Month: October 2012

Snapshot of Daily Life

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      After three weeks, we feel like we’re really settling into our new home.  Of course, that initial victory hasn’t been won without some battle scars—namely, the swollen casualties suffered because of a hole-y mosquito net and an underestimation of how ferocious these little creatures can be!
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Good thing it isn’t malaria season. This was after the first night, we have since solved the mosquito problem.

     We’ve settled into a daily routine of waking up around 7, taking some quiet moments to prepare for the day, to talk with our Father, to take a “bucket shower” and start the day with the refreshment of a cold bath.  We join the family around 9 for a breakfast of chai, chapattis, and vegetable curry or whatever is left over from dinner the night before.  The morning is spent doing laundry and helping to prepare food and do chores around the house, and we’ve enjoyed re-learning all of those basic activities like small children.  “In America, you don’t clean the house?” our host sister asked the other day, confused by our apparent inexperience.  We try to explain that we do, but the process is so different that it hardly seems like the same thing!  Throughout the day, we practice Hindi, learn new words, study the things we’ve written in our notebooks, and struggle to spell things in the Hindi script.  When we show our attempts to our hosts, they often laugh and rewrite completely different words than we thought we heard.  We’re still learning how to hear the strange sounds of our new tongue.  Five times a day, the call to prayer rises from a loudspeaker.  Five or six times a day, we drink chai with the family.  In the afternoon, when it is hottest outside, most people take a nap, and usually, so do we.  In the evenings—now that we have a bit of basic language—we sometimes go out to talk with neighbors, and sometimes are invited over to their homes for more chai.  Dinner happens anytime between 8:30 and 10 o’clock at night, and after that we usually sit around talking with our host sisters and our host brother, who gets home from work just before dinner.  Throughout the day, we hang out on the front step to talk with people walking past, or to laugh at the water buffalo that lives in front of the house across the street.  Occasionally, we make a trip to the market with our host father to buy vegetables, or to the huge community milk vending machine called “Mother Dairy”.  At night, we head back to our room around 10 or 10:30, spend the next half hour mosquito-proofing ourselves for the night and go to sleep.  We’ve really enjoyed becoming part of the family’s daily rhythms of work and relaxation, and learning more from them each day.  It’s such a blessing to have a safe environment within their home to make our first cultural blunders, and we’re so thankful to have advocates and friends who can help to integrate us into the community.

      Up to this point, A. and I have been doing most of our long-distance travel on the modern, air-conditioned metro system, but most of our neighbors are limited to the un-air conditioned and less reliable bus system because it’s cheaper.   So last Wednesday we decided to take the bus to our friends’ place on the other side of the city.  We piled into a crowded little van (but van is a strong word… it implies full enclosure) for the first unpaved leg of the journey, out of our community to the highway.  Then we waited for nearly half an hour at the bus stop.  While we waited, a very crowded bus came by and a few people scrambled on, some still hanging outside the door and trying to force their way inside as the bus sped away.  Finally, ours showed up and we piled on.  It was crowded and hot, but we were excited to be above ground and able to see all of the street-level activity between point A and point B.  A few minutes down the road, a rhythmic, jolting, thudding starts under the floor of the bus.  We look behind us to where the last passenger aboard is standing in the doorway, clinging to the outside of the bus.  He is looking down at the tire, and seems somewhat amused.  The motorcycle and truck drivers passing us are all staring in that direction, too—apparently the tread is coming off the tire and flinging against the bottom of the bus with each rotation.  At the same time, we’re beginning to notice the grinding of the gears and the halting acceleration after each stop of the bus.  We aren’t sure which problem will take down the bus first.  As we’re sitting in a traffic jam at a huge, unregulated intersection with a cross flow of rickshaws, motorcycles, trucks, cars, and buses in front of us, we stare into the rooftops and inner rooms of the slum dwellings that line the highway, divided only by a canal of open sewage and huge pipes serving as walkways over the water.  A man repairs a power line standing on a bamboo ladder whose bottom rung is just a couple of feet away from our back tire.  Pedestrians and bicycles hurry past between the tire and the ladder.  A few minutes later, the transmission beats the tire to its demise and everyone moves from our bus to another one further ahead in the traffic jam.  This one runs on a slightly different route, but we manage to get off at approximately our desired destination and take another “van” to our friends’ community.  After all of that, we still manage to reach their front door in less than two hours!

Yes, life here is good.

