction to pick up got a ride with someone else, so it was just him and I heading back, (his concern caused me to be concerned that I might be paying the full fare of an entire car myself). On top of that, all of the drivers around us were urging us not to go, that landslides had caused blocks all along the road and it was dangerous to drive. The driver left it up to me.
Well, in my time here I have begun to generalize that Bhutanese people might tend to be slightly dramatic when it comes to describing a situation. But once upon a time I also thought they were exaggerating about the leopards, so really, what do I know. I still told him we should try.
We headed off in the pouring rain through the fog and the darkness. As we climbed in altitude, we had patches of fog so ridiculously thick I think the only thing that let us move forward was the driver’s familiarity with all the twists in the road. We passed by small landslides that were not there yesterday on my way in. The side of the mountain just crumbled and rocks and roots rolled down in a pile of mud. The landslides creep onto the road and then the cars have to inch closer to the edge, or skid through the landslide itself, equally dangerous activities.
Despite my nervousness, I drifted in and out of sleep, waking up every time few minutes when the car would jerk my head near off my neck as a result of the crater filled road. I woke up briefly when we stopped to talk to the driver of a public bus coming from the opposite direction. He told he just passed a big landslide coming down slowly, and that we ought to hurry. Love waking up to that kind of information. Well, then we really started cruising through the fog, rushing to beat this landslide coming down. We had already passed dozens.
We came up to the area where they are widening the road, and it was here in the soft minerals and soils that a huge part of the mountain face had collapsed due to the rain: boulders the size of our car and tree trunks even bigger were sitting at the road, waiting to inch forward. We passed carefully as I wondered how fast and sudden landslides can move. Being in this country has given me an incredible respect for, and curiosity about, nature’s processes.
We passed by two more landslides of the same size in this stretch of construction. The unfortunate part of this area is that it has the steepest drop off of the entire road between my house and Carson’s. There was just enough room for our car to creep by the landslide at the edge of the drop-off. I figured we would be the last ones through that night.
Once we had beaten the landslides, the driver and I relaxed a little. He encouraged me to sleep, and so, like the Bhutanese do, I let me head drop awkwardly and tried to sleep on myself without having the bumpy road smash my face into the window.
I reached home, and the taxi driver generously offered to cover half the cost. Sleepily, I told him I had spent all my money in canned goods frenzy and could I send the money with his son tomorrow. No problem, he was just happy I wasn’t upset about the cost. Since I usually hitchhike for free, it seemed due. I was just happy that the man had gotten me home alive.
***
It’s the kind of night that makes all the challenges of this country worth it.
I went for my daily walk. I usually start out at a jog just so I can hurry to get past everyone who stares at me in amusement as I jog/stumble down the mountain road during this silly activity that hard-working farmers have no need for.
I got almost to the half-way point of my route, and there sat Sonam Tobgay in the drizzle at the side of the road. He is a class 7 hostel student who comes to get boiled water from me every night before he goes to sleep.
I slowed down to talk to him, and he had a cell phone in his hands so I asked the usual assistant matron questions (they are not supposed to have cell phones). My heart is never really into scolding them for such things, besides, it was his mother’s and he was bringing it back to her.
He invited me to come to his house, which I thought was the village around the distant mountain that I had never been to. Immediately, something inside of me told me I should go, that a Bhutanese experience was waiting for me. But the rational, organized and disciplined side of me cautioned not to; I should get home, clean my laundry, make soup, do work, try for an hour to connect to the internet to send out happy belated birthdays. Ashley, if you are reading this, happy belated birthday.
But, as those of you who know me love to remind me, the rational, organized and disciplined side of me is really quite a small, insignificant part. These reasons not to go all seemed so… normal for my groove here. I was being invited by a student to meet his family, see his house and his village.
Well… just like I predicted and Sonam Tobgay casually dismissed, it rained as we reached Gamfey. That’s right, a village named Gamfey in the same valley that already has a village named Gantey. Which explains my confusion for the first half a year when people kept pointing in opposite directions to what I thought was the same village.
But Sonam Tobgay doesn’t live in Gamfey, as I found out. No, he lives past Gamfey, down the valley, across a river and up the other mountainside.
By the time we reached his house, we were drenched. News was spreading that Madam was in the ‘hood, and faces were piling up at the windows to peer at me. The language was completely different, just one village over, but I could tell by Sonam Tobgay’s response that he was explaining to the curious inquisitors that I was his teacher. More like purveyor of boiled water, nurse, dance instructor, ping-pong partner…
His family ushered me into the small dry house. Angi, the ultimate Gramma/Bhutanese host was all “Joo, joo” and “Jee, jee”, (which is sit, sit and eat, eat). They pulled out the best carpet and butt pillow, then parked me near the buccari, which was so shitty that flames were falling out the holes in the bottom, setting fire to the things below. One of Sonam’s cousins grabbed the burning canvas from beneath the buccari and ran it outside while little old Angi yelled about the offensive smoke blowing into my face.
Soon, tea was ready, and ST and I were the only ones drinking while everyone else just stared. It’s so adorable and such an honour to watch them fuss over me and understand parts of their arguments. Usually it’s over how best to serve me, what’s cleanest, what more they can offer me.
Puffed rice, fried rice with local butter squished into it, and pounded flat rice all in woven baskets piled on top of each other. Angi- gee, gee… I was trying to drink as much tea as I could but she wouldn’t let the cup get even the tiniest bit empty, always full to the brim. And gee, gee, to the assortment of rice products, even while I was drinking tea with puffed, fried and pounded rice stuffed into both my cheeks.
The next thing I knew, they were handing me a plate of rice. “Dinner,” ST said, so I started eating, thinking we were having just rice. The whole family was watching me eat with my hands, observing my one-handed rice-squishing technique. Sonam was washing his hands with the rice, rolling it into a dirty little ball that he just set aside. He was also watching me shovel the rice in with my thumb. “Wait Madam, for the curry”.
Well, sweet mother of Zeus, this woman could cook. An ema datse which was mostly fresh datse, it had the texture of mozzarella and the chilies were not too spicy but packed full of flavour. The whole thing sat in a small bowl of oil.
Gee, gee, and I was eating again. Rice, curry, zow and tea, all at the same time in an attempt to satiate Angi, who was practically putting all these things into my mouth. They offered me arra; I refused. They offered again; second obligatory refusal. To take some home? Polite a tse-tse.
Phub Gyem had been staring at me with big eyes since she came in to the house. I kept thinking about how hard I am on her in class. I finally moved her to the front to encourage her to pay more attention and stop cheating on everything. And there she was, excited beyond belief to have me see her home, her village, and to have me be a part of what she knows as comfortable.
And she walks that distance everyday. Twice. And probably does chores all evening, as well as has parents that don’t speak or read either of the languages of instruction at school (a challenge in a country that has over 16 languages/dialects), so they would not able to help her.
Sonam Tobgay apologized repeatedly for how dirty his house was. I told him I liked his house. It’s good they are building a new one out of rammed earth though. That house must be freezing in winter with all kinds of draft coming in, considering I could see the pigs wandering around outside through the large gaps in the wood planks.
Abruptly, Sonam stood up to announce that we had to go, and fast, since light was disappearing and we had no torches. Lord knows, this kid is smarter than I am about leopards and such things. An hour and a half to walk yet through the mountains…
We slipped, fell, climbed, and stumbled up and down the mountains and valleys in the mud. This time we moved with no talking, at an obnoxious half-run half walk in the failing light. Huffing and puffing, we finally reached the turnoff to our village Yesa. I wanted to go up the road/path/sharp rock pile that I knew I could navigate in the dark, but ST wanted us to take the shortcut. In the pouring rain. Oh yeah, did I mention it was pouring rain? Just assume that it’s always raining here. Monsoon season. I live up in the clouds.
So I slipped and slid up the “shortcut”, and the next thing I knew, I was being herded into a narrow cow path with barbed fences on each side. The wet and muddy cow shit I was trudging through was up to my shins. We trudged along slowly, me holding on to dear life with one hand reaching for the intermittent wooden fence poles, the other hand clutching the bag of potatoes Phub Gyem sent along with me. I told ST that his path was the stupidest shortcut I have ever taken. I said stupid several more times loudly as I felt the cow shit seep into my socks.
“Yes madam,” he said, dejected. “This path is not good anymore”. He told me when he came down earlier, it was all dry. Such is monsoon season in the mountains I guess.
We eventually reached the school. I filled up a bucket of hot water and sent with him to the hostel for a shower. Now I am drinking the arra his family sent and counting my blessings for being here, knowing these people, working with them and for them, and learning about my own capacity for compassion and relief of cultural ignorance.
The hard part is that days like this make me wonder if I am leaving Bhutan too early, if one year is not enough. Maybe it will help me to focus on the things that really matter. Drive me to accomplish even more. Say yes to more things.
Am I making the right decision? What is the right decision? I want to be with Carson. I love him and appreciate so much about who he is. But what about Singapore? Can I have moments like this in Singapore? I have never, ever had moments like this before in my life. These experiences will be unmatched by any to follow, of that I am sure. But I have had unbelievable moments in my world travels where I know I can’t take anything away but a mere imprint, a photo maybe, just a still slice of the magic that happened at that exact moment, in that exact place, with those very people I almost always never see again.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Madam, How Many kg's is Your Head?
