Category Archives: Around Town

Around Town, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections

The Olympics of Self-Quarantine

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EDITORS NOTE: Back in late May, just as this post was ready to be published, so many things happened, frontlined by the tragic murder of George Floyd and the uprisings against racial injustice that followed. All of my blog posts were delayed in coming weeks, which became months of more surprises, transitions, public reckoning, and adjustment. So for now, thanks for reading along as I catch up on unpublished entries from the intervening time.

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Here we all are nearly two months in to this bizarre reality. The team in Nepal have all been working from home, and we meet daily for a morning and evening call. I join the evening call in Nepal every day at my 7:15am in Connecticut, and getting up each day for our call has been the ordering event of my American quarantine experience, forcing me to maintain a routine that starts early each morning with human connection on the other side of the world.

The number of Covid cases reported in Nepal is still low, but major cities are on complete lockdown, with police in the streets. In Kaskikot and most of our rural working areas, it seems people are going about their daily business – corn planting season has just ended – but transportation and commerce are mostly shut down. There is a worry that Covid cases may only be starting to hit a rise now, as the first deaths have just occurred; but it is hard to know how the lack of testing, reporting and accessibility to hospitals in so much of the country plays in to the accuracy of data on case prevalence.

One particularly interesting discovery is that Nepal seems to have largely based its quarantine strategy on an extremely well-rehearsed protocol for political shut downs. Political strikes have been the main style of public dissent (or social control, depending on your point of view) for the last 25 years in Nepal. When a strike, or “bandh” (“closing”) is instituted, transportation, schools and businesses are closed, people mostly stay home, and if you need to go somewhere, you walk.  Depending on who has called the strike, and the level of power and uncertainty involved, police may patrol the streets to ask what business you are out for and decide whether or not to send you back home.

And for the moment, it seems this is more or less the same strategy that has been enthusiastically deployed for Covid prevention.

On the plus side, Nepali people are pretty used to the bandh-style quarantine. Back when I first started visiting Nepal in the early 2000’s during the civil war, bhandhs were imposed almost weekly by either the Maoists or the government. After the overthrow of the Monarchy in 2006, a notable effect was a bandh-free-for-all whereby any sub group with a pending discontent of any kind would call for a strike: drivers striked to protest fuel prices, teachers striked to protest salaries. In 2012, a series of strikes broke out across the country when the Parliament was trying to move to a federalist political system, and ethnic groups as small as 150 people called for closings to demand representation in a new state constitution. One sub-group would strike one day and everything would be closed, and the next day, everything would stay closed but now on behalf of the responding strike by another sub-group. And because bhandhs are shut downs (not simply a refusal to work), these protests were widely understood to mean that the entire public was to stay home.  So everybody would just stay in their houses or go for short walks until everyone with something to say was done striking.

With some exceptions, that is—such as the Gurung strike in Pokhara during the 2012 series, which involved both policed closures and exuberant Gurung dancing and singing at the empty traffic intersection in Mahendrapul. Which was followed later in the week by a Brahamin strike and corresponding displays of cultural force.

All of which is to say, in Nepal coronavirus has met the Olympic World Champions of self-quarantine. However I’d like to also report that for the sake of the global pandemic, a few fantastic additions have been made. Topping the charts, we have these people-catcher-thingies on long poles. Really. See for yourself. This terrific solution ensures police don’t have to potentially touch covid-y pedestrians who are found to be walking without cause or ID, and I am so glad it has had occasion to be invented and put on the internet.

As to our daily team meetings: in the odd dream of a halted, people-catcher filled world, with all primary health care either paused or redirected to coronavirus response, the tinny voices of my colleagues over Viber each morning has helped to maintain a sense of movement while most of our work and so much of the world stands still. We’ve challenged each other to home exercise goals and used our office messaging system to share videos of our respective jump roping efforts (Rajendra impressively did his with a traditional namlo rope used to carry baskets). We employed our dental technicians to make personal phone calls to all the patients in their registers to go over Covid-prevention guidelines. We began a home-made mask campaign.

We have also, finally, taken this time to launch our youtube channel. There is a huge variety of content here: tours of our clinics, cute kids doing school brushing programs, samples of community outreach parent discussions and child-friendly dental care in schools, some words from a village chairman about our project, and my personal favorite: the annual Oral Health Bhailo competition, where schools record traditional bhailo songs on the to topic of oral health during the festival of Tihar (seriously, these are devastatingly adorable). These videos really bring the people and places we work with to life and we’d love you to click around and visit us at home in Nepal! (And better yet, please subscribe to our channel!)

After all, we’re gonna be in this for a while. It’s a great time to connect.

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America, Around Town, Earthquake, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections, Work

A House of Mirrors

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These past few weeks, I increasingly find myself reliving the morning of April 25, 2015, when my phone woke me at 6:30am. I rolled over and Prem was on the line: a 7.8 magnitude earthquake had ripped through Nepal. I stumbled to the kitchen table in my slippers and didn’t move for what seemed like days. The papers were covered with images of fallen temples that were whole in my albums, with tent cities at familiar outdoor intersections in Kathmandu, with maps seen from high above and covered in digital markings. It was a long time before anyone could capture photos of people, especially in the rural expanses of the country, which were accessible only by helicopter for what seemed like ages. But in my mind’s eye the earthquake was a long, long parade of individuals. Today, I reread the email I sent out three days later.

It is a strange feeling to find the whole planet in crisis. Population-level disasters of this scale seem to disproportionately fall upon the shoulders and homes and rivers of the world’s most vulnerable places, while the other places try to help. In the years I have worked in Nepal, Nepali people have plodded on through civil war, three major government transitions, annual landslides and floods and hail, the 2015 earthquake, water shortages and electricity outages up to sixteen hours a day for years on end, and of course, the daily vulnerability of chronic poverty, weak infrastructure, and floppy safety regulations. The road to Kaskikot has had three bus accidents in the time I have considered it my second home. I remember thinking after the earthquake, as I watched messages flood my accounts, that people didn’t realize how often Nepal’s communities were used to seeing things broken, taken, lost, or never having existed in the first place. The earthquake was unthinkably horrible. Yet for those who didn’t lose everything–people, entire villages–that trauma was largely swallowed within a few months by massive shortages of petrol and goods due to political instability and border closings. The summer brought deadly landslides. Six months later, most of the country was no longer discussing the earthquake.

These last few weeks have been an odd, house-of-mirrors experience. While Nepal is facing pandemic, New York City and Milan and Barcelona and Sydney are also facing pandemic. My colleagues are quarantined in Pokhara and Kaskikot and Tilhar, and I’m quarantined in Hartford, and Prince Charles is quarantined in London. The realization that anything could happen to anyone at any moment has set upon us all, a realization that seems to be expanding daily. And amidst a great deal of chaos and uncertainty and worry, I find myself in occasional moments of disconcerting calm. Things were always this way. Now they are simply unveiled. We are all the defenseless Other.

Now as then, there is great beauty to uncover in difficult times. In the months after the earthquake five years ago, we improvised. I have no idea how many kilometers Dilmaya and I walked. Practically speaking, I learned a huge amount about the contributions a small community-based organization like ours can offer in disaster management. At that time we found we were well placed to spend personalized time on unique household and community circumstances, to mitigate challenges that didn’t meet a universal disaster threshold but were extremely destabilizing for the specific individuals facing them. Our focus became “the lower percentage of damage:” the houses that were not fallen, but cracked and indeterminately unsafe. It was a life-changing experience.