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Source: New feed

Our own place

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So this weekend we moved from our host family’s home on the outskirts of the city into a more urban neighborhood.  We realized that this is the first time in 11 months that we’ve lived by ourselves (If you don’t count the shared bathroom…)!  Here are some photos:
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View from the roof of the house where we slept during our homestay

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Inside our current home: bedroom to the left, kitchen to the right. We’re especially thankful for that window during power outtages.

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Next to the kitchen– our landlord’s belongings are on the top shelf; ours are on the bottom two. We won’t be using his washing machine, but it does create some extra counter space.

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This is the view out our window. The white minaret in the background is one of the local Mosques. The black tank is our neighbors’ water supply, and the small structure beneath it is similar to the bathing area/toilet on our own roof.

Source: New feed

Mountain Retreat

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          Last week we headed into the beautiful mountain town near Nepal.  While some of our friends went trekking in the real Himalayas with another family, we stayed in the “foothills” of the Himalayas at that family’s house and crammed in a 1-week intensive of Hindi courses at a local language school.  After an overnight train and a hair-raising taxi ride up a narrow, winding road with two-way traffic and a lot of blind curves, we found ourselves above the smog layer of the plains, breathing clean, 70 degree air and marveling at the feeling of going nearly a whole day without sweating.  ”Is this still India??” we kept thinking.  

          We spent a lot of time hiking to and from class, and exploring the surrounding area.  The town is a hill station from British colonial times (makes sense that the British would build their fancy estates in the part of the country where the climate most closely approximated that of England), so there are lots of interesting old buildings around, but by far the most interesting element of the place was the wildlife.  There were wild monkeys all over the walking paths and playing in the trees, and leopards are often sighted in the area… though we were spared the privilege of running into one of those.

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          Since the language course is actually designed as a 3 month intensive course, so our two hours of class each day were plenty to keep us busy around the clock with studying as we tried to cram as much grammar into our heads as possible.  We only made it about 2/3 through the course, but at this point we’re just so overjoyed to possess the power of past, present, and future tense that we didn’t really mind.  You don’t realize how much you love grammar until you start over from scratch without it.  Knowing what we do now, we’ve realized how much entertainment we’ve probably been providing for our friends and neighbors up til now :) 
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          After our friends and the rightful owners of the house returned from the mountains, we moved a little further down the mountain where there were rooms available—in a community hospital that simultaneously functions as a hotel, oddly enough.  Right there next to the operating theatre, there was a big room with rolling furniture and 3 hospital gurneys which is apparently left open for overnight visitors.  We found it pretty hilarious. 

          While I was sitting in the hospital room alone one day, checking email, I made the mistake of leaving the window open for too long.  After a few minutes, I looked up just in time to see this kind of monkey (the more aggressive kind) slowly raise his head up into the window:  
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          From what I had seen, these monkeys tend to behave somewhat like mentally disturbed humans with well-developed self preservation instincts and no social conscience. He stared at me with an unnerving expression of bold curiosity.  I wasn’t sure quite what to do, but I knew I didn’t want to be alone in the room with that creature!  “No, no, no, no…” I calmly repeated over and over again, slinking towards the open window with my hands outstretched in front of me.  Finally I was about two feet away from the furry little face that had held eye contact with me the whole time.  WHAM!  I pulled the glass panes shut and locked them.  Crisis averted!  The monkey sat on the roof and continued to stare up at me for a couple of minutes before moseying away. 

          After the reprieve of the mountains, it was a bit of a shock to careen back down the mountain and into a sweaty traffic jam with nauseating fumes, but we’ve pretty well adjusted again now.  And we made it home in time to celebrate our 2 year wedding anniversary on the 26th!  Looking back on everything that’s happened, it seems like it’s been far longer than two years… we’ve enjoyed the adventure so far and are excited for the journey ahead.