I just hitchhiked with some awesome people. A brother and a sister. He worked for Anti-Corruption (I love how much that sounds like Harry Potter) and she worked for Human Resources. They were listening to North American pop on the radio in their SUV, and for some reason this just floored me. I had never been so excited to hear popular music in my life! She gave me some real mint gum (most of the ‘gum’ you can buy here is fruit or chocolate, and the one mint flavour I’ve found just crumbles in your mouth and sticks to your teeth) so I chewed ecstatically and rocked out to Michael Jackson and Shaggy in the back.
Conversation flowed really easily (a blessing when you are desperate for a ride and hitchhiking with random strangers), and before I knew it, I was at Lawala Pass. I hopped out, said my unromantic goodbyes and let go of these beautiful people offering dentene peppermint and a musical taste of the west.
There, at the pass, an old man must have recognized me as the foreign teacher who waits at Lawala for rides into the valley after visiting her mop (details on this potentially misspelled Dzongkha word later). He flagged me down, waving excitedly and speaking Dzongkha with a personalized sign language. I understood only 'going' and '?' in Dzongkha (they have a word that means basically a question mark has been added to a sentence), and his sign language indicated we should be 'going' together. He hobbled over to me as I danced on one foot trying to put on socks to warm my feet at the cool, high altitude of the pass.
Socks on, I ran to get the old man a nice flat rock to sit on so he wouldn't have to squat in the mud. I brought it back to him and asked him to sit in what I hope was the polite way (I have been told there is an impolite way to tell your students to sit, but I can't remember which is which). It's ok, add a 'La' to any sentence and it becomes polite. He asked where my rock was, so I ran off to find myself one. But I didn’t actually sit because I’ve been wearing out the bum on my favourite and only pair of jeans from all my rock-sitting since I’ve been in Bhutan. Already I had Gyen Sir stitch them up, for which I gave him an assortment of Canadian pins, but this created a jealousy fiasco among the teachers at my school that I won’t even get into.
Anyway, it didn’t matter because I could hear the low roar of a massive engine struggling up Lawala. Big engines are a good sign when you really just want to get home. To expand on Carson’s hitchhiking rant, big engines mean big trucks, which means drivers probably won’t speak English and will still be more than willing to pick you up (I assume any company is good company when you drive for extended hours at a time.)
I climbed up the ladder and into the massive loading truck, tossed my bags on the seat and turned around to help the old man climb up. I hoisted him by the arms and marveled at the strength still left in his body.
A small boy of maybe four, tiny limbs and great big eyes with irises so dark they looked almost black in the evening light, sat on a bench near the window watching us. It was surprisingly spacious inside and quite fancy. Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised given the way they usually decorate the outside of the transport vehicles; hand painted flowers and designs, shiny tinsel and bright tassels hanging everywhere, personalized messages of faith or jokes that aren’t that funny printed on the back bumper above the ever-present “Horn Please”. Keep your eyes on the road and your mind on God, A man who marries young is good, a man who marries old has fun… And then the strange sentences I have always wondered about, painted on the windshields or the side of the trucks like Missed Call 115 and I love you. I mean, it's always nice to hear someone loves you, but I’ve never really understood why it’s painted on the truck.
Inside the transport truck I was in, there were big glowing red and green lights in the shape of flowers in the roof. Pictures of the 3rd and 4th Kings I had never seen before hung in shiny plastic gold frames above the dash, above our heads. Buddha, in a matching shiny plastic gold sat next to a patient prayer wheel on the dashboard, to the left of the driver (the driver’s seat is on the right here, something I always forget when climbing into the vehicle as a passenger). I looked up to see a bunk bed above my head. It appeared as though it could slide down four poles to make room for 2 people to sleep comfortably in the truck. I wondered if the driver and his son lived in the truck. A big pile of comfy blankets were folded neatly to my right.
We stopped on the way into the valley because a farmer was crawling up the side of the mountain waving his arms. I stared at the little boy while the driver conversed with the farmer. I kept getting lost in his black eyes. I felt a poke and pulled my gaze away from the child; the driver wanted me to look out his window.
Down the steep cliffside, the farmer had crashed his tractor. It lay broken, red and crumpled on top of its trailer. I gasped involuntarily. I had no idea how the man was all right, and how he crashed his tractor in the first place. I mean, those things go very slowly, and he had to have had time to see that he was heading towards the edge… I hoped he hadn’t been drinking, or it might hurt even more the next morning when his family found out he crashed the only tractor they probably have.
We left the man there and headed on down the valley through the pine trees and the wandering yaks. The little boy kept half his body hanging out of the window the whole time, watching the land pass by outside. The old man tried to pull him in a few times as we squeezed past huge trucks on the impossibly thin road, but the boy was glued to the world passing by outside.
I remember contemplating if a kid from the west could stare at the outside world for so long without getting bored, or if they would need more stimulation, something electronic.
* * * *
I stopped at Nim’s shop long enough to buy some abnormally big bananas. I was told they came from Punakha, which is very near to me. I try to avoid buying fruit from India if I can after I was told some scary stories about the misuse of pesticides there. I’m not sure if it’s any better here, but my Bhutanese teachers say that eating too many Indian Mangoes makes them sick. I was told that Bhutan gets their pesticides from India, and India gets the rejected pesticides from the west that are not fit for use or do not work.
After I asked Nim about where the bananas came from, she expertly selected a banana based on how it felt when she gently pressed on it. She is so sweet to me, she asked me to try it. Normally, I detest the bananas here; they are sour and slimy, oozing their way down the throat and leaving a bitter taste in the mouth. And if you leave them sit long enough they develop hard black seeds inside, but I buy them anyway as they could be the only fruit I have in a month. But this Punakha banana was comparatively tasty, so I took six, hoisted them over my shoulder and stepped outside the shop.
On a bench outside, Singay Sir, a teacher from the community school down in the bottom of the valley, was sipping mango juice with a friend I recognized but didn’t know. Singay told me of his teacher woes, being transferred to the community school (he used to teach at my middle school), being understaffed, over-worked, no spares, I’m lucky to have one, I came here to volunteer all of my time didn’t I? Teachers in isolated placements have a tough time- I interjected with the common idea of teaching as a “noble profession”. He hit me back with a complete dismissal of the idea, Noble being a word the establishment uses behind their desks while doing no work with needy children or knowing of the real lack of materials, space, funds and staff in the rural schools. I couldn’t argue with this, he made a valid point. But the young and inspired teacher inside of me disagreed with him silently, and he seemed nowhere near finished so I made an attempt to leave. Out of nowhere, Lhakpa’s bear of a brother picked me up in a crunching hug from behind. I’m not sure if he really doesn’t know that I don’t speak Dzongkha, but he always converses with me as though I do.
“Che joni mop mo la?”
“What’s a mop Sir?”
“Mop is husband.”
He’s not my husband. (Nga joni boyfriend la). Then the conversation turned to marriage and my age. They seemed to think that I was 23, I told them I was 27, knowing full well where this was going. Some days when I don’t have the energy, I let them refer to him as Husband, but some days, like today, I have the stamina to defend my cultural beliefs. Maybe it was the potassium in the banana.
They told me this was an age I should be married at. I tried to explain to them that in Canada, 27 is still a very young age to not be married at. Young people are spending time on education and traveling, and marrying later, but my argument teetered to a halt as I stared into unreceptive faces who might be potentially be changing their moral judgments of the foreign teacher educating their children. I sighed and cursed myself silently.
Yes, mop joni is just easier.
* * * *
If no teacher shows up to teach my Class 6 students after my science period is over, they will often bombard me with question after question in an attempt to keep me in their classroom. Their questions are so amazing and they are so adorable, I will often sit with them for the whole period, laughing and doing my best to answer them.
“ Madam, how many scientists are there in Canada?” (I’m stumped, trying to count the universities and the potential scientists per institute).
“ A thousand?” (Oh, God, I hope people reading this aren’t angry).
“Madam, where are the doors to the airplane?”
“How did you get off the airplane? Was it steps?”
“Madam, did you get to choose your meal on the airplane?” (I explain the awesome concept of first class and choice and free alcohol, then disappoint them with my economy budget truth).
“Madam, where did you meet Mr. Carson? In Canada, Thailand, or Bhutan?” (I’m smiling because some of the adults must have been talking. Clearly these kids know the answer to that already, even though I only told one person that I met Carson in Thailand.)
“Does Madam have a baby?” (This question is still funny to me. Yes, I left it in Canada and I never talk about it.)
“Madam, how many stories tall is your house in Canada?” (I’m thinking of my apartment near Corydon. I lived on the 4th floor.)
“How many rooms?” (3. They count the kitchen and the living room as rooms as well.)
“Did it have a toilet inside?” (Yes dear children. It can get to -45 c outside. Not fun.)
“Do you live by yourself Madam?” (Yes.)
“Why???” (Me laughing. Because children move out and live alone after a certain age!)
“Why???” (Because… Maybe they don’t want to still be living with their family when they are older.)
“Madam, why???” (By now I’m really thinking, and it doesn’t seem so normal anymore. Families here, even extended, often continue to live with each other until they die.)
“Because maybe they want to live a separate life from their family.” (Now it even sounds weird coming from my mouth, especially considering how much I miss my family these days. Family is life here.)
“No one else, just Madam.” (They are in disbelief. Why would I do that to myself?)
“Well, my cat lived with me,” (Great, just where I wanted this conversation to go.)
“Madam has a cat???”
“Had. She died last week in Canada.”
“Omigod Madam!”
“Yeah, while I was in Zhemgang.”
“Did Madam cry?”