Every day this week I’ve joined in a group call with my colleagues in Nepal as they work from home, developing a strategy to redirect our rural health care personnel from dentistry to coronavirus. Since we launched our Dental Hub app in September, hundreds of patients and their phone numbers have been entered in our database, so our first step is having dental technicians replace their weekly clinics with “phone clinics,” calling every patient in the database. We’ve created a script for checking in with each family to see how well they’ve been able to implement isolation guidelines and what if any obstacles are in the way. We don’t yet know how this will go or how useful it will be, but it’s something to do. It’s a way to be in community.

All that said…the 2015 earthquake was irreconcilably different than the looming crisis we are facing now. To begin with, the rest of the planet is occupied with its own emergency, not fundraising and overloading the aid channels in Nepal with variably useful assistance strategies. Second, Nepal’s health care system was inadequate to meet public need before coronavirus, and there is effectively no intensive care available for severe Covid-19 cases. So even though there are so far very few confirmed coronavirus cases in Nepal, I am still trying to understand how “flattening the curve” works in a health care system where the capacity threshold is fairly close to zero. We don’t know the answer, if there is one. I’m not sure yet if anyone does.

Like many of us, I can’t help but wonder how we would understand our society if we felt this vulnerable and interdependent all the time. It is deeply unfamliar to us in the dominant American culture–replacing the community of work-productivity with the community of survival. Confronting the primacy of the nuclear family, when that family is cut off from neighbors, schools, social supports, food production, occupation, and future planning. This discomfort feels worthy of deep and shared reflection. In the mean time, I have made a call list, and have been doing one quality catch-up each day with someone I’ve missed, or who I want to make sure isn’t alone.

For whatever reason I also found myself drawn back this week to this poem, written during the (still unresolved) family separation crisis at the US border in the summer of 2018. I hope to use coming weeks to catch up on past entries and continue posting about the unfolding of this pandemic Nepal on my blog. In the mean time, wishing all of you patience and resilience and comfort as we, as a world, navigate the weeks and months ahead.

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At the Base of a Tree

The cicadas came when I was five
behind the school yard.
I put my finger on one
and then I picked it up
it was like a fig, dark and rough.

At five cicadas were interesting, like figs.

Now I am much bigger
friendly, the little goat nuzzles my shoulder with his warm snout
soft, we are alive, together easily.
And then I press my eyes shut
as I capture the insect that has invaded this carpet, which is mine
because I own it.

Sometimes I wonder how I can find my way back
from the pliant kid to the figs to the cicadas, captivated
with all their legs, their slick ribbed shells, all their songs enchanting
the school yard
all chirping and chirping tickling my ears until my ears overflowed with music
amid the crunching leaves and delicate wings
a symphony, a society, a universe blossom
after seventeen years of silence.

Sometimes I wonder
what we are afraid of
why we crush things, bugs and leaves and oceans and people
when I was five, I used
just one tiny finger
to say hello.

 

 

 

Around Town, Nepal Life, Oral Health Care Project, Work

A Piece of Christmas Cake

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For about two years now, we have been hard at work lobbing the new province government for health policy that includes primary oral health care. I’ve found myself hesitant to blog about many of the twists and turns in this aspect of our journey because political issues feel so sensitive while they are unfolding. And yet this phase of our adventure has produced some of the most colorful, absurd, harrowing and triumphant experiences we’ve ever experienced. Advocacy is, after all, a combination of showing up at government offices, making connections, making connections from connections, inviting people out to see our work, giving presentations, writing policy recommendations, rewriting policy recommendations, cajoling officials for meetings to discuss policy recommendations, and drinking tons and tons of tea and coffee over many coffee tables. These activities are exciting enough in a well-established, stable government. We are working with a government that is has been in perpetual transition for decades, with roads that wash out, with wise men and power saris, with astrological events that dictate the movements of both presidents and wedding parties.

I mean, all kinds of things happen. It is a shame not to tell you about some of them, some of the time.

Recently, we had a breakthrough: Province #4, ours, re-established a previously defunct “Basic Oral Health Training” for primary care providers. We spent almost all of the summer of 2018 madly campaigning for this training. The five provinces of Nepal and the provincial government structure itself had at that time only recently been established – prior to 2017, the federal government was sub-divided by 75 districts – and it would still be some time before personnel had their job parameters defined in the new structure. But our efforts that summer eventually paid off, and recently, through a winding chain of events and people, writes and rewrites, submissions and resubmissions, and patience possible only thanks to some amount of beer, a province-level Basic Oral Health Training budget training descended from the heights of government.

The training is not actually designed yet, so it is fragile and easily gutted, but this also our first major policy breakthrough at a high level of government. It taught us a ton about collaboration, persistence, and the emerging structure of Nepal’s new decentralized governance structure. Even this small-big step would have been impossible to accomplish by working alone.

So this winter, our sights are trained on the Province Training Centre, where the official Basic Oral Health Training will be delivered. This training has a long history in Nepal that I will share at a later time; suffice to say that the essential focus of Jevaia over the last decade has been implementation of care after health care workers have taken Basic Oral Health training that’s provided outside our organization. So by nature, our role has involved a lot further training and refining of skills. If there’s one thing we’ve been up to our, um, teeth in (sorry it was too easy), it’s training and professional support for midlevel providers to do “basic oral health care” in Nepal’s primary care system. That’s why we exist, and it’s how all of our health post clinics and community programs survive against tremendous headwinds.

Now, as you can see this is all very serious business, and our recent meeting at the Province Training Centre rose to the gravity of the occasion. With this shiny, hopeful budget allocated, it is essential that we lobby for a training program that reflects what we’ve learned in over a decade of up-skilling midlevel providers to deliver rural oral health care. So we printed out materials. We reviewed key strategic points. We went to the Province training center.

“You guys!” Rajendra, our Medical Coordinator, cried as we crossed the threshold of the Province Training Centre, examining his feet with a mix of alarm and delight and curiosity that is unique in this world to Rajendra. “I’ve worn the office slippers!” He giggled, and then looked shocked, and then giggled again. Indeed, a brief review of Rajendra’s feet confirmed that he was in fact wearing a pair of the shower shoes we use inside our carpeted office, and his sneakers were still safely stowed on the shoe rack by the office door.

I began to giggle too. “Maybe nobody will notice?” I said.

“Sita Ram sir!” Rajendra announced to our Program Director, excitedly. “I’m wearing the office slippers!” He couldn’t help it. He’ll agree with me when he reads this.

We were led in to the office of the government’s oral health Training Coordinator, where we left our shoes and shower slippers at the door, conspicuously not blending together.

We had a lengthy, complex, and sometimes coded meeting with the Training Coordinator. We were thrilled to find out that a technical working group is to be formed and we are invited to send a representative. The Training Coordinator requested that we also submit an evidence basis for our recommendations, and I will spend the next week compiling a selection of scientific literature around an “augmented Basic Package of Oral Care.” (For you nerds out there, the BPOC was developed with the support of the World Health Organization back around 2003 and is well documented in the literature; meaning we didn’t invent it, our business is to translate it in to practice in the face of real-world challenges.)

From the Training Centre, we re-donned our shower slippers and moved to the Health Division, the government department the Training Centre sits under. There, at the door, we ran in to none other than our past Jevaia program director! Nabaraj now works as a training coordinator in the province offices – perhaps a hopeful sign for us. We were warmly welcomed and led in to a cavernous office with an enormous with a desk at one end, and, per Standard Operating Procedure, tons of couches arranged against all free wall space. The couches were populated by a dozen or so visitors, people we didn’t know, who were both together and separately in an ambiguous state of meeting with the official we had come to see: The Health Directorate.