Growing Pains

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We’re in our second week at language school here in Mussoorie, a small mountain town in the foothills of the Himalayas.  By my estimation, these are already mountains, but seeing the snowcapped peaks of the bigger Himalayas just beyond us puts these “foothills” into perspective.  Taking the public bus up the narrow mountain road to get her was a hair-raising experience. As the driver flew around blind corners on the single-lane highway clinging to the edge of the mountain, sometimes blaring his horn and sometimes leaving the possibility of oncoming traffic to chance, we often found ourselves doubting the driver’s will to live.  At least gravity was working in our favor… we’re dreading the downhill return this coming weekend, now that we’ve seen the speed that’s possible even when working against the incline.  Upon arrival, however, we walked off our nausea during the mile-long uphill hike to where we’re staying.  We decided that the cool temperatures and stunning views of mist-shrouded hills and the Indian plains transformed into a placid sea spreading toward the horizon below were well-worth the train trip and the terrifying bus ride.  Through some friends, we were able to find a friendly Indian family to rent a small apartment from.  They live upstairs, and we enjoy a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and living room (with actual table and chairs!) for studying down below.  We weren’t prepared for the 50 degree drop in temperature, so we bought wool sweaters to throw over our summer clothes and now we’re enjoying being cozy instead of just cold :)  It’s monsoon here, so most days there is at least heavy fog if not heavy rain, and the humidity seeps through the walls and keeps clothes and dishes and towels from drying.  But when the dense cloud recedes, it looks like heaven come to earth when the sunlight plays across the sky, painting the clouds that ensconce the low rooftops of the the hillside town itself.  With all the shifting clouds and light, no two days look the same, even from the same vantage point on the mountain.  Walking along dirt footpaths through the massive, dripping, fern- and moss-covered trees to climb up to language school or down to the market to buy vegetables reminds us how much we’ve missed having exercise, silence, and space to breathe in the city.  Nature is rejuvenating.  

Of course it’s not all peace and quiet.  As usual, the monkeys are everywhere, both the aggressive and the space-suit variety, and we had a nasty run-in with a troop of them the other day when we came to a part of the road where they refused to let us pass.  A. wielded a water bottle and made aggressive noises, but the monkeys just leapt forward and bared their fangs.  We retreated to find stones to throw at them, and once we had pebbles in hand the monkeys fled– though not without indignation.  A momma picked up her baby just as I hurled a little rock in their general direction and turned to look at me with her mouth gaping open, as if to say, “Hey, this is a baby!  What do you think you’re doing, being so aggressive?”  The next day, we saw a local guy chasing a monkey troop away from the street in front of his shop with a flare gun, so I guess foreigners aren’t the only ones being monkeyed with around here.

We have two hours of one-on-one language instruction each day, which is really pushing us forward in our listening and speaking ability, and our time thus far has felt extremely productive.  We’re encouraged by our progress and thankful for the formal instruction and the change of scenery.  But there’s an element of being here that is difficult, too.  Having access to internet in our apartment (whenever the fog or thunderstorms aren’t knocking it out) means greater “connectedness” with the outside world– we can read online news, skype with a few people, send emails, check facebook.  But in another way having that connection shows us just how disconnected we really are.  We can digitally follow bits and pieces of hundreds’ of friends’ lives, but we aren’t part of the day-to-day substance of any of them.  The reality is that “back there” isn’t really home anymore, and “over here” isn’t quite home yet.  So this week, even as we take in the beauty of the Himalayas and the excitement of preparing for the next step of our journey here, we’re also feeling the loss of the life we left behind and missing the people who have journeyed with us up to now– people spread across the globe from China to California to Nashville to Peru, and lots of places in between.  A week from now, we’ll be on the move again, as we have been many times before.  Uprooting has become somewhat of a trademark for us, but we’re hoping soon to begin learning the patient art of settling in.

Source: New feed

Hittin’ the streets

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          Today’s weather report: “88 degrees.  Feels like 112 degrees.”  

          I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that kind of drastic heat index, but our sunburned, sweaty selves can testify to the fact that it is ridiculously hot out there today.  Since we arrived in this city about two weeks ago, A. and I have been combing the city on foot for up to six hours a day, exploring various communities, talking to people, and finding out where we should start looking for a room.  Aside from helping us to pinpoint some very promising locations, all of this wandering has yielded a lot of insights about our new home.  First of all, there is less pollution than where we were previously, which means that getting a sunburn is once again possible.  Another thing is that there are way more cows and other animals here than anywhere else we’ve seen.  Cows and dogs wander the streets, the university campuses, the slums– everywhere, as a matter of fact, except the zoo.  A. and I have both stepped in juicy cow pies when we’ve let our attention drift from scanning the pavement for too long during our walks, but it turns out that the zoo is the one place in this city where you don’t have to worry about stepping in animal droppings of any kind! 
 