“Yes, for many days.”
“What was the colour of Madam’s cat?” (I tell them about the gray striped cat I named after the Credence Clearwater Revival song Suzy Q. They can tell I am sad, so they move on to my family.)
“What is the name of Madam’s mother? What work does she do?” (Her name is Sharon, and she works for a bank in Canada). They like the name Sharon.
“What is the name of Madam’s father? What work does he do?” (His name is Robert, and he is a farmer). They are always surprised to hear my father is a farmer. I think maybe they aren’t sure that we have farmers in Canada, and they equate farming with a lot of hard work and very little money. Same deal in Canada kids, same deal.
I tell them about my stepmother. The family conversation leads to divorce, a concept they are familiar with.
My favourite question;
“Madam, why did your parents divorce?” (How to answer…)
“Do you like your step mother?” (Yes, love her. It was different growing up but now we are very close.)
“What is her name? What work does she do?” (Her name is Sandi, and she works in a hospital like a nurse.)
“Does she help your father when he is sick?” (Ha, I think so! Unless he has recently pissed her off or something.)
“Does she help your mother when she is sick?” (What an interesting question.)
“Um, they are too far away from each other. My mother gets help from her family and friends when she is sick.”
“Do they talk? Your mother and step-mother?” (Sometimes. I told them about how gracious everyone was at my brother’s wedding in Mexico, how everyone was kind and relaxed.)
Satisfied, they want to know more about the long journey from Canada to Bhutan. They know I switched planes three times, but they want to know the exact route of the plane and where it stopped. I tell them we flew over the North pole and Siberia, and we stopped in China for 6 hours.
“Madam, what do Chinese people look like?” (Um…)
“Madam, what subjects do students learn in Canada?” (This is easier. I tell them most of the subjects are the same, but they learn music as well.)
Music stumps them.
“Canada is very rich!” (Yes. For the first time in my life, I truly get that.)
“Do they learn Dzongkha Madam?” (Ha! No. I tell them about French, and Canada as a bilingual country, just like Bhutan.)
“What is French Madam?” (My answer was this; it’s another language. I really could have elaborated, but sometimes simple is best.)
“Who is living in madam’s house now?” (It’s gone, everything is sold and gone so I could come here.)
“Where will Madam live?” (Hmmmm…)
“Madam can stay in Bhutan!”
They take notes on the things I say; they write down my birthday, my parent’s names, they copy my sketch on where the emergency exits are in an airplane. They check their social studies books to cross-reference my estimates at populations and distances.
My God they are thorough.
* * * *
I have to end with one last comment. I have been teaching weight in Class 3 math, and we have been doing some pretend shopping for chilies and potatoes so the student can become more familiar with measuring, estimating, and converting grams and kilograms.
As I was walking back to my house from my most recent interview with Class 6, one of my class 3 students caught up with me. She reached over to hug a small boy in class 1, and she told me how beautiful this boy was. I found this curious, since I had often wondered about the developmental health of this child. His head is quite a lot bigger than the rest of his body, and his forehead is wide and protruding, with a fairly flat face. My student touched his skin and told me how white it was. Then she commented on the size of his goti, or head.
“Very big Madam.”
I agreed silently and contemplated the preciousness of this moment.
Then she paused thoughtfully, tilted her head slightly and asked, “How many kg’s is Madam’s head?”
Awesome.
Conversation flowed really easily (a blessing when you are desperate for a ride and hitchhiking with random strangers), and before I knew it, I was at Lawala Pass. I hopped out, said my unromantic goodbyes and let go of these beautiful people offering dentene peppermint and a musical taste of the west.
There, at the pass, an old man must have recognized me as the foreign teacher who waits at Lawala for rides into the valley after visiting her mop (details on this potentially misspelled Dzongkha word later). He flagged me down, waving excitedly and speaking Dzongkha with a personalized sign language. I understood only 'going' and '?' in Dzongkha (they have a word that means basically a question mark has been added to a sentence), and his sign language indicated we should be 'going' together. He hobbled over to me as I danced on one foot trying to put on socks to warm my feet at the cool, high altitude of the pass.
Socks on, I ran to get the old man a nice flat rock to sit on so he wouldn't have to squat in the mud. I brought it back to him and asked him to sit in what I hope was the polite way (I have been told there is an impolite way to tell your students to sit, but I can't remember which is which). It's ok, add a 'La' to any sentence and it becomes polite. He asked where my rock was, so I ran off to find myself one. But I didn’t actually sit because I’ve been wearing out the bum on my favourite and only pair of jeans from all my rock-sitting since I’ve been in Bhutan. Already I had Gyen Sir stitch them up, for which I gave him an assortment of Canadian pins, but this created a jealousy fiasco among the teachers at my school that I won’t even get into.
Anyway, it didn’t matter because I could hear the low roar of a massive engine struggling up Lawala. Big engines are a good sign when you really just want to get home. To expand on Carson’s hitchhiking rant, big engines mean big trucks, which means drivers probably won’t speak English and will still be more than willing to pick you up (I assume any company is good company when you drive for extended hours at a time.)
I climbed up the ladder and into the massive loading truck, tossed my bags on the seat and turned around to help the old man climb up. I hoisted him by the arms and marveled at the strength still left in his body.
A small boy of maybe four, tiny limbs and great big eyes with irises so dark they looked almost black in the evening light, sat on a bench near the window watching us. It was surprisingly spacious inside and quite fancy. Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised given the way they usually decorate the outside of the transport vehicles; hand painted flowers and designs, shiny tinsel and bright tassels hanging everywhere, personalized messages of faith or jokes that aren’t that funny printed on the back bumper above the ever-present “Horn Please”. Keep your eyes on the road and your mind on God, A man who marries young is good, a man who marries old has fun… And then the strange sentences I have always wondered about, painted on the windshields or the side of the trucks like Missed Call 115 and I love you. I mean, it's always nice to hear someone loves you, but I’ve never really understood why it’s painted on the truck.
Inside the transport truck I was in, there were big glowing red and green lights in the shape of flowers in the roof. Pictures of the 3rd and 4th Kings I had never seen before hung in shiny plastic gold frames above the dash, above our heads. Buddha, in a matching shiny plastic gold sat next to a patient prayer wheel on the dashboard, to the left of the driver (the driver’s seat is on the right here, something I always forget when climbing into the vehicle as a passenger). I looked up to see a bunk bed above my head. It appeared as though it could slide down four poles to make room for 2 people to sleep comfortably in the truck. I wondered if the driver and his son lived in the truck. A big pile of comfy blankets were folded neatly to my right.
We stopped on the way into the valley because a farmer was crawling up the side of the mountain waving his arms. I stared at the little boy while the driver conversed with the farmer. I kept getting lost in his black eyes. I felt a poke and pulled my gaze away from the child; the driver wanted me to look out his window.
Down the steep cliffside, the farmer had crashed his tractor. It lay broken, red and crumpled on top of its trailer. I gasped involuntarily. I had no idea how the man was all right, and how he crashed his tractor in the first place. I mean, those things go very slowly, and he had to have had time to see that he was heading towards the edge… I hoped he hadn’t been drinking, or it might hurt even more the next morning when his family found out he crashed the only tractor they probably have.
We left the man there and headed on down the valley through the pine trees and the wandering yaks. The little boy kept half his body hanging out of the window the whole time, watching the land pass by outside. The old man tried to pull him in a few times as we squeezed past huge trucks on the impossibly thin road, but the boy was glued to the world passing by outside.
I remember contemplating if a kid from the west could stare at the outside world for so long without getting bored, or if they would need more stimulation, something electronic.
* * * *
I stopped at Nim’s shop long enough to buy some abnormally big bananas. I was told they came from Punakha, which is very near to me. I try to avoid buying fruit from India if I can after I was told some scary stories about the misuse of pesticides there. I’m not sure if it’s any better here, but my Bhutanese teachers say that eating too many Indian Mangoes makes them sick. I was told that Bhutan gets their pesticides from India, and India gets the rejected pesticides from the west that are not fit for use or do not work.
After I asked Nim about where the bananas came from, she expertly selected a banana based on how it felt when she gently pressed on it. She is so sweet to me, she asked me to try it. Normally, I detest the bananas here; they are sour and slimy, oozing their way down the throat and leaving a bitter taste in the mouth. And if you leave them sit long enough they develop hard black seeds inside, but I buy them anyway as they could be the only fruit I have in a month. But this Punakha banana was comparatively tasty, so I took six, hoisted them over my shoulder and stepped outside the shop.
On a bench outside, Singay Sir, a teacher from the community school down in the bottom of the valley, was sipping mango juice with a friend I recognized but didn’t know. Singay told me of his teacher woes, being transferred to the community school (he used to teach at my middle school), being understaffed, over-worked, no spares, I’m lucky to have one, I came here to volunteer all of my time didn’t I? Teachers in isolated placements have a tough time- I interjected with the common idea of teaching as a “noble profession”. He hit me back with a complete dismissal of the idea, Noble being a word the establishment uses behind their desks while doing no work with needy children or knowing of the real lack of materials, space, funds and staff in the rural schools. I couldn’t argue with this, he made a valid point. But the young and inspired teacher inside of me disagreed with him silently, and he seemed nowhere near finished so I made an attempt to leave. Out of nowhere, Lhakpa’s bear of a brother picked me up in a crunching hug from behind. I’m not sure if he really doesn’t know that I don’t speak Dzongkha, but he always converses with me as though I do.