We took up arbitrary seats on couches where seats were available. This scattered Sita Ram far on a westward couch, while Rajendra, Rajendra’s shower slippers, and I secured side by side perches on an eastward couch. From there on out, in order for us to talk to Sita Ram, we had to either sign or speak very loudly over cross-talk from the northward visitors, who occupied the longest line of couches and either were or were not meeting with the Health Directorate, and may or may not have all been a single group with a unified agenda. There was no way to tell. Luckily, our former director Nabaraj was able to sit nearby me, on the adjacent westward couch, with only a fat faux-leather arm separating us, which made for good chatting and time to assess the situation.

We remained in this configuration for some time, until the room quieted and, based on a cue I could not identify, the Health Directorate affably invited us to introduce ourselves.

All of the people on all of the couches remained at their stations as we took the floor from our arbitrary seats among them.

Sita Ram went first, and then Rajendra. And then it fell to me to introduce myself and provide a general history and outline of our project, and why we were at the Health Division. In Nepali, with all the important couches watching.

The Health Directorate was gracious and curious. He asked us a series of astute questions about the need for primary oral health services in Nepal and about evidence and evaluation for our project model. He has a PhD in the sciences and absorbed our answers thoughtfully.

“You are here,” he said, “at the right time.”

We held our breaths. This was a good start.

Suddenly, the door opened and a group of men walked in.

All the heads on all the couches rotated toward the door.

“Namaskar, sir!” exclaimed a young, brisk man at the front of the group. The Health Directorate rose to meet them.

“We have brought you” –the young man held out a package, importantly– “a Christmas Cake!”

A murmur rippled across all of the couches of people. The Health Directorate reached out to receive a festive box. He thanked the men profusely. Without disrupting our key role as a riveted audience, I was able to lean over to Nabaraj and deduce that the men had come from a local hotel where the government hosts many of its meetings and gatherings.

“A Christmas Cake!” exclaimed the Health Directorate. “How wonderful!”

“How wonderful!” hummed the Couch Sea.

It was decided in short order to adjourn to the next room for Cristmas Cake. The entire room of people rose and passed through a door behind the Health Directorate’s desk, which led us in to a board room with a long, shiny table. The Health Directorate sat down at the head of the table; Rajendra, Sita Ram and I took seats all the way near the other end, and the as-yet-unidentified substantial company filled up the positions in between. The hoteliers huddled around the Health Directorate and bowed their heads over the Christmas Cake box, which was opened delicately to reveal a white iced fruit-cake with a neat candy-cane trim.

Paper plates were produced out of nowhere.

The Health Directorate began the careful process of dividing the roughly 6-inch cake in to precisely calibrated slices for the large room of attendees. Each offering was gravely placed upon a paper plate and passed to the right. Each person then continued passing the plate until it had circulated the long board table and ended up with the person sitting to the left of the Health Directorate. The Christmas Cake circulation continued thusly until all had been served. To the best of my knowledge, there was not a single Christian in the room, including me.

“What delicious Christmas Cake,” we cooed in turn.

Back at the office later, everyone wasted no time in celebrating the shower slippers for their trip to the Province Offices today. “How’d it go?” the rest of the team asked.

“Amazing,” we said. “We have no idea what happened.”

I sat down at my desk to begin compiling our package of research articles.

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Around Town, Nepal Life, Oral Health Care Project, Work

Cash on Delivery

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As the start of our winter Professional Development session approaches, it’s time for me to bite the bullet and shell out a bunch of cash for a pile of tablets for an App we’re developing. Teaching clinical teams how to use the app will be the focus of the first part of our upcoming workshop.

The problem is the tablet-acquiring part is…a bit intimidating. At home, I’d search options on the internet and then probably order a few different options, which would arrive at the door with an option for 30-day free returns. But I will shamelessly admit that when it comes to Nepal, I have no idea how to do this. I know how to do stuff that involves baskets, ropes, and misplaced stretches of mud…but I do not know how to do a normal officey thing I am in charge of, such as acquire some expensive pieces of unfamiliar technology.

I asked Muna, our Program Manager Who Literally Fixes Anything, how and where one buys a pile of tablets in Nepal. We were hoping for something with a little flexibility on standard retail price, since we’d be needing 5-7 of them to start.

Muna, did I mention she Literally Fixes Anything, told me about a site called Daraz.com where I could order things on the internet to my house. Or our office. I was floored. Internet ordering is a thing in Nepal? Where the heck have I been? Muna explained to me excitedly that they literally bring it TO YOUR DOOR.  Right to your very own door! And then, you pay for it there. If you don’t want it, you return it with the courier.

“The courier?”

“A person brings it.”

“You order it on the internet and a person brings it? But how do they find you?” I was pretty sure this wasn’t happening through the regular mail system.

“They call.”

I just want to point out that, while a postal service certainly exists in Nepal, most houses don’t have street addresses, and a minimum of streets go by name (that anyone uses or that command street signs), and a large percentage of the houses and streets that do exist were only recently built, and in the majority of the country there are a minimum of streets altogether.

“Are you sure this works?”

“I use it all the time,” Muna said, becoming excited again by the phenomenon of internet ordering. “It’s cash on delivery.”

We looked on daraz.com and ordered five $280 tablets to Ravi’s office in Kathmandu. I arrived in Kathmandu a day later, a week before our training was to start, intending to return with both our trainer (Bethy) and the highly necessary tablets. By this time Daraz.com had called Muna, and Muna began relaying messages between the company, Ravi, and me. At first everything seemed fine. Then Daraz explained that they had the five tablets, but needed to get them out to a store where the courier would pick them up and bring them to Ravi’s office. Or my hotel. Or wherever we asked them to come on the day that they would call us, some time soon, having secured the assets through the official processes.

“Are these going to get here on time?” I asked Muna. She knows things. Admittedly we’d ordered the tablets at the last minute, and even on-time things are almost never fast things. And I seriously doubt that Daraz often receives orders for a heap of five tablets at once.

“Let’s see?”

While the tablets whereabouts remained uncertain, Bethy did arrive as planned from Cambodia.  We spent an afternoon with Ravi to map out our training plan for next week. By Sunday, I was starting to worry. I started calling around in Kathmandu to see about buying some tablets from a show floor, something that in my mind was randomly assigned as a more feasible activity in Kathmandu than Pokhara.  We ended up locating a completely obvious strip of cell technology stores around the corner from New Road. I called Muna and told her we were going on an expedition to find the tablets ourselves.

“If I find them, we can cancel the order, right?” I asked her.

“I called to ask, and they said that when the courier shows up, we just say we don’t want them.”

My mouth opened and closed for a few seconds. “It’s seventeen hundred dollars of merchandise!”

“I know, it doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what they said.”

Just to be clear, I’m not telling this story as a lesson in how things don’t work in Nepal. To the contrary, this is exactly how things work in Nepal. The internet company wasn’t trying to give us the run around, they were just trying to figure out how to find a guy who could get his hands on the pile of pricey tablets we wanted and get them to our guy in a short period of time. Without street names. In a cash economy.

Bethy and I set off to New Road to begin the in-person search. If I’d been more savvy, I’d have known from the start that we should have gone to New Road: as we rounded a corner, there before us, like Oz, was a fairlyand of Samsung and Oppo and Huwaei stores packed together for a block and a half. We walked in and out of them pricing out different tablets, including the one we’d possibly or possibly not ordered online, and when we thought we’d settled on a winner, we wandered in to one last alley for a final try.

There we met Ravi #2, who presented us with our final and ultimately champion tablet, a simpler and smaller version than everything else we’d located. At about 40% of the price.

“I’m a movie star,” Ravi #2 said.

He is. Look him up.

“Here’s a video of me,” Ravi #2 said offhandedly, handing us his phone, his Bieber coif spilling over his brow glamorously but without obstructing his vision. We bent our heads over the small screen, which showed our tablet salesman serenading a beautiful woman on a bridge.