          The best discovery has been that people here are incredibly friendly.  Earlier this week, the two of us visited one neighborhood where an old monument built during the reign of Mughal empire centuries ago towers over the densely packed, tiny homes hastily constructed in the last quarter of a century or so.  We followed the narrow, winding alleyways through the settlement, asking directions to the monument along the way.  To our surprise, the last person we asked happened to live inside the monument.  He invited us in to have tea with his family, who has resourcefully converted the old tomb into affordable housing.  They took us up a dark, treacherous stairwell to stand on the top of their building and enjoy the view– we could see miles across the patchwork of slums, apartment buildings, open fields, and other ancient monuments in the distance.  

          Afterward, we sat on plastic chairs drinking tea and watching a baby goat dart in and out from under the bed, bucking its head into people’s legs as they hung over the edge.  We were amused to see a cheap ceiling fan installed overhead, and a chicken running around an ancient sepulcher in the middle of the family’s living room.  ”I think that’s one of you in there,” said one of the daughters, pointing toward the grave. “A British guy.”  I guess when you’re living in the forgotten parts of the empire, impoverished and marginalized in society, one set of powerful, oppressive rulers seems pretty much like another.  The Mughals and the British had both come and gone long before this girl was born, and now all that was left of this once-important man, whoever he had been, was a crumbling monument to his own worldly ambition.  At least this one is serving the unintended purpose of providing shelter for a family who might otherwise be without a home.  

Fair/Unfair

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Fairness was something Jesus spent a lot of time discussing (and changing people’s minds about).  The prevailing understanding of poverty and suffering in his day was that they were punishments for sin, while wealth and well-being were interpreted as divine rewards for a person’s righteousness.  Either way, your social position was duly earned and deserved.  Thus, the earnest question put to Jesus by his disciples in John chapter 9: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind (and doomed to destitution)?”  And thus Jesus’ rhetorical questions in Luke chapter 13– “Do you think that the people who were murdered by the Romans in the temple recently, or the people who were killed when the tower of Siloam collapsed on top of them suffered those fates because they were more evil than other people– because they did something to deserve it?”  Jesus goes on to answer all of these questions with a resounding “no.”

I read an intriguing opinion piece* recently about the concept of fairness.  The article centers around two competing means of evaluating the “fairness” of various laws and public policy: the “veil of opulence” and the “veil of ignorance”.  The veil of opulence, the author explains,  asks questions of fairness only from the perspective of “whether it is fair that a very fortunate person should shoulder the burdens of others.”  It seems that so often, we instinctively approach everything from tax laws to business practices to foreign policy from the perspective of the elite, regardless of whether or not we ourselves actually find ourselves within that privileged group!  This perspective ”assumes that the playing field is level, that all gains are fairly gotten, that there is no cosmic adversity. In doing so, it is partial to the fortunate” because it implies that whatever prosperity or failure a person encounters has been fully earned by their individual actions– i.e. the CEO got where he is solely because of his good business sense and hard work, the people in the inner city can’t seem to get ahead solely because they make poor decisions.  

Reality, as Jesus knew, is not so straightforward.  As I’ve been learning first-hand over the last several years, poverty (or prosperity) is usually a complex web of structural forces, uncontrollable factors and personal choices– unjust laws, illness, physical or mental disability, social stigma, and poor individual choices can all contribute to some people’s poverty; wealthy parents, elite social connections, good health, and– yes, unjust laws– can likewise contribute to others’ prosperity.  

Taking all of that into account, an alternative way to consider laws and policies is from behind the so-called “veil of ignorance”, which forces an individual to approach the issue at hand hypothetically assuming that they are completely ignorant about their own place in society– their own health, income, opportunities, talents, etc.  The necessary starting point from that direction is to ask, “What system would I want if I had no idea who I was going to be, or what talents and resources I was going to have?”  In other words, “If you were to start this world anew, unaware of who you would turn out to be, what sort of die would you be willing to cast?”  The author concludes that the “veil of ignorance” is necessary in order to escape the natural human tendency to think primarily about “what is fair for me” (whoever I am).   

Rather than attempting to craft fair policies for either people who are wealthy or poor, sick or healthy, fortunate or unlucky, our goal should be to create systems which are impartial toward everyone– which is the definition of fairness in the first place.