“Che joni mop mo la?”
“What’s a mop Sir?”
“Mop is husband.”
He’s not my husband. (Nga joni boyfriend la). Then the conversation turned to marriage and my age. They seemed to think that I was 23, I told them I was 27, knowing full well where this was going. Some days when I don’t have the energy, I let them refer to him as Husband, but some days, like today, I have the stamina to defend my cultural beliefs. Maybe it was the potassium in the banana.
They told me this was an age I should be married at. I tried to explain to them that in Canada, 27 is still a very young age to not be married at. Young people are spending time on education and traveling, and marrying later, but my argument teetered to a halt as I stared into unreceptive faces who might be potentially be changing their moral judgments of the foreign teacher educating their children. I sighed and cursed myself silently.
Yes, mop joni is just easier.
* * * *
If no teacher shows up to teach my Class 6 students after my science period is over, they will often bombard me with question after question in an attempt to keep me in their classroom. Their questions are so amazing and they are so adorable, I will often sit with them for the whole period, laughing and doing my best to answer them.
“ Madam, how many scientists are there in Canada?” (I’m stumped, trying to count the universities and the potential scientists per institute).
“ A thousand?” (Oh, God, I hope people reading this aren’t angry).
“Madam, where are the doors to the airplane?”
“How did you get off the airplane? Was it steps?”
“Madam, did you get to choose your meal on the airplane?” (I explain the awesome concept of first class and choice and free alcohol, then disappoint them with my economy budget truth).
“Madam, where did you meet Mr. Carson? In Canada, Thailand, or Bhutan?” (I’m smiling because some of the adults must have been talking. Clearly these kids know the answer to that already, even though I only told one person that I met Carson in Thailand.)
“Does Madam have a baby?” (This question is still funny to me. Yes, I left it in Canada and I never talk about it.)
“Madam, how many stories tall is your house in Canada?” (I’m thinking of my apartment near Corydon. I lived on the 4th floor.)
“How many rooms?” (3. They count the kitchen and the living room as rooms as well.)
“Did it have a toilet inside?” (Yes dear children. It can get to -45 c outside. Not fun.)
“Do you live by yourself Madam?” (Yes.)
“Why???” (Me laughing. Because children move out and live alone after a certain age!)
“Why???” (Because… Maybe they don’t want to still be living with their family when they are older.)
“Madam, why???” (By now I’m really thinking, and it doesn’t seem so normal anymore. Families here, even extended, often continue to live with each other until they die.)
“Because maybe they want to live a separate life from their family.” (Now it even sounds weird coming from my mouth, especially considering how much I miss my family these days. Family is life here.)
“No one else, just Madam.” (They are in disbelief. Why would I do that to myself?)
“Well, my cat lived with me,” (Great, just where I wanted this conversation to go.)
“Madam has a cat???”
“Had. She died last week in Canada.”
“Omigod Madam!”
“Yeah, while I was in Zhemgang.”
“Did Madam cry?”
“Yes, for many days.”
“What was the colour of Madam’s cat?” (I tell them about the gray striped cat I named after the Credence Clearwater Revival song Suzy Q. They can tell I am sad, so they move on to my family.)
“What is the name of Madam’s mother? What work does she do?” (Her name is Sharon, and she works for a bank in Canada). They like the name Sharon.
“What is the name of Madam’s father? What work does he do?” (His name is Robert, and he is a farmer). They are always surprised to hear my father is a farmer. I think maybe they aren’t sure that we have farmers in Canada, and they equate farming with a lot of hard work and very little money. Same deal in Canada kids, same deal.
I tell them about my stepmother. The family conversation leads to divorce, a concept they are familiar with.
My favourite question;
“Madam, why did your parents divorce?” (How to answer…)
“Do you like your step mother?” (Yes, love her. It was different growing up but now we are very close.)
“What is her name? What work does she do?” (Her name is Sandi, and she works in a hospital like a nurse.)
“Does she help your father when he is sick?” (Ha, I think so! Unless he has recently pissed her off or something.)
“Does she help your mother when she is sick?” (What an interesting question.)
“Um, they are too far away from each other. My mother gets help from her family and friends when she is sick.”
“Do they talk? Your mother and step-mother?” (Sometimes. I told them about how gracious everyone was at my brother’s wedding in Mexico, how everyone was kind and relaxed.)
Satisfied, they want to know more about the long journey from Canada to Bhutan. They know I switched planes three times, but they want to know the exact route of the plane and where it stopped. I tell them we flew over the North pole and Siberia, and we stopped in China for 6 hours.
“Madam, what do Chinese people look like?” (Um…)
“Madam, what subjects do students learn in Canada?” (This is easier. I tell them most of the subjects are the same, but they learn music as well.)
Music stumps them.
“Canada is very rich!” (Yes. For the first time in my life, I truly get that.)
“Do they learn Dzongkha Madam?” (Ha! No. I tell them about French, and Canada as a bilingual country, just like Bhutan.)
“What is French Madam?” (My answer was this; it’s another language. I really could have elaborated, but sometimes simple is best.)
“Who is living in madam’s house now?” (It’s gone, everything is sold and gone so I could come here.)
“Where will Madam live?” (Hmmmm…)
“Madam can stay in Bhutan!”
They take notes on the things I say; they write down my birthday, my parent’s names, they copy my sketch on where the emergency exits are in an airplane. They check their social studies books to cross-reference my estimates at populations and distances.
My God they are thorough.
* * * *
I have to end with one last comment. I have been teaching weight in Class 3 math, and we have been doing some pretend shopping for chilies and potatoes so the student can become more familiar with measuring, estimating, and converting grams and kilograms.
As I was walking back to my house from my most recent interview with Class 6, one of my class 3 students caught up with me. She reached over to hug a small boy in class 1, and she told me how beautiful this boy was. I found this curious, since I had often wondered about the developmental health of this child. His head is quite a lot bigger than the rest of his body, and his forehead is wide and protruding, with a fairly flat face. My student touched his skin and told me how white it was. Then she commented on the size of his goti, or head.
“Very big Madam.”
I agreed silently and contemplated the preciousness of this moment.
Then she paused thoughtfully, tilted her head slightly and asked, “How many kg’s is Madam’s head?”
Awesome.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Yak Babies & A New Kind of Love
May 7th
It all changed in the middle of the night.
I had a dream I was back in Canada. I had just arrived, and I was wondering the streets in downtown Winnipeg, feeling like I was shrinking underneath in all the tall buildings and architecture I was not used to. I walked past Bar Italia, apparently now in the exchange, and they ushered me inside. Everyone was angry with me; they told me I was late, I was on the schedule. They put me straight to work; I didn’t remember how to serve. I was shaking and breaking cups, and I had forgotten everyone’s names. The menu had changed; most of the staff had changed. I was in absolute shock! I was so nice and Bhutanese-style friendly, and no one gave a single shit. Everyone was selfish and mean, wrapped up in his or her own desire to make money and look good while doing it.
No one asked me anything about my trip, even though I had been gone for over a year. Clearly I had changed entirely who I was but everyone just saw that and thought I was the weird girl serving without any make-up covering up my patchy red mountain cheeks. G was pissed and yelling at me for further scheduling issues. I felt lost and far away from everything I knew.
I woke up suddenly and looked around me, the fear draining from my brain slowly as I realized where I was. Still in Bhutan; I felt a warmth that was familiar. It was the first time I had woken up and felt like I was at home, that this is where I belonged, even with my family and my friends so far away.
The strange thing was, in my dream I couldn’t remember where I had been. I kept trying to recall. I knew it started with a B, but I could only guess Borneo, and I knew that wasn’t it. The memory of the country was slipping away, and I was frightened that I couldn’t hang on to it, desperate to remember some part.
After this dream, I started having these tiny moments of joy that linger and seem to multiply into more moments of joy. When I am looking at the sun hitting only parts of the mountains, when day by day the valley turns a deeper shade of green, when my students ask a question in English that is more complex than they ever have before, when I am alone with Bhutanese people and I feel like I am at home.
So let me tell you about some of the intensity before this switch in the night, because I was starting to feel out of place with an attitude I couldn’t shake…
May 5th
Today I woke up to the sound of bamboo striking skin, right outside my door. I know what that sounds like now; I don’t even have to look.
I guess the girls in the hostel weren’t doing what they had been asked to do, again.
What a shitty day really.
As I was walking back to my house for lunch with some students, we passed a dog chewing on another dog’s head, it was fairly fresh. Could have been one of the grosser things I’ve ever seen before eating. And I caught this thought passing through my head: of course that’s happening, I’m in Bhutan.
I’ve moved from a private house onto the campus, into the sick room next to the matron. It’s a one-bedroom suite, and it’s colder because it’s made out of cement instead of rammed earth. But it has running water, and most amazingly, a water heater with a shower that gives me about 8 minutes of hot water. Best 8 minutes ever.
Now my door faces out to the mountains, and I have the habit of waking up in the morning to open my door wide. I jump back into bed and curl up under the multitude of blankets, just to stare outside for a while. I’m pretty sure I may never live in another location where I can stare out the door at the Himalayas from my bed.