“I’m not the singer,” Ravi #2 admitted. “Just the actor.”

I withdrew a heap of cash from the ATM and forked it over. While five separate people bustled about unpacking our tablets in order to fill out warranty cards, add screen covers, and repack them, we waited and chatted with Movie Star Ravi. He reclined on his stool, a physically not possible thing that only Nepali movies stars can do.

“Do you know my pal Mahesh? He’s a movie star also,” I volunteered.

Why yes, Ravi #2 did know Mahesh, the brother of our field officer Gaurab (the human). Gaurab and Mahesh are both from Kaskikot and I’ve known Mahesh since he was a kid, and even produced a radio story about his robot-making career before he was a movie star with Ravi #2. His father Thakur was one of the founders of Jevaia Oral Health Care back when it was Kaski Oral Health Care, a bazillion years ago.

“Small world,” I said. “You should consider a further discount, considering that Mahesh’s family is closely involved with the very worthy project that these tablets are for.”

“Sorry,” Ravi the Movie Star said. “But here’s my number. Call if you have any problems with the tablets and I’ll get them fixed right away.”

We needed tablet covers.

Ravi the Movie Star didn’t have any tablet covers, but he gave us the name of a shop in another part of the city about a mile away. Obediently I put it in my GPS and Bethy and I set off at a fast clip, racing against the gathering dusk, the new tablets in my bag. In no time the main thoroughfare of Cell Phone Oz had narrowed, then faded away behind us and deposited us in to the heart of Kathmandu’s old, cloistered Newar alleys. Ornate wooden windows leaned precariously in over our heads, while vendors presided over every vegetable and shoe and devotional item imaginable, and as we dashed alternately through crowds and crowded passageways it seemed unlikely that we were headed closer to tablet covers. Night fell, and the cobbled paths and squares became lit by yellow squares falling out of spice stalls, flickering lamps dotting the pavement where vendors had spread out their treasures. We sped through, dodging colored blobs in our path like marbles rolling through a game.

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Out the mouth of a maze we arrived, suddenly, at the destination on Ravi the Movie Star had directed us to, and Lo and behold, there before us was a shop with exactly the name he had provided.

It sold a lot of stuff, but none of the stuff was tablet covers.

We turned around and went back in to the din. We wove about, passing up vacuum cleaners and suitcases and incense and frilly skirts. Surely, somebody, somewhere among all these objects, had some simple tablet co—-

And there it was. Bending off the laid stone path and its hoard of pounding feet was a harshly lit corridor of electronic gadgetry shops that contained four bazillion types of cell paraphernalia. At the end of it, positioned in such a way that suggested anybody arriving must surely be doing so at the end of a great pilgrimage, was a casual shop crammed with phone covers. A woman sat among them as if, obviously, we had been on the way and due to arrive at some point, whenever.  Inexplicably, she had only one type of tablet cover, in one size, and it was a size that fit our efficient little mini-tablets.

“We’ll take five,” I said.

We packed them up, shoved them in our now very full backpacks, and set off on the last part of our expedition through Bishal Bazaar and Ason, butter lamps burning what seemed like everywhere in the lively chill.

“Muna,” I said over the phone a little later, “I’ve secured our tablets. We can cancel the online order.”

“Where did you find them?” she asked.

…You know…streets?

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Around Town, Nepal Life, Oral Health Care Project, Work

Airport Gymnastics

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Bethy and I are on our way to Thailand to present at the International Association of Dental Research Conference in Da Nang, Vietnam.  We are on a panel about “Behavioral Science and Health Sciences,” me to present about Jevaia as a social justice project and Bethy to talk about a system she developed for school-based health care in Cambodia.  Between us, let’s call Bethy the scientist. She plans ahead. She calculates things such as time and has an external battery pack with every configuration of port imaginable and a rubberized exterior that could withstand a nuclear attack, and she brings it with her almost everywhere.  Bethy is a prepared and organized kind of person. I’m what we could call…the artist. I hit snooze 4 times and borrow chargers from nice people along the way. I don’t travel without chocolate.

We meet in Thailand, the mutual transit point on our respective journeys from Nepal and Cambodia to Vietnam.  The next afternoon, at Bethy’s urging we’ve arrived at the airport a solid two hours before our short international flight from Bangkok to Da Nang.  How planny of us. As we are checking in, the clerk asks us to display our visas for Vietnam.

We are both surprised.  Even the scientist! With our American and New Zeland passports, we thought we could purchase visas on arrival in Vietnam.  This is somewhat true, the airline agent tells us. However, there is a new process that requires visitors to submit an online application ahead of time and bring an electronic visa approval to immigration upon landing.  Without the approval, we aren’t allowed on plane.

Well then.  This is awkward.

The Airline Agent informs us politely that we have 47 minutes before check in closes.  I get my phone connected to the WiFi and start googling around for how to apply for a visa to Vietnam.  I find a website called Vietnam Visa Online (lovely name, quite to the point) that says this can be done with approval rushed to one hour, for a fee of only $500.

While I’m poking at my phone looking for a less pricey extortion option, Bethy assures the Airline Agent that we’ll definitely have no problem completing the required process in 47 minutes or less.  I tap madly at my phone screen, and we decide to go for a rush fee that’s only $100 and might or might not get us the visas in time. I click send. Bethy stalls with the Airline Agent. The check-in line shrinks, I hit refresh on my phone, and by now our window has diminished to 13 minutes.

…Tick tick tick…check in closes.

But not before Bethy casually softens the Airline Agent in to printing out a document that shows we arrived on time, and woos her in to walking us over to another desk where we can stare at my email waiting for the visa approval to arrive on the basis of our $100 rushfee. A new Airline Agent looks delighted that our problem has been moved over to her counter, where I set down my phone and Bethy and I peer deeply in to its icons.  We wait.  Airline Agent #2 waits.

An email!  Is it our visa approvals?  No. It’s a reply stating that due to the fact of today being Saturday, urgent processing isn’t possible.  However, we do have an attractive option to pay another $300 to get the visa approval today, or we can certainly wait in Thailand until Monday.

We kind of have no choice but to do the extra-special saturday rush fee, which has been specifically designed, after all, for suckers like us.  So we pay the fee, and then the screen freezes, and we can’t tell if we’ve paid $300 or not. I get an email saying that we can call an office in Vietnam with questions. But honestly, who has questions?   

Calling Vietnam would be a fine idea except that neither of us has phone cards that work in Thailand, so I ask Airline Agent #2 if she can call the Vietnam Visa Online from a land line.  She says the airline has no way to make international calls.  “But you’re an airline,” I point out. This doesn’t change anything, since apparently Asia Air actually cannot make an international call to a mysterious Visa processing office in Vietnam. I deduce this because eventually, Airline Agent #2 takes pity on us and gives us her personal cell phone.  We call Vietnam Visa Online and induct a fourth person in to our lair of chaos.

Mean time, I still can’t tell whether the payment has gone through on my credit card, and my credit card password isn’t working (or theoretically it’s possible I haven’t used it in a few months and I can’t remember it) so I can’t log in and check. For the next twenty minutes, the clock ticks down to our departure while I toggle between my phone and tablet trying to figure out if I’ve paid the fee, and Bethy toggles between Airline Agent #2 and the newly inducted lady from Vietnam Visa Online, whom we have to keep calling from the Airline Agent #2’s personal cell phone.  The voice in Vietnam talks us calmly and assuredly through various steps, which I tap out on my phone, as if we are diffusing a bomb.

