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.