These moments are usually interrupted by the girls in the hostel, who take full advantage of the fact that I am living so close to them and I let them come in and look through all my stuff. I actually let them unpack all of my things when I moved; they arranged my kitchen, my school supplies, my toiletries, my limited amount of furniture, and my photos. It’s adorable to watch them explaining to each other who the people are in my photos; they will explain that the baby in my arms belongs to my agim, my sister, they will tell each other which brother is my older brother and which is my younger brother. They whisper to each other about the photo of me in the ocean, most likely because I am in a swimsuit. They think Nadine’s baby is so cute, and that Simran is beautiful. They ask me if I get along with my stepmother. They constantly ask why I don’t have photos of my mother and father, and I kick myself for not bringing any. I have put photos from home on my ipod also, and they love to look at pictures of the farm and the snow. I always point out how flat the prairies are.
I showed some tourists around the school the other day, explaining what I could and asking them questions about their reasons for visiting Bhutan. I tried to hold in whatever judgement seemed to automatically arise in response to their answers; to see the culture, to see the people’s connection to the earth, to witness the traditions of shamanic Buddhism, to see a pure culture unadulterated by tourism… I tried to remind myself that I once thought these things also, when I was more removed from the culture. As one of the tourists spouted off about the environment and how green and clean it was, I remembered once while I was waiting for a ride near the road I saw an Ama, a Grandmother, walk to the edge of a bridge and dump and entire box of plastic and garbage into the beautiful river flowing 20 feet below. These images had only become more common to witness and my time here passed. I casually mentioned the lack of appropriate garbage disposal methods in the country.
After I finished showing the tourists around, a South African in the group said to me as he shook my hand, “I hope your time here gets better!”
I froze in shock. Better? What was I saying to this man that indicated my time here was not going well? I said nothing but the truth about supplies, systems and the nature of our school. I didn’t think it was negative, just real.
But it was at this point that I realized my perspective needed to change. After that comment, I made a vow to switch to a more accepting attitude about the differences between my own culture and the one I was living in.
May 1st
Yak babies. I never even thought about their existence before this adventure, even though clearly, yaks exist, so their babies must also. But spring has come, and so I have become witness to the existence of yak babies in my valley.
I have no idea what they are called. Yaklings? They are these small little shaggy fuzz balls that stand underneath their mothers, and you can hardly tell which end is front or back, until a little nose pokes out from the shag to watch you as you drive by.
Second shock of the day; I am driving. In the Himalayas. Driving. Me, from the prairies.
Sigay generously lent me his car so that I could drop Carson off where we thought we would be meeting Charlie and Julia. But they called on our way out of the valley to tell us we had to come all the way to the main road because they couldn’t convince their driver to come in.
I was doing great until we started to get up higher and the turns became sharper and the steep cliff on my left seemed to press in on me like some inevitable fever I knew I was bound to catch.
I made Carson sing because I was starting to grip the steering wheel so hard that my shoulders had pulled up past my ears and I no longer owned a neck.
So he sang Yesterday, and I nervously joined in as we drove up out of the valley with yaks. Probably not what McCartney had in mind, but yesterday I was not afraid of driving off the edge of a steep mountain, so troubles were farther away.
I pulled over at the Chorten that marks the edge of my valley so Carson could drive. My valley was frightening enough to drive in, and those mountains are fairly low and rolling. Where we needed to drive to was down and out into steep mountains with dropoffs that were so deep you cannot see the bottom from the road. Jagged white Himalaya peaks cut into the distance past a gorgeous but dangerously deep and long valley. The road is really only big enough for one vehicle. No freaking way I was going to try, I was already sweating thinking about what my Mother would say if she knew.
Carson was clearly more comfortable driving in the mountains than I was. I was still shit-scared without a Bhutanese driver in control, so all I could do was grip the dashboard tightly. I wasn’t listening to anything that he was saying, I’m not sure if he was rambling some more about politics and the inadequacies of the UN or if he was making jokes.
Eventually I relaxed a little bit and I looked over at him. I had an urge to tell him to keep driving, and not to stop until we felt like it. Camp somewhere in the mountains in the rain, get up the next day and keep driving, just to see more of Bhutan. With him.
Meeting the interns was fun, but brief. Seeing Charlie and Julia was so good, I can’t believe how much time has passed already. Enough time for Julia to get sick, and better. They brought me an amazing stash of peanut butter and jam, with some fresh Thimpu bread. Bless their sweet, sweet souls. How do I make such amazing friends wherever I go?
May 17th
I am back in my isolated village.
I spent a week in Samtengang with Carson, driving down every morning with a sweet Libay from the primary school up there. I was required to attend a child-centered learning workshop in the town (which lately I catch myself referring to as a city) of Wangdue, and the Libay also had to attend this workshop, so every morning at an unpredictable time between 7:00 and 8:00am, the Libay and our taxi driver would pick me up outside the school compound. The ride to Wangdue always proved to be a most interesting adventure, I never knew who I would find in the taxi that day or how many people we would try to cram in while weaving and winding down a narrow, stony mountain road.
One morning, with 9 of us crammed in the little Volkswagen taxi, one woman was wailing and weeping. I usually try to stay quiet because talking seems to increase the inevitable carsickness that occurs on the crappy ride down from Samtengang, but this woman was clearly ill or upset. Another one of the teachers from the workshop was in the back with me, and so I had her translate some questions for the woman to see if I could help. She had a headache, a fever, and nausea. Before I could advise her about anything, she hurled herself out the window and the four of us who were crammed in the back simultaneously reached forward to grab her and keep her from falling out and down the mountainside. She ralfed the rest of the way down, retching and shaking. I felt like doing the same.
We dropped her off at Chizomsa, a small town at a fork in the road. Her husband jumped out after her and ran to her as she let herself collapse by big rock. I looked out the back of the window as we drove off and asked why we weren’t taking her to the hospital.
“They will get out here,” was my answer, and I just sighed, for I am getting used to not understanding why things happen the way they do in Bhutan.
I kept hoping that the vomit fest of the morning was not going to foreshadow the rest of my day. But I was suspicious and feeling like shit from the ride down the mountain, the diesel fumes in Wangdue, and the whiskey which Carson and I had been enjoying every night before we went to sleep.
But my day pushed forward with a joyful attitude on my behalf regardless, and during some of the more boring parts of the workshop, I would work on a long letter I was writing to Simran. I found myself writing exuberantly about the people I was meeting every morning and evening while traveling to and from the mountaintop of Samtengang, and about this tickling happiness that was growing inside of me when I thought about the fact that I got to go back home to Carson again.
I wrote the following to her in an uncontrolled rush of penned thought:
I can’t even talk about anything else! I feel very happy, with everything. I think I am in the emergence stage of culture shock. I’m coming back out from the shadows of misunderstanding. I’m accepting the way things are; the doma spit painting the sides of cars red, the staring and overtly personal questions, the over-charging in shops who don’t know me, the meetings and conversations held entirely in Dzongkha, the students who smell like feces from not washing, the complete lack of any hand washing ever, the pig hairs in the fat they call meat, the same vegetables over and over….
I could go on, because these things still occur every day, but the truth is none of it really bothers me anymore. I still notice these things, but my reactions to them have stopped.
I think that North American comfort zone of mine must have expanded, or relaxed, because I am no longer shocked or upset by these things. It used to really bother me, but now I just watch and observe, accept without attaching myself to the reactions that take place inside my mind.
And it seems like I am accepting these things because I am learning to understand the culture and make room for differences between this culture and mine; because of the love that is fastening roots inside of me, love for the country and the people of Bhutan.
It all changed in the middle of the night.
I had a dream I was back in Canada. I had just arrived, and I was wondering the streets in downtown Winnipeg, feeling like I was shrinking underneath in all the tall buildings and architecture I was not used to. I walked past Bar Italia, apparently now in the exchange, and they ushered me inside. Everyone was angry with me; they told me I was late, I was on the schedule. They put me straight to work; I didn’t remember how to serve. I was shaking and breaking cups, and I had forgotten everyone’s names. The menu had changed; most of the staff had changed. I was in absolute shock! I was so nice and Bhutanese-style friendly, and no one gave a single shit. Everyone was selfish and mean, wrapped up in his or her own desire to make money and look good while doing it.
No one asked me anything about my trip, even though I had been gone for over a year. Clearly I had changed entirely who I was but everyone just saw that and thought I was the weird girl serving without any make-up covering up my patchy red mountain cheeks. G was pissed and yelling at me for further scheduling issues. I felt lost and far away from everything I knew.
I woke up suddenly and looked around me, the fear draining from my brain slowly as I realized where I was. Still in Bhutan; I felt a warmth that was familiar. It was the first time I had woken up and felt like I was at home, that this is where I belonged, even with my family and my friends so far away.
The strange thing was, in my dream I couldn’t remember where I had been. I kept trying to recall. I knew it started with a B, but I could only guess Borneo, and I knew that wasn’t it. The memory of the country was slipping away, and I was frightened that I couldn’t hang on to it, desperate to remember some part.
After this dream, I started having these tiny moments of joy that linger and seem to multiply into more moments of joy. When I am looking at the sun hitting only parts of the mountains, when day by day the valley turns a deeper shade of green, when my students ask a question in English that is more complex than they ever have before, when I am alone with Bhutanese people and I feel like I am at home.
So let me tell you about some of the intensity before this switch in the night, because I was starting to feel out of place with an attitude I couldn’t shake…
May 5th
Today I woke up to the sound of bamboo striking skin, right outside my door. I know what that sounds like now; I don’t even have to look.
I guess the girls in the hostel weren’t doing what they had been asked to do, again.
What a shitty day really.
As I was walking back to my house for lunch with some students, we passed a dog chewing on another dog’s head, it was fairly fresh. Could have been one of the grosser things I’ve ever seen before eating. And I caught this thought passing through my head: of course that’s happening, I’m in Bhutan.