Eventually, all three of us–Airline Agent #2 is all in now—are leaning anxiously over my phone, hitting refresh, waiting for the document with our visa approval to show up from the Helpful Voice in Vietnam.  Whose name turns out to be Selina.

Is it there?

How about now?

We may have to carry on our bags.

…Should we call again?

……Is it there yet?

……..How about now??

TADA!

The email arrives.  All three of us bounce up from my tablet screen and give a shout.  Airline Agent #2 triumphantly passes our boarding passes over the counter and we run to the gate.  I won’t see it until we’ve already arrived in Vietnam, but another email has popped up from Selina at Vietnam Visa Online.  It is highlighted in an alarming fluorescent yellow the color of a radioactive duck.

HAVE YOU RECIEVED YOUR VISA YET? IS EVERYTHING OKAY NOW? PLEASE ADVISE!

I write Selina back after we land in Da Nang.

We are here in Vietnam and everything is fine! I didn’t get your mail until we landed. Thank you for all your help today!

We’re aware that it would be responsible, at this stage, to be upset about the insane amount of money our visas just cost, but instead we are delighted with the exchanges of the day, the managing and wooing and reassuring and eventual co-conquership with strangers of our last-minute visas. In fact, we were so irresponsibly pleased by this accomplishment that Airline Agent #2 didn’t even seem bothered when I wanted to take our picture, regardless of the fact that we were holding up an otherwise orderly process of reasonable people getting on a flight from Bangkok to Da Nang.  

And we were able to recharge our tired devices on the fly.   

*

Around Town, Nepal Life

It’s Not a Problem to Deliver Your Underwear

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My friend Ann is here in Pokhara for the summer. She is an IMT therapist and has begun volunteering at the Kaskikot health post, working with the Health Assistant to treat patients using integrative manual therapy. Whenever somebody comes to visit me in Nepal for the first time, I briefly have a renewed sense of chaos, of how from a western sensibility, there is an unnerving feeling of inefficiency and an opacity around how problems get solved. For the most part you don’t rely here on public services, or even private businesses, to pop up with specialized solutions or knowledge in a pinch. You rely on someone’s cousin. To the uninitiated, it’s unclear what people do when things need fixing, and this leaves one with a sinister feeling that small irresolvable inconveniences will accumulate until everything is a hopeless mess and all is lost forever. Therefore, in the presence of first-time visitors I can’t help feeling as though I need to account for a mild but pervasive sense of anarchy that they cannot describe but which, I know, they feel. I don’t know how to explain that there is a different kind of intuitive coherence with other rules.

As for Ann’s visit, everything is basically going great, but one hitch happened early on when she left the bag that contained all her underwear at a hotel in Kathmandu. Also, Ann said it was perfectly fine if I wrote a blog post about her lost underwear. The underwear, while inconvenient but replaceable, was not as much of an issue as the bras that were in the forgotten bag: Ann said her bra size is not that easy to find, and she also said that it’s fine if I write about her bra size too. Replacement of the odd size bras in this environment is one of those opaque things that appears to have no viable solution. The bag needed to be retrieved.

We called Ann’s hotel in Boudanath and determined that they had located the bag of underwear and put it in storage. This was a positive start, however, the next opacity was how the bag would get moved to our district when the mail system exists but doesn’t work according to any particularly obvious or accessible processes. Happily, I was scheduled to go to Kathmandu about a week later. So we rang up Ann’s hotel again and I asked Dorje, the proprietor, if he could hire a taxi to send the underwear to the hotel where I would be staying in Kathmandu. Regarding my hotel, I had previously stayed at the Tibet Peace Guest House only once, but last week after I had called a few times in the process of reserving a room, the hotel clerk and I were officially pals, and when I would call he would answer, “Hello, didi.” I asked the Tibet Peace hotel clerk if he would mind fronting the taxi fare for Ann’s underwear, so that I wouldn’t have to coordinate an exact meeting time with the driver. He said, “Sure didi, no problem.”

“Ann, I have hired a chauffeur for your underwear and the clerk will receive it at my hotel,” I told Ann. She was so excited. Especially for the bras.

I got to Kathmandu and had my meetings and Dr. Bethy arrived and the next day we boarded the plane to Pokhara.

“AH, SHOOT!!” I cried, bonking my forehead against the inside of the double-paned window. A French tourist sitting behind us, who was playing her ukulele in the airplane, became alarmed. She stopped playing her ukulele and leaned forward with her eyes wide.

“Is everything okay?” She asked luxuriously, concerned.

“I forgot Ann’s underwear!” I cried. “Shoot shoot shoot!” Now how would we get it?

The French tourist leaned back and resumed her ukulele playing, and also some singing. The plane was very small, and luckily she was quite a good singer.

Once we’d landed, I called up Ann’s hotel again. Had they forgotten to transport the underwear, I needed to know, or had I left it orphaned for a second time, now at the Tibet Peace Guest House?

“Hello Dorje sir, do you still have my friend’s underwear?” I asked. Dorje revealed that he had planned to send it a day later, today, because the hotel was located in Bouda, a bit of a hike from downtown Thamel where my hotel was, and today they had a driver making an outing anyway. “Oh, I am back in Pokhara now,” I said. “Now what?”

Dorje sir and I pondered the problem for a moment.

“If you know anyone who can bring it to Pokhara, I’ll get your friend’s things to them,” Dorje sir promised. “I will deliver it myself!”

“Ok, I have an idea,” I said. I hung up and walked over to Adam Travel in Lakeside, where we are friends with the owner. Prem often hangs out here in his free time and they book all my tickets. Once, I got to attend a travel agency exhibition in the U.S. with the owner Basu sir.

“Hello Laura didi,” the Adam Travel guys said when Bethy and I walked in. “Ah! Bethy! Hello!” They naturally always know who is traveling with me; the same guys had booked Bethy’s tickets a day earlier, too.

“Hi guys, I was wondering if your Kathmandu office could arrange to have my friend’s underwear sent over. She left all of her underwear at her hotel in Bouda.”

The Adam Travel guys told me that their Kathmandu office is now closed, but the people who used to work at there now work at the Sacred Peace Hotel. Those guys would arrange it. Adam travel proceeded to call Surjet at the Sacred Peace hotel. Surjet said he had some friends at a bus company.

“So,” Adam Travel told me, “They need to bring the items to the Sacred Peace hotel, and you’ll pick it up here. It’s going to be $5 for the cab to the hotel and $5 for the bus to Pokhara. You pay $10.” Where would this be paid? I asked. We’d pay Adam Travel, they said; other people would pay other people in the middle and the debt would accumulate and then we’d pay it off here. No problem.

Sold! I put Adam travel on the phone with Dorje and they discussed all the intermediary checkpoints where someone knows someone who will help reunite the lost underwear bag from Bouda with Ann in Pokhara by Wednesday. We’ve solved the matter within 8 minutes. I wondered why I hadn’t just done this before.

“So there’s bad news, and there’s good news,” I announced that evening to Ann. “The good news is that your underwear will be at Adam Travel in 48 hours. The bad news is I forgot it in Kathmandu.”

“How’s it going to get here?” Ann asked.

“…FedEx.”

*

Around Town, Nepal Life, Oral Health Care Project, Work

Politics and Poets

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With the Nepal government undergoing a major restructuring, a big goal for us this summer is to figure out how the newly formed provincial government works and establish relationships with influential decision-makers.  We’re just getting started, and as I’ve described elsewhere, so is the government: most of the province-level officials are quite new to their desks, and in many cases the scope and processes of their jobs are still being decided.