* “The Veil of Opulence” by Benjamin Hale, posted on the New York Times website

Source: New feed

The Village Diet

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The market

          The hospitality here has been incredible.  Most of the time, there’s no one around who speaks English, so we communicate with our host family in Hindi.  But Hindi is a third language for them, behind the local dialect they speak at home and the Nepali they learn at school.  Our situation is comparable to an American family taking in complete strangers for an extended period of time who speak no English and only a smattering of Spanish.  Several generations of an extended family live here, and many other neighbors and friends are frequently around, so the house is often a beehive of activity.  We’ve been struck by how generously everyone has accepted us into the flow of their lives and the limited space of their home.  Of course, along the way our stark cultural differences have made for some funny situations.
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Looking across the river (and the border) into India

          Especially when it comes to food.  On our first morning in the village, we were greeted by a blackened goat head on the floor when we walked into the main room of the house.  The old grandfather of the family was kneeling next to a dirty burlap sack on the concrete floor, butchering the head on top of it with what appeared to be a thick, dull knife.  We sat down nearby to observe the strange proceedings, but were forced to move further back after his enthusiastic hacking splattered some vitreous fluid or brains—I’m not sure which—onto my clothes.  The whole thing was strange but didn’t really surprise us, as we already knew we had no idea what to expect from a Nepali village—and since, in every culture, grandparents tend to be the most “villagey” of everyone.  But we WERE surprised when the butchered head was served up straight from the floor, without so much as a rinse or a minute in the fry pan!  They indicated to us that the raw matter in the small bowls they had handed us was the best part—the brain and the ears.  I knew right away I couldn’t stomach it; A. looked more uncertain.  A few years ago we probably would have both dug in, but by now we’ve each had our own round of Asian parasites and the novelty of eating raw goat brain just wasn’t worth repeating that experience!
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huge trees

          Throughout the week, there have been several reincarnations of that initial delicacy.  Yesterday, the family slaughtered another goat in the front yard, blackened the whole thing over a bed of hot coals, and then munched on some of the still-raw organs as they proceeded to chop up the carcass.  We aren’t sure what happened to the meaty parts, but we had a nice boney dish for lunch, and then at dinner time in the fading evening light, we slowly discerned that the bowls set before us were goat innard stew.  The gutsy smell tipped us off before we took a bite.  A. chowed down like a champ, but I decided to stick to the chapattis on my plate.  “What does it taste like?” I asked him.  “Spicy liver,” came the reply.  “I can’t believe you aren’t even going to try it,” he added ruefully.  We were being watched and I didn’t want to embarrass the cook by gagging in front of her.  However, my untouched bowl soon generated serious concern among the two grandmas who began hovering over me with furrowed brows, watching me eat my plain chapattis.  “Why?” they gestured.  I just gave an embarrassed laugh, unsure of how to explain myself.  Next to me, A. was nearing the bottom of his bowl.  “I’ve never eaten this before, so I feel afraid,” I said in simple Hindi. 

          One of the grandmothers seemed to understand, and hurried away to the kitchen.  She came back with a container full of ghee (clarified butter) and dropped a whopping glob onto the stack of chapattis on each of our plates—more butter than either of us has ever tried to consume at one time.  Next she brought out sugar, and encouraged us to douse the buttery chapattis with sugar, too.  “It’s so good!” both women told us excitedly.  They looked on with satisfaction as I took the first bite.  Just as I began to feel my stomach reaching full capacity with ghee, sugar, and chapattis, one of the old women went back to the kitchen and came back with a full bowl of cooked okra… and more chapattis.  By this time A. and I were laughing out loud at this comically oppressive hospitality.  “No really, we’re stuffed!”  We tried to communicate.  No use.  The grandmothers watched– intently, lovingly– from close range as we negotiated the pile of okra into our stomachs.

Source: New feed

Into the unknown

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          On Monday morning our overnight train pulled into the station where we had been told to disembark.  Heavy rain had continued all through the night, leaking through the old metal roof of the train car and splashing onto our beds.  When we got off of the train, rain was still pouring down on us.  We took shelter under a little metal awning with other passengers, discovering as the train pulled away that this “station” was comprised of nothing more than this one, lonely platform next to what seemed to be a very small, lonely town.  We dialed the number of our acquaintance’s friend who was supposed to pick us up and take us from there.  The call wouldn’t go through.  We asked some of the men standing under the shelter with us if any of them knew how to get to the Nepali border from there.  They all motioned in a similar direction, some mentioning a rickshaw, others mentioning a horse cart.  With two backpacks and only one small umbrella between us, I ventured out from under the awning with the umbrella and the smaller backpack holding our electronics.  I walked out to what appeared to be the main road (desolate and small) and was eventually able to hail a horse cart.  A. came running through the rain with the rest of our things strapped to his back.  The drivers were overjoyed at the prospect of earning $2 to haul us and our gear to the border, so they excitedly lifted up the tarp covering the cart and jostled their other passengers around to make space for us.  I sat up front just behind the horse and driver, getting soaked through the opening in the tarp.  A. hoisted himself into the back, where there wasn’t anywhere to sit and he was obliged to perch in a half-squatting position with his feet on the “tail gate” for the next several miles as we bounced along flooded, potholed roads that were unpaved in most sections.  There were twelve of us stuffed into this primitive wooden cart, along with backpacks and piles of vegetables bound for Nepal.