I’ve moved from a private house onto the campus, into the sick room next to the matron. It’s a one-bedroom suite, and it’s colder because it’s made out of cement instead of rammed earth. But it has running water, and most amazingly, a water heater with a shower that gives me about 8 minutes of hot water. Best 8 minutes ever.
Now my door faces out to the mountains, and I have the habit of waking up in the morning to open my door wide. I jump back into bed and curl up under the multitude of blankets, just to stare outside for a while. I’m pretty sure I may never live in another location where I can stare out the door at the Himalayas from my bed.
These moments are usually interrupted by the girls in the hostel, who take full advantage of the fact that I am living so close to them and I let them come in and look through all my stuff. I actually let them unpack all of my things when I moved; they arranged my kitchen, my school supplies, my toiletries, my limited amount of furniture, and my photos. It’s adorable to watch them explaining to each other who the people are in my photos; they will explain that the baby in my arms belongs to my agim, my sister, they will tell each other which brother is my older brother and which is my younger brother. They whisper to each other about the photo of me in the ocean, most likely because I am in a swimsuit. They think Nadine’s baby is so cute, and that Simran is beautiful. They ask me if I get along with my stepmother. They constantly ask why I don’t have photos of my mother and father, and I kick myself for not bringing any. I have put photos from home on my ipod also, and they love to look at pictures of the farm and the snow. I always point out how flat the prairies are.
I showed some tourists around the school the other day, explaining what I could and asking them questions about their reasons for visiting Bhutan. I tried to hold in whatever judgement seemed to automatically arise in response to their answers; to see the culture, to see the people’s connection to the earth, to witness the traditions of shamanic Buddhism, to see a pure culture unadulterated by tourism… I tried to remind myself that I once thought these things also, when I was more removed from the culture. As one of the tourists spouted off about the environment and how green and clean it was, I remembered once while I was waiting for a ride near the road I saw an Ama, a Grandmother, walk to the edge of a bridge and dump and entire box of plastic and garbage into the beautiful river flowing 20 feet below. These images had only become more common to witness and my time here passed. I casually mentioned the lack of appropriate garbage disposal methods in the country.
After I finished showing the tourists around, a South African in the group said to me as he shook my hand, “I hope your time here gets better!”
I froze in shock. Better? What was I saying to this man that indicated my time here was not going well? I said nothing but the truth about supplies, systems and the nature of our school. I didn’t think it was negative, just real.
But it was at this point that I realized my perspective needed to change. After that comment, I made a vow to switch to a more accepting attitude about the differences between my own culture and the one I was living in.
May 1st
Yak babies. I never even thought about their existence before this adventure, even though clearly, yaks exist, so their babies must also. But spring has come, and so I have become witness to the existence of yak babies in my valley.
I have no idea what they are called. Yaklings? They are these small little shaggy fuzz balls that stand underneath their mothers, and you can hardly tell which end is front or back, until a little nose pokes out from the shag to watch you as you drive by.
Second shock of the day; I am driving. In the Himalayas. Driving. Me, from the prairies.
Sigay generously lent me his car so that I could drop Carson off where we thought we would be meeting Charlie and Julia. But they called on our way out of the valley to tell us we had to come all the way to the main road because they couldn’t convince their driver to come in.
I was doing great until we started to get up higher and the turns became sharper and the steep cliff on my left seemed to press in on me like some inevitable fever I knew I was bound to catch.
I made Carson sing because I was starting to grip the steering wheel so hard that my shoulders had pulled up past my ears and I no longer owned a neck.
So he sang Yesterday, and I nervously joined in as we drove up out of the valley with yaks. Probably not what McCartney had in mind, but yesterday I was not afraid of driving off the edge of a steep mountain, so troubles were farther away.
I pulled over at the Chorten that marks the edge of my valley so Carson could drive. My valley was frightening enough to drive in, and those mountains are fairly low and rolling. Where we needed to drive to was down and out into steep mountains with dropoffs that were so deep you cannot see the bottom from the road. Jagged white Himalaya peaks cut into the distance past a gorgeous but dangerously deep and long valley. The road is really only big enough for one vehicle. No freaking way I was going to try, I was already sweating thinking about what my Mother would say if she knew.
Carson was clearly more comfortable driving in the mountains than I was. I was still shit-scared without a Bhutanese driver in control, so all I could do was grip the dashboard tightly. I wasn’t listening to anything that he was saying, I’m not sure if he was rambling some more about politics and the inadequacies of the UN or if he was making jokes.
Eventually I relaxed a little bit and I looked over at him. I had an urge to tell him to keep driving, and not to stop until we felt like it. Camp somewhere in the mountains in the rain, get up the next day and keep driving, just to see more of Bhutan. With him.
Meeting the interns was fun, but brief. Seeing Charlie and Julia was so good, I can’t believe how much time has passed already. Enough time for Julia to get sick, and better. They brought me an amazing stash of peanut butter and jam, with some fresh Thimpu bread. Bless their sweet, sweet souls. How do I make such amazing friends wherever I go?
May 17th
I am back in my isolated village.
I spent a week in Samtengang with Carson, driving down every morning with a sweet Libay from the primary school up there. I was required to attend a child-centered learning workshop in the town (which lately I catch myself referring to as a city) of Wangdue, and the Libay also had to attend this workshop, so every morning at an unpredictable time between 7:00 and 8:00am, the Libay and our taxi driver would pick me up outside the school compound. The ride to Wangdue always proved to be a most interesting adventure, I never knew who I would find in the taxi that day or how many people we would try to cram in while weaving and winding down a narrow, stony mountain road.
One morning, with 9 of us crammed in the little Volkswagen taxi, one woman was wailing and weeping. I usually try to stay quiet because talking seems to increase the inevitable carsickness that occurs on the crappy ride down from Samtengang, but this woman was clearly ill or upset. Another one of the teachers from the workshop was in the back with me, and so I had her translate some questions for the woman to see if I could help. She had a headache, a fever, and nausea. Before I could advise her about anything, she hurled herself out the window and the four of us who were crammed in the back simultaneously reached forward to grab her and keep her from falling out and down the mountainside. She ralfed the rest of the way down, retching and shaking. I felt like doing the same.
We dropped her off at Chizomsa, a small town at a fork in the road. Her husband jumped out after her and ran to her as she let herself collapse by big rock. I looked out the back of the window as we drove off and asked why we weren’t taking her to the hospital.
“They will get out here,” was my answer, and I just sighed, for I am getting used to not understanding why things happen the way they do in Bhutan.
I kept hoping that the vomit fest of the morning was not going to foreshadow the rest of my day. But I was suspicious and feeling like shit from the ride down the mountain, the diesel fumes in Wangdue, and the whiskey which Carson and I had been enjoying every night before we went to sleep.
But my day pushed forward with a joyful attitude on my behalf regardless, and during some of the more boring parts of the workshop, I would work on a long letter I was writing to Simran. I found myself writing exuberantly about the people I was meeting every morning and evening while traveling to and from the mountaintop of Samtengang, and about this tickling happiness that was growing inside of me when I thought about the fact that I got to go back home to Carson again.
I wrote the following to her in an uncontrolled rush of penned thought:
I can’t even talk about anything else! I feel very happy, with everything. I think I am in the emergence stage of culture shock. I’m coming back out from the shadows of misunderstanding. I’m accepting the way things are; the doma spit painting the sides of cars red, the staring and overtly personal questions, the over-charging in shops who don’t know me, the meetings and conversations held entirely in Dzongkha, the students who smell like feces from not washing, the complete lack of any hand washing ever, the pig hairs in the fat they call meat, the same vegetables over and over….
I could go on, because these things still occur every day, but the truth is none of it really bothers me anymore. I still notice these things, but my reactions to them have stopped.
I think that North American comfort zone of mine must have expanded, or relaxed, because I am no longer shocked or upset by these things. It used to really bother me, but now I just watch and observe, accept without attaching myself to the reactions that take place inside my mind.
And it seems like I am accepting these things because I am learning to understand the culture and make room for differences between this culture and mine; because of the love that is fastening roots inside of me, love for the country and the people of Bhutan.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Thunder sounds different in the mountains
March 12
The crows here gurgle in their throats. It’s a disgusting sound, really. The other day I was walking with my principal’s son and he told me that the ones with the black beaks are bad luck, and the ones with the orange beaks are good luck. It’s the black beaked ones that gurgle and bubble in their throats. A few days ago I was walking cheerily to the morning assembly and a black beaked crow said the word “asshole” as I passed, clearly and audibly. I was the only one around. I could not help but feel it was directed at me…
The other day I received an invitation to a wedding dinner; it was addressed to Meghann Turner with the “and family” crossed out right after my name. For some reason this made me laugh. It is just such an uncommon thing here to be without your family. To travel is not really a concept that is understood by any of my Bhutanese friends either; why do I not have children? Why am I not married? My answers to this seem far away from being understood. I wanted to see the world. The world to a people who may never ever leave their country even once, is far away. As much as I am entering their lives, and they mine, we are still far away from understanding each other! I sometimes feel like a circus spectacle to these people, they are watching everything I do.
There was a lightning and thunderstorm outside last week, so I took my homemade rum and water outside and sat and watched it. I sat on a big rock amidst a pile of my own stinking compost, which I have just been hurling out my kitchen window into the fields below. Karma, I figured, for my laziness.