So let me give you an idea of how this works.  Honestly, this is my real life.  I begin with a friend of mine in Kathmandu, who I was introduced to through an organization that gave us a grant a few years ago.  This friend refers me to a colleague of hers, who I’ll call Sam, who works inside the new Province #4 government office in Pokhara as a representative of a big nonprofit doing policy work on another topic.  So Sam is not exactly a government employee, but he’s connected to people in the Province office because he works in the building, and most happily, he is someone I can ring on his cell phone.  I set up an appointment.  It’s our first trip to the Province offices and we’ll just have to go meet Sam and see where we get.

Are you with me so far?

Muna and I walk about a mile from our office in burning July sun, and meet Sam in his office at the new Province building. Sam is a friendly, energetic and smart guy, and he begins to orient us to the structure of the Province government (we tried to google it–maybe you’ll have better luck). He combs through our present bureaucratic challenge: obtaining official endorsement for a workshop we want to host to train new dental technicians (who will of course work in Government Health Posts).   In the absence of clear procedures, we mull over who best to take this to next.  Sam makes a call to the Province Health Coordinator, an obvious choice, but the Health Coordinator is out today.

Eventually – and this is only possible because Sam is helping us, and because we’ve made a satisfactory case to him – he gets us an invite upstairs to meet direclty with the Minister of Social Development, who holds the highest office in the Province, something like a governor.  This is great news.  Muna and I follow Sam out of his office, and by this act Sam is adopted into our quest and ordained as our guide.  Without him Muna and I are just random people in the hallway. We stroll through the almost-finished government building, which like most government offices outside Kathmandu has a concrete austerity produced by minimalist decoration and a building style that leaves stairwells in the open air.  Even the walls look somehow unfinished, expectant.

At the top of the stairs we move down an echoey corridor and come to the mouth of a room crowded with men.  Peering through the door frame, I see a tall, lean Official sitting at the other end of the narrow office, the throng of visitors clamboring for his attention.  Sam and Muna and I are directed to the room across the hall to wait.

We wait.  It is very hot.

After some time, we are brought back across the hall to the Minister’s office.  It is stuffed with as many black faux-leather couches as the room will allow, and as per standard Important Office decorating style, they are situated perpendicular rather than parallel to the desk where the Official in question is seated. I can’t explain this, but it’s the set up of almost every Important Office I’ve been to in Nepal.  The halls are empty and the offices are packed with extreme quantities of couches, which are almost always lined up along one wall so that visitors find themselves talking to the Official they’ve come to see at an angle, while the Official gazes past their knees at empty space.  A perk of today’s office is that, with the July heat pawing at the walls, the ceiling fan is turned on to the highest setting.  I am seated directly under it.  It feels wonderful for about ten seconds, and then I realize I am doomed to suffer in a singularized typhoon for the length of our Important Meeting.

The last of the previous visitors is just leaving as we get seated, and when the previous callers have cleared out, Sam introduces us to the Official.  Muna and I – mostly Muna – describe Jevaia and explain the authorization letter we are looking for.  We say are “seeking suggestions on how to properly coordinate and align with the new government.”  We don’t say we are already pretty sure that these procedures are not defined yet; in fact, the inquiry itself is probably the best formal step available.

After some time, the Official falls silent. In my opinion, the Official Silent Phase is one of the great tests of mettle in this line of work, particularly for impatient foreigners.  From a western sensibility it’s completely perplexing: for about five mintues, the Official taps on his laptop and gazes past our knees without saying anything. The fan blasts the top of my head and wooshes through my ears, and I command my self to sit properly through the Official Silent Phase, like Sam and Muna are doing, without fidgeting or asking to turn the fan off.  Take note, impatient American Person With An Agenda.  If you come here on a schedule, it will be silently and inexorably bled out of you. The people on the faux-leather couches don’t own this timetable no matter how bombastic and fantastic their ideas are, and let me tell you right now that nobody else is in a hurry.  It never occurred to me I might need a jacket to get through our first Province government visit in the dead middle of the summer, but I surely wish it had.

Suddenly, the door flies open and an elderly man in traditional daura-suruwal dress walks through the door.  He waves his walking stick at the foot of the couch.

I don’t have a picture of the Poet, so here’s an internet photo of a man in a daura surulwar.

“Son, get up and move over there, I’m just gonna have a seat,” the old man says to Sam, who graciously leaps up from the seat closest to the Official desk, and moves down the line of couches to a spot near the door.  The old man sits down and leans in to the corner of the Minister’s desk with a twinkle in his eye. He begins reciting a legnthy poem.

The Official is, by old man terms, a junior “son” like Sam. In an instant, the hierarchy of the room is reorganized. The Official leans back in his chair with a grin and sets to listening to the poem. All of a sudden, we are all in school.

For forty five minutes–no, I’m not exaggerating–the Official and the Old Man engage in philosophical conversation while the fan hammers my head, Muna waits politely and Sam cycles through expressions of interest.  I won’t find this out until after the meeting, but the old man is the son of a famous poet, and himself a reknowned scholar. More men–all men, Muna and are I the only women for miles around, it seems–wander in to the room to listen while he holds court.  The poet leans dramatically forward and back on the faux-black leather couch, swaying to his recitations, swiveling his attention from the Official to us to other would-be meeting-seekers near the door, and unleashes a reverent Islamic lyric.

“So tell me,” our Official says, with somber studiousness. “I want to know something.  You’re a Hindu man.  But you speak eleven languages and you’ve studied Islamic poetry extensively.  How do you reconcile those who eat cow meat?”

I shiver and try to casually hold my hair out of my eyes.  I look enviously at a corner door, where more men are periodically filing in and out of the room, and notice that Sam seems distracted by the door too.  Why can’t the Minister just tell us whether we can have a letter, or what we have to do to get it?  Why can’t he release us from bondage, and THEN listen to poetry?

“Let’s have another poem,” the old man says. He turns to Muna, who, following Sam’s relocation, has ended up on the couch seat beside the Poet.  Leaning toward her, the old man brightens, saying, “Would you like to hear a Hindi Poem?”

“Nobody properly understands Hindi,” the Official interjects, boldly. “How about a Nepali poem.” I am well aware that we will need to hear all the poems if we want to find out about our letter.

Another gaggle of men comes out of the corner door, and suddenly Sam says, “let’s go.”  Go where? I chatter.  The Minister hasn’t answered our question yet.  I’m confused.

“This way,” Sam says, motioning toward the corner door.  Why are we leaving?  But with no choice, I get up and follow Sam and Muna through the mystery door.  We enter the next room, and there, in a grand office, behind a hefty wooden desk flanked by the National flag, sits the actual Minister of Social Development.  She rotates on her chair, adjusts her sari over her shoulder, and waves us to sit down on two spacious couches where she can examine us directly from across the carpet.

Who was that guy? I whisper to Muna. Suddenly I am afraid I’m about to start giggling uncontrollably.

“The Secretary,” Muna mutters.

“So,” the Minister of Social Development commands, wasting no time and leaning forward on her clasped hands.  “Who are you?”

 

 

Around Town, Nepal Life, Reflections

The Idea of the Mountain

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I started searching for Mt. Everest abstractly.  It wasn’t exactly about the mountain; it was about the idea of the mountain.  With my college books lying next to the bottom bunk, I would retreat in to stories about mountaineering and daydream about exploration. I collected pieces of Asian culture without dwelling on their origins or innate meanings.  These articles and wanderings were satellites of the idea of the mountain, which I assigned to Mt. Everest, and the idea of the mountain was in Nepal, and therefore going to Nepal became inevitable.  But I didn’t even really aim at Mt. Everest. I just got out of bed and aimed at Nepal.

This is how, on a hazy August morning in 2001, I found myself in Kathmandu with a group of foreigners, looking for things to do.  For two weeks we had been traveling to different parts of the country learning about medicinal plants. This was long before I would develop a focused interest in natural medicine, so that detail was just a bonus. Actually, the trip was the result of me Googling “Go to Nepal, August 9 – 22,” which was when I had a window available to travel after the competitive summer rowing season.  But I had not accounted for the little-known and unlikely fact of summer. The monsoon fog, as it does, had blanketed the sky for two weeks, perpetually pressing heat and moisture against our bodies and blotting out the entire horizon.  Now we had a few days to entertain ourselves at the end of the trip.

“I want to see mountains,” I suggested.  We were really so close.

The travel agent brought my new friends and me tea and told us we had options.  Theoretically, the options involved flights.  However, the airplanes might or might not end up taking off, the travel agent cautioned, what with the blanket of clouds obscuring the whole atmosphere.  My friends and I tried to sort out the weather, and things.

There was a tower in Nagarkot, said the travel agent.  A lookout tower.  I inspected my guide book, and my guide book said I could bike to the lookout tower in Nagarkot.

“I’m going to bike to the lookout tower in Nagarkot,” I announced.

At the suggestion of the travel agent, my friends and I refined the plan further.  We would first bike to the old city of Bhaktapur about an hour away, and from there, I would continue biking up to the lookout tower in Nagarkot.  This plan made sense to me because a) it was in my guidebook and b) the travel agent was able to rent us some bikes.  Nepal-bikes, if you will.  They had wheels and gears and hand-brakes and they were heavy as hell.

We woke early the next morning and set off for Bhaktapur.  As I clicked along the road, I felt a swell of freedom.  It reminded me of the first solo drive I had made, to the ice rink, after obtaining my drivers license.  The past two weeks had had various ups and downs and dramas and mishaps, but the main thing was that I’d been packed in with a group of other foreigners and we’d been on a schedule and somebody else was in charge.  Suddenly here I was on two wheels being powered by my own legs, on a road that led to the idea of the mountain.

If you ever get to visit Nepal, you must visit Bhaktapur.  Its name means “the place of devotees.”  The area is located on a historic trade route between India and Tibet, and is jammed full of gorgeous architecture, art and cultural life dating back to the 1400s. Wonderfully preserved temples and stupas surround a tidy public square, whose graceful wooden carvings curl up like a garden that sweeps the gaze from one frozen deity to the next.  It is a place that makes you want to bow your head for a moment to whatever all this is…not because it’s religious exactly, but because it feels bigger than you. Because it is old, and earnest, and fully itself.

We took photos.

My friends left.

I clicked over to a small shop, parked my bike, and met a woman and her daughter.  Something had caught my eye…a sheaf of heavy lavender silk.  I asked to hold it, and it slid cool over my hands, a whisper of winter hiding under the heavy roof of summer.  I turned it over and moved it from one arm to the other.  The mother and daughter draped it over my shoulders and wrapped it around and around my waist to show how it would be worn.  I asked the price.

The material was intended to be made in to a sari, which, needless to say, was something I would never put on.  I set it down, and picked it up.  Eventually, I reached for my guidebook, checked the route, and left without the lavender silk.  Now I was fully alone.  I rode down a long hill and pedaled laboriously up another.  As the heavy biked clicked toward Nagarkot, Bhaktapur began to disappear behind me.

I stopped the bike.  I turned around and biked all the way back to Bhaktapur and bought the lavender silk from the mother and daughter.  I folded it carefully in to my backpack and set off again for Nagarkot.

Beginning early in the day, we had not been particularly focused on the schedule.  It was now about 2:00.  And something else I ought to mention is that only about ten weeks prior, on June 1, 2001, nearly the entire royal family of Nepal had been massacred by the crown prince, and a stunned hush lay over everything.  A Maoist insurgency that had started in 1996 was also gathering force.  It would crescendo around 2004 and topple the monarchy in 2006.  But in August of 2001, while I was biking alone from Bhaktapur to Nagarkot at 2:03pm, everything was humid, and pregnant, and subdued.  It is only now, looking back fifteen years later, that I feel the uncertainty of that stillness, stretching out across the emerald for miles and miles around me on my tiny bike.

As the afternoon progressed, the pavement ended and the switchbacks started.  The heavy-as-hell bike was now clicking over the back of a dragon, lumpy and steep, the first of what would be many, many, many Nepal Road Experiences (NREs) in my future.  With increasing frequency, I had to dismount completely and haul the heavy bike uphill with my arms.  In addition to unfortunate lack of planning around time, I had only two granola bars for food.  I might have bought some snacks in Bhaktapur, but now I was in the middle of nowhere.  This was also before cell phones, and in fact and even land lines in 2001 were commodities mainly rented by the minute at shops or small businesses, most of which were in cities.  So, to recap, I was in a completely foreign country on a rural road with a guidebook and a heavy bike and no food during an insurgency, a few weeks after a royal massacre, in a place I knew nothing about except for stories of Mt. Everest written by North Americans and Europeans.

“Tower,” I thought contentedly, and clicked over another crater in the road.

I look back now and the little part of me that the world has worn down scolds her for this.  For the presumptuousness and irresponsibleness.  But even now, most of me is still enchanted by the idea of the mountain.  That is who she is, even all alone on a road.  She doesn’t realize she’s going to write this story later, and she is not performing.  She is biking on a road because she is on it and there is a lookout tower at the other end.  Hopefully.

As dusk began to fall, I checked my guidebook more frequently.  It did seem mildly alarming that I had no idea how far I was from civilization.  What to do?  Well there was, after all, only one road, so if I had taken a wrong turn I had inevitably biked to a different district altogether, which was a problem far outside the reaches of my ability to solve by worrying.  No use mulling over that.  Soon buildings started appearing at the roadside and it looked like, possibly, I was somewhere.  Just as darkness was confirming its authority over my climb, I came upon – true story – The Hotel at the End of the Universe.

However, the Hotel at the End of the Universe was not near the lookout tower, and my guide book said there was a hotel near the lookout tower.  So, and don’t ever ask me to explain this, I biked past the Hotel at the End of the Universe in to full-fledged night.  Uphill.

It was after 9pm when I found it.  In rural Nepal in 2001, 9pm is the middle of the night.  I walked in to the hotel that my guidebook had suggested, sweating and with every muscle in my body limp.  Two young men emerged behind the hotel counter and they assigned me a room.  The kitchen was closed for the night and it was too late to make dinner.  Oh well.  I had some of a granola bar.

“Please wake me at 5am so I can go to the lookout tower,” I said.

“If the weather is good, we’ll wake you, miss,” the hotel guys said.  “But it’s usually cloudy.”

Nope.  “I want to go either way.  Will you make sure to wake me at 5am?”  (Besides, maybe it wouldn’t be cloudy.)

“Of course, miss,” the hotel guys said.

I woke up at 5:15am.  No hotel guys.

I jumped out of bed, paid for my room, and got back on the heavy-as-hell bike.  I followed the directions in the guide book, and just as the sun was creeping over the horizon, I came upon…THE TOWER.

LOOK AT THIS TOWER.

Yes, this is a lookout tower made of sticks.

Which only strikes me as incredible now, much later, on behalf of the little part of me has been chastened and worn down.  At the time, I thought, quite happily, “This is a lookout tower.”

I climbed up the lookout tower, which was advertised in the guide book to offer a panoramic view of the Himalayas surrounding the Kathmandu valley, sweeping giants, famous the world over, visible from THIS STICK TOWER that I am climbing.  The top of the structure was rickety, like a platform treehouse.  I stand up.

There are clouds as far as I can see.  Not a mountain to be seen anywhere.  Silence for miles and miles and miles.  I sit down on the tree-house platform.  I am here.  I float out over the clouds, newly lit by morning, silky and cool, endless.  I take a photo.  For a few minutes, these are my clouds.