Thunder sounds different in the mountains. It’s almost as if it starts under the earth and rumbles up through the mountains. Like mountain-speak: the thunder grumbles and shakes between them.
I live in an apartment made of rammed earth. My students call it mud. I live in an apartment made of mud I guess. There are 4 suites, and big extended families live in all the other ones. Always I see new faces as aunts and grandmothers and nieces and nephews and uncles come and go for indeterminate amounts of time. I’m actually never really sure who lives here, I’m not sure if it’s something I need to actually know or understand. Families are an open door here, always.
The rammed earth has cracks in the windows and walls. Where I am living the wind is so strong it blows the roofs off of houses, so they put large rocks on top of all the sheet metal to hold it down. I asked my class six to design houses and explain the materials they used for a science project. I said they could use any materials they could imagine, and still more than half of them drew roofs with rocks holding them down. I asked the students questions about ways that could be more efficient than just plain old rocks on top, but I don’t think they understood me.
It takes hours everyday to keep one’s self and home clean here. I sweep my apartment daily, but my neighbour told me it doesn’t matter, and as he brushed his hand across my wall I saw why: dirt was falling off my walls made of dirt. Go figure. The walls are painted, but it is with some sort of earthen paint, so every time I lean against my wall I this chalky lime green dust all over me.
The topic of laundry deserves mention. I haul water up to my second floor. I light a fire. I place two large pots on the buccari and wait for the water to heat. I wash each piece of laundry by hand in a small bucket. Then I set it aside to be rinsed. Usually the water still comes out so brown because I basically live in a dusty wind tunnel, I have to rinse two or three times. Wringing the clothes out is the worst part I think. Each piece, I try to squeeze out the last drop of water because I know that this means my clothes will dry that much faster. While I am doing this and my hands are red and raw and my arms are killing me, I have the time in my brain to think about washing machines back at home. Brilliant inventions: how have I not appreciated the spin cycle before this?
I teach 6 days a week. Last Saturday after class, my grade five students prepared to hike up a mountain with me. They were so excited, they all gathered outside my apartment with packed lunches. The clouds were a deep purple grey and becoming more ominous by the minute. I tried to tell them that it might rain and maybe it was not such a good idea to hike. My precocious class captain looked at me like I was crazy and said “It is only a little bit of snow Madam”, holding up his fingers a pinch, as if to indicate that I might just be a chicken.
It started hailing as we reached the foot of the mountain. During our ridiculous hike up the shortcut path the students were laughing and singing loudly. This, they told me, was to scare the bears and tigers. Which is true, there are both on these mountains. They picked bunch after bunch of these little purple wildflowers for me, which looked so strangely beautiful poking up through the white snow. It was incredible.
We went into the temple and the lopen showed us three different rooms. He went out of his way to let us in, to tell us about the different Buddha’s, to bless us with holy water, twice. I’m only hoping that my double blessing was enough to redeem myself from washing my hands in the water hole with a demon haunting it afterwards!
After our temple visit, we sat on a cement wall at the edge of the mountain and ate our lunches amidst the crows and wild dogs. The students would bring me biscuits and fried dough in their dirty little hands, and against my better judgment I ate everything. They gave me fanta from their bottles and drank my water and ate my rice. We hiked down the slippery mountainside together, and I played them Michael Jackson on my ipod. They had no idea who he is. That made me feel very alone.
****
March 23
Yesterday, I had been here for two months.
Today, I feel very strange. I feel very out of place in this foreign land. I am out of toilet paper, but my toilet is as clean as a whistle. Great, now it is the cleanest place in the house, and all to receive shit.
The sun has already risen. Sir’s words from last night echo in my head; once you are hung from singchung, you are hung not only for one day but for another at least. Rice juice, Libay had said as he handed it to me with a devilish grin.
Last night turned blurry and warm as Libay continuously filled my cup. I held his small adopted daughter in my hands. I think he was drunk. They were talking to me and all I could focus on were the beads of sweat on Libay’s brow, trickling down the side of his face. Principal Sir was rambling on and I was thinking, why is Libay sweating? It’s not that hot in here. Maybe it’s the booze.
My mind is overwhelmed with Bhutan. Last night I had a dream of my hometown. I NEVER dream of that place! The white store. Carson was there with me. We couldn’t get along. I was showing him the small bakery selection and the largest selection of chips you can imagine in a dream.
I was rollerblading down the school street, and the Geisbrechts had decided to construct a pond right across the sidewalk. I only noticed this after I fell in and caused a commotion. They thought I was a troublemaker. And back then I was…
I woke up feeling strange, feeling slightly savage for being here. Yes I can fit in. Yes I can adapt. Does that make me lawless?
I don’t remember putting myself to bed last night. I don’t remember making fried rice, but I can see that I did. I am now wiping my ass with writing paper. My drinking water smells like feces and I can’t get rid of that smell no matter what I do.
I try to keep my own standards, but it feels like waves breaking against a rock. What can I do when I can’t do anything to change it?
I don’t want to lose myself, my morals, what I believe in. I don’t want to hit children. I don’t want to have affairs with married men. I don’t want to wipe without toilet paper…
****
March 29
Today one of my teachers tied up four of my students with rope and told them he would throw them in the river. My students told me this in secrecy. I think the teachers are beating my students more because I won’t.
My two Class fives and I planted the garden today. The bell rang and it started to rain, so I sent the classes inside, but Baby and a few others stayed to finish planting. The rain was pouring but neither Gyeltsen nor Baby wanted to stop, and we had to get those seeds in so we planted them in a hurry in the rain. I’m sure there will be random carrots and bean plants sprouting up all over.
I ran back soaking wet to Tshewang and the lunch she made for us. She promptly told me I shouldn’t make the students work in the rain. I told her it was actually them who were making me work in the rain. No one else seems to understand how much work, sweat and love we have put into the creation of this garden. My students understand; they are obsessed with that garden.
They handpick manure, hoist rocks using hands, levers, poles, smash stones, bring tools an hour walk to school, dig and scratch holes in the soil with their hands. We have spent two weeks building a stone fence, and then encasing this fence with a bamboo fence. The students are always certain that some sort of “small animal” or “small calf” could break in somehow, through some careless gap in our system that needs improvement. They give me visuals of how a small creature might get through. I laugh at this because it is funny to see their little heads poking through the fence. I know they don’t want to go back to the classroom.
I look out at the mountains and tell myself to remember this.
Monday, February 14, 2011
The Poo Phone and a Stone Bath
Currently, I believe they are fishing my phone out of the poo. I am told that is is okay now... I can't believe I did that.
Enter the outhouse, pull my pants down, a soft thud, and my phone lands in a smushy pile of shit. Seriously.
The whole family is talking about it. I have just arrived, I am definitely drunk after pounding back a Druk 1100 by myself while the family watched and waited before climbing the precarious cliff side to their home. And the first thing I do is drop my phone into a years worth of excrement. Sir thinks that I am used to luxuries, that it is his rustic bathroom's fault that my phone is covered in shit. I understand that it is because I am an IDIOT.
I had been waiting for a text from Carson.
It is true, the phone has been rescued. It is also true, it smells like shit. For real, like people poo. A poo phone. The kids are taking turns smelling it and laughing hysterically.
They washed it. Soaked it, probably with soap. I don't even know what to say. Electronics don't like to be washed, but I can't blame them! Just now, they are drying it out. They shook it for several minutes, flinging water everywhere. Now it lays by the fire drying, until tomorrow Miss, I am told.
Tomorrow. I am supposed to be here now, cut off from everything I know. Why?
* * * *
I spent my morning learning Kuru, darts, and shaking oranges and guavas down from the trees outside on the mountain slopes. The kids are so cute, they are nervous to use English with me. That will be my first order of business at the school; make them comfortable. Interchange words, from Dzongka to English. Again and again.
The house is beautiful, Sir and his wife are so kind and gracious. After last night's phone fiasco they sent me to bed with a blessed cup of warm bumchung, a strong fermented grain tea that eased me from my state of unrelenting embarrassment. My bed is a cotton stuffed mat on the floor next to the mat Sir's daughter and his niece are sharing. They gave me all the best blankets in the house.
Before bed, the girls showed me the house alter , the butter carvings, the Gods. I gave them cookies and oranges. They asked about me, was I married? No. I showed them a picture of "boyfriend". I looked for a picture of Carson in his gho. They thought he was handsome. It is weird embracing and embellishing about something so new. Is this real? I keep asking myself. Who are you? I keep asking him.
Pema made me come in here to the living room. To have tea. Now I am entertaining a little one- we are counting to five in English and Dzongka. Five oranges and Guavas, and singing happy birthday.
The mountains are foggy this morning. I can see we are nestled in between terraced rice fields and steep slopes. It is warm enough here for the fruit to grow. I rolled up my bed like the others and came to brush my teeth by the tap with Madam. She wishes she could speak more English, and I think she is embarrassed to talk with me. I wish she wasn't. It is okay with me to just try, I want so badly to be able to communicate with this family.
* * * *
I am on my second cup of milk tea by the fire. Today is the domchay. It is a cool morning with fog hugging the mountains.
Last night, I had a stone bath with the family. They heat huge rocks in the fire for hours, and then put them into a big wooden bathtub outside under an orange tree. The rocks steam and hiss, and boil the water, releasing sulphur and minerals. When it came to my turn, the Ama and Kinley washed my back and hair for me. We sniffed orange leaves and laughed together. Ama said I looked happy in the water. It's true. I am always happy in the water. Kinley would get out and stark naked, pick up stones with the massive tongs to put into our large wooden bath. We sat for a long time. Ama spoke in Dzongka, and Kinley explained that before I left, the family would sift the rice and prepare a bag to take back to Phobjikha with me.