“This is going to be a good story,” it occurs to me vaguely.

Then some Nepalese tourists turn up, and they take my photo.  It will be a prized possession.  But soon the platform is crowded, and the floating is over.

Now all I have to next do is get back to Kathmandu.

I climb down the tree-house-lookout-at-clouds-tower.

We are going downhill.  I run my finger down a page where my guide book says that up ahead I can either take a normal road, or another road that is a bit less organized but somewhat shorter and “good fun.”  And so help me God, nobody will ever no why, but I decide it is a good idea to take the Good Fun Road.

The Good Fun Road is the dragon’s back I climbed up, now with measles and more speed.  So basically, I can barely ride on it at all.  Every time I try to get the heavy bike going, a terrifying hole in the dirt screeches in front of my tire and I have to slam on the hand breaks and I nearly topple over.  I end up walking my bike for most of the Good Fun Road.  “This is good fun,” I think, “and I should write my own guide book.”

I eat the last remaining bite of granola bar.

After what seems like forever, I come to the valley floor.  It is hot again and I am drenched in sweat. As I bike through the valley in what I certainly do hope is the direction towards the tourist area of Kathmandu where my friends are waiting, I pass a school and the Headmaster flags me down.

I end up spending about an hour at the random school in the Kathmandu valley.  I play with the kids and talk with the Headmaster.  I am oblivious at the time to the certainty that the Headmaster is hoping to make a connection and cultivate me as a patron, and this works to my advantage because I am not resistant or cynical.  I am playing with kids at a school in Nepal because it is on the road associated with the idea of the mountain.

For many hours afterwards, I am not one hundred percent sure that I am on the correct route back, although I do know that I’m overall aiming at Kathmandu.  Gradually, around 4pm, the streets start to narrow into corridors, clustering together in the traditional Newar style of Kathmandu, and then, miraculously, like an actual fuck-all miracle, I recognize where I am, back in the middle of Thamel. Vendors are selling tiger balm in the streets, tourists with dreadlocks and tie-dye are browsing knockoff North Face gear.  My friends are near here somewhere.  We have a hotel we are staying in.  I bike to it.  It is 5pm.  I’ve been gone for about 36 hours.

I unpack the lavender silk.  Sixteen years later, it is still carefully stored in wait of a special occasion.

“How was the tower?” everyone asks.

“Cloudy,” I answer. “There were a lot of clouds.”

Outside, night is falling fast.

“So when is dinner?”

*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aamaa, Around Town, Family, Nepal Life

The Other Skies

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The first thing I have to do is convince Aamaa to wear one of her new kurta salwaars. She has spent 60 years wearing a more dignified sari and she’s shy to dress like a girl. I insist she will be a lot more comfortable on our 24 hour journey with trousers on.

Bhinaju and our cousin Laxu come to the airport with us. As we stand outside the door to the airport, again there seems to be a strange inversion of everything. We say goodbye and move in to the 24-hour netherworld of air travel, but the moment when I detach like a raft in to the sea, alone and timeless until landing back in the rest of my life, never comes. Instead, all my focus is on Aamaa while we pass through various inexplicable passages and security checks, making goodbye phone calls along the way.

We end up seated with Chandrakala, a charming woman probably in her mid-forties leaving Nepal for the first time to go be a maid in Greece. I explain everything from the seatbelt to how to order drinks and use the bathroom. I set up their personal TVs with films for them to watch. They both look disapprovingly at the glass of wine I ask for, so I make a point of asking each of them repeatedly if they would like some wine during the flight. Aamaa has a million questions. Is it night or day? Can I put my passport away yet? Are mom and dad awake now? I don’t know. I’m used to not thinking about any of these things.

We spend the flight talking with Chandrakala didi and when we get off the plane in Doha in the middle of the night, the three of us stick together. The Doha airport will be the first thing we encounter that is a developed country version of the comparable thing in Nepal; Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu only supplemented its two small departure terminals a few years ago and the waiting area is decorated with rows of cheap, attached metal chairs that can be dragged about in units of three. The Doha airport is a dazzling maze of high ceilings, moving walkways, shiny things, monitors, duty free shops where beautiful women are illuminated by fluorescent lights, and of course, the enormous random nauseous teddy bear that is taking up space at the center because space needs to be taken up. It occurs to me how strange it is that in modern times, the first thing an immigrant from a developing country will see in a wealthy country is an airport, which is one of the weirdest environments modernity has to offer.  For example, Aamaa couldn’t even think of a question about the following dinosaur under a passageway in the airport:

I lead Aamaa and Chandrakala didi to the sleeping room and we all try unsuccessfully to doze off. Aamaa and I both end up stretched out on the floor instead of the awkward lounge chairs, and I appreciate how we must look, sprawled out on the ground in a room full of disciplined travelers using the chairs.

We go to the bathroom and use an automatic hand dryer.

By now we are all aware that we’re going to have to abandon Chandrakala didi to the Doha airport when our flight leaves for New York. I take us out to the nauseous teddy bear where a bank of monitors will show Chandrakala’s departure gate when the time gets closer, and explain to her three or four times how she’ll navigate the list of English symbols. Chandrakala didi is literate but uncomfortable with English, and if you don’t know what a gate is or how an airport works, reading the monitors is just one obstacle (how do you even know you’re supposed to read a monitor?). There are many Nepalis working in the Doha airport and we chat some of them.  Chandrakala didi will be able to ask someone if she needs help, but it still feels wrong to leave her alone in the glowing Doha airport with its mysterious halls and signs and statues. Eventually we have to say goodbye, and she sits outside our gate watching us go.

Every time Aamaa and I have to pass through a checkpoint or security screen, the international airport staff first assume that we aren’t traveling together, and then want to know what in the world is going on. Aamaa has all the looks of a first-time traveler from a traditional part of Nepal, and in addition to the fact that I have all the looks of a private-school educated white suburban yuppie from Connecticut, I tower over Aamaa by about eight inches.  Since she doesn’t speak English, I usually have to translate instructions.  After figuring out that we go together, most people assume I am her daughter in law, which would explain how I know Nepali and why I’m the one shepherding her on an overseas journey. “This is my daughter!” Aamaa giggles as she corrects enthralled security guards and airline attendants. We make our way from counter to counter and checkpoint to checkpoint, crossing the globe in a little bubble of delight that we make no sense.

Finally we board our fourteen-hour flight to JFK. We get incredibly lucky with an empty middle seat on a mostly full flight, so we’re able to take turns properly sleeping. I was worried about how Aamaa would handle strange food made by unknown people, but she mostly exclaimed over amount of it, approaching each tray with curiosity and then asking me if I wanted to eat her pats of butter because she was full from the continuous flow of food.

“That goes on the roti Aamaa, you don’t eat it by itself. It’s like ghee.”

And then the next tray would come and she’d ask me if I wanted the butter again.

We peered out the window at the rolling white puffs lolling off to infinity and Aamaa asked if the clouds were the ground or the sky.

“The sky,” I said.

“Does this plane also go to the other skies?” Aamaa asks, long after we’ve lost track of night and day.

“Other skies?”

“They say there is this sky, and then a sky above this, and then a sky below this one,” Aamaa says. “I don’t really know much about it. But I was wondering if this plane goes to the other skies.”

I gaze at her.

“I don’t really know,” I say. “I don’t know much about it either.”

Many trays and questions and naps and pats of butter later, we break through this sky and New York comes in to view. Aamaa reaches behind her for my hand as she stares out the window, and with a dramatic rumble, the plane sets us down on the ground.

*