Ama said she wanted me always to have enough rice.
* I apologize for any errors in the Dzongka spelling, it is an outrageously difficult language to spell!
Enter the outhouse, pull my pants down, a soft thud, and my phone lands in a smushy pile of shit. Seriously.
The whole family is talking about it. I have just arrived, I am definitely drunk after pounding back a Druk 1100 by myself while the family watched and waited before climbing the precarious cliff side to their home. And the first thing I do is drop my phone into a years worth of excrement. Sir thinks that I am used to luxuries, that it is his rustic bathroom's fault that my phone is covered in shit. I understand that it is because I am an IDIOT.
I had been waiting for a text from Carson.
It is true, the phone has been rescued. It is also true, it smells like shit. For real, like people poo. A poo phone. The kids are taking turns smelling it and laughing hysterically.
They washed it. Soaked it, probably with soap. I don't even know what to say. Electronics don't like to be washed, but I can't blame them! Just now, they are drying it out. They shook it for several minutes, flinging water everywhere. Now it lays by the fire drying, until tomorrow Miss, I am told.
Tomorrow. I am supposed to be here now, cut off from everything I know. Why?
* * * *
I spent my morning learning Kuru, darts, and shaking oranges and guavas down from the trees outside on the mountain slopes. The kids are so cute, they are nervous to use English with me. That will be my first order of business at the school; make them comfortable. Interchange words, from Dzongka to English. Again and again.
The house is beautiful, Sir and his wife are so kind and gracious. After last night's phone fiasco they sent me to bed with a blessed cup of warm bumchung, a strong fermented grain tea that eased me from my state of unrelenting embarrassment. My bed is a cotton stuffed mat on the floor next to the mat Sir's daughter and his niece are sharing. They gave me all the best blankets in the house.
Before bed, the girls showed me the house alter , the butter carvings, the Gods. I gave them cookies and oranges. They asked about me, was I married? No. I showed them a picture of "boyfriend". I looked for a picture of Carson in his gho. They thought he was handsome. It is weird embracing and embellishing about something so new. Is this real? I keep asking myself. Who are you? I keep asking him.
Pema made me come in here to the living room. To have tea. Now I am entertaining a little one- we are counting to five in English and Dzongka. Five oranges and Guavas, and singing happy birthday.
The mountains are foggy this morning. I can see we are nestled in between terraced rice fields and steep slopes. It is warm enough here for the fruit to grow. I rolled up my bed like the others and came to brush my teeth by the tap with Madam. She wishes she could speak more English, and I think she is embarrassed to talk with me. I wish she wasn't. It is okay with me to just try, I want so badly to be able to communicate with this family.
* * * *
I am on my second cup of milk tea by the fire. Today is the domchay. It is a cool morning with fog hugging the mountains.
Last night, I had a stone bath with the family. They heat huge rocks in the fire for hours, and then put them into a big wooden bathtub outside under an orange tree. The rocks steam and hiss, and boil the water, releasing sulphur and minerals. When it came to my turn, the Ama and Kinley washed my back and hair for me. We sniffed orange leaves and laughed together. Ama said I looked happy in the water. It's true. I am always happy in the water. Kinley would get out and stark naked, pick up stones with the massive tongs to put into our large wooden bath. We sat for a long time. Ama spoke in Dzongka, and Kinley explained that before I left, the family would sift the rice and prepare a bag to take back to Phobjikha with me.
Ama said she wanted me always to have enough rice.
* I apologize for any errors in the Dzongka spelling, it is an outrageously difficult language to spell!
Monday, January 31, 2011
Dragon Roots
We were soaring high above the clouds when I first saw the peaks of the Himalayas. There, high up in the clouds, the stark darkness of the mountains cut through our soft cushion and reached for us. And we, tiny little creatures in a plane flew straight toward them.
The Captain actually came on to the intercom to inform us that we would be landing in 15 minutes, and by the by, if we see mountains closer to us than we ever have before, please do no be alarmed. Well, given that we had just dove through the cloud cover and were now weaving our way in between the mountains, this was a wee challenge. But it was also and incredible rush; I couldn't believe that people actually live here, fly planes here, farm and create families here on these inclines, this land of edges.
From Paro airport, which is the tiniest and most quaint airport I have ever seen in my life, we made our way to Thimpu. We have been here now at Dragon Roots Hotel for almost two weeks; eating chilies as vegetables (ema datse), drinking distilled rice wine with cooked egg and butter (arra), learning the basics of the national language (Dzongka), completing paperwork and preparing for our adjustment to our postings, the education system, and the culture.
We've met the minister of education and had dinners with all sorts of "important" people. This country is really funny, its all about the privilege of being here, and of loving it here, and of being able to SURVIVE here. I'm not joking! We have been buying supplies for the last week, trying to put together what we need for our rural postings. Water boilers and filters, blankets, dishes, heaters, food and school stuff... it never ends. We are trying to prepare for torrential monsoon rains, incredible cold, lack of electricity, rats, bugs, tree leeches, no fridges, teaching 6 days a week, loneliness, it goes on.
They are worried about me because they stuck me in the coldest place (being a winnipegger), so I am buying a woodstove to have installed in my apartment. I am looking forward to it. I cant believe this is actually happening. Sometimes I wake in the morning and feel frightened by the proximity of the mountains. It cuts a panic deep into me, thinking of the isolation and the ease of being forgotten here in this crevice, and it goes down deep. It feels fierce, like their angry gods painted on everything and the dragons everywhere. It feels like I have crawled into the mouth of a dragon.
The Captain actually came on to the intercom to inform us that we would be landing in 15 minutes, and by the by, if we see mountains closer to us than we ever have before, please do no be alarmed. Well, given that we had just dove through the cloud cover and were now weaving our way in between the mountains, this was a wee challenge. But it was also and incredible rush; I couldn't believe that people actually live here, fly planes here, farm and create families here on these inclines, this land of edges.
From Paro airport, which is the tiniest and most quaint airport I have ever seen in my life, we made our way to Thimpu. We have been here now at Dragon Roots Hotel for almost two weeks; eating chilies as vegetables (ema datse), drinking distilled rice wine with cooked egg and butter (arra), learning the basics of the national language (Dzongka), completing paperwork and preparing for our adjustment to our postings, the education system, and the culture.
We've met the minister of education and had dinners with all sorts of "important" people. This country is really funny, its all about the privilege of being here, and of loving it here, and of being able to SURVIVE here. I'm not joking! We have been buying supplies for the last week, trying to put together what we need for our rural postings. Water boilers and filters, blankets, dishes, heaters, food and school stuff... it never ends. We are trying to prepare for torrential monsoon rains, incredible cold, lack of electricity, rats, bugs, tree leeches, no fridges, teaching 6 days a week, loneliness, it goes on.
They are worried about me because they stuck me in the coldest place (being a winnipegger), so I am buying a woodstove to have installed in my apartment. I am looking forward to it. I cant believe this is actually happening. Sometimes I wake in the morning and feel frightened by the proximity of the mountains. It cuts a panic deep into me, thinking of the isolation and the ease of being forgotten here in this crevice, and it goes down deep. It feels fierce, like their angry gods painted on everything and the dragons everywhere. It feels like I have crawled into the mouth of a dragon.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Blue Blue Sky
Inside this joy, I am sometimes sad about my constant state of change. Of travel, of obsession with culture, and most of all, my affinity with leaving.
I just don't know any way else to be.
I am fueled and propelled by the dreams of my family and friends. By the way they see me, changing...
I come back, then I dream bigger. Then I go, come back, and dream bigger.
Now I meet others who have aged doing this, and I am afraid I am as lawless as them...As temporary? As ink-less as this damn computer.
So glad I came out to the island. On the boat ride back, I could see off to an edge of the world I had never seen before. Where the sea and the sky meet, in an infinite sparkle, and I am swallowed.
And on the beach, I stare off into the ocean for hours. Like the others here, given a rare chance to be okay with life, with all my experiences and thoughts. How can you not be okay when staring into the twinkling 10 karat ocean under the blue, blue sky?
The sand here is so fine it slips into every crevice and coats the skin a soft white. And nothing annoys me, not the mould on my roof, not the sand in my bed, not even the burning garbage outside of my bungalow.
This is Thailand. Just smile, and every little thing will be alright.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Waiting in Bangkok
It is not clear to me what I am waiting for either, except to get myself physically to Bhutan. I think I am already there mentally.
It is like waiting for a needle. Or perhaps something more pleasant. There is anxiousness though; I am eager to have a home in which to unpack my bags of insanity.
Bangkok is a good place to wait. There are always things to do; attempt the chilies in the street food, navigate the used-shoes, stolen phones and Buddha relics in the markets, watch a beautiful breasted transexual Celine Dion gracefully stave off drunks while lip singing in a late night drag show. You know, whatever...
It is like waiting for a needle. Or perhaps something more pleasant. There is anxiousness though; I am eager to have a home in which to unpack my bags of insanity.
Bangkok is a good place to wait. There are always things to do; attempt the chilies in the street food, navigate the used-shoes, stolen phones and Buddha relics in the markets, watch a beautiful breasted transexual Celine Dion gracefully stave off drunks while lip singing in a late night drag show. You know, whatever...
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