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The courtyard of our eventual destination

We were surprised when the little wagon came to a halt next to a rushing, muddy river, because there was no official immigration office in sight.  We put our backpacks on again and began to follow the stream of people onto a bridge across the river.  A. ran ahead, sans umbrella, in an attempt to keep every piece of clothing we owned from getting drenched.  The fate of the clothes remained to be seen, but he was completely drenched already.  I straggled behind him, trying to keep the computer dry under the umbrella in the driving rain and marveling at the power of the murky water churning beneath my feet.  We must have been crossing more of a dam than a bridge, and it was several hundred feet long.  On the other side, monkeys frolicked in the water outside of a tiny building labeled “Immigration”.  We found out we were still in India, and we filled out forms and got our passports stamped.  We also learned that the Nepali side was still a kilometer and a half ahead.  One of the men hanging out at the immigration office turned out to be a rickshaw puller, and he offered his services and his large umbrella to convey us the rest of the way to the border.  He walked us a little ways through the rain to the rickshaw, and about that time a man drove up on a motorbike and asked if we were the foreigners he had been sent to pick up!  I don’t know how he got there, but it was a good thing he came, because we had no idea how to get to the village where we were planning to stay, or even what it was called.  The rickshaw walla wiped off the wet seat to no avail, and held the umbrella over us as we wedged ourselves onto the narrow bench and piled our things on top of us.  The two umbrellas together made a combined canopy that kept our heads mostly dry.  The big backpack had already given up the ghost, and we surrendered it to the elements.  We bumped along another flooded, pockmarked road that may have been paved at some point in the past, and our new friend on the motorbike followed along slowly beside us.  After a steep hill that required to other people to help the rickshaw walla push us (we were unable to move under our stack of bags), we reached an equally small and unofficial-looking “Immigration” office on the Nepali side.  
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View of the village from our roof

          During the time it took us to fill out more forms and get overcharged for visas, our motorbike friend left and returned with a second guy on a motorbike who was sporting a two-headed pancho for A. and our bags to take shelter under.  I hopped on the back of the first motorbike and the real adventure began.  Not too far down the road, we stopped at a vegetable shop where the owner agreed to give us a huge plastic bag and to cut one side open with a razor—voila: a rain resistant hood and cape for my shivering frame.  As we took off again, we were surprised how fast these guys were driving on wet roads.  As the rain tried hard to peck out my eyes, I realized for the first time that we weren’t wearing helmets.  Fortunately, the road would only permit speed for so long.  Within minutes the pavement had turned to a rutted, muddy track.  In one place, three-quarters of the road had washed away, leaving only about 12 inches of dirt next to an intimidating slope towards the river below.  We still hit the flooded sections with surprising speed, sometimes at a low spot in the road and other times at places where the irrigation canals from the rice fields on either side washed across the road.  
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One of the family’s goats

          Not long after I had decided to relax and enjoy the excitement of off-roading and the water splashing up on my legs, we reached a section of the road that had been completely washed out by the river.  More accurately, the river was now flowing across the road—30 feet of fast-moving brown water—and the road reappeared on the opposite side.  We were stuck there for several minutes trying to figure out what to do.  One of the drivers waded out into the rapids to see how deep the water was.  Knee-deep.  Not impossible for crossing on foot (although the swift current looked challenging), but certainly too deep for the motorbikes; they could easily get swept downstream.  The younger and more adventurous of the two drivers wandered further up the bank and found a shallower place to take the motorcycles across, one by one.  It looked like an advertisement for Honda: modest, 100cc motorbikes casually fording a river and rolling over loose rocks in the middle.  Some villagers wandered over about that time and asked us where we were going.  They were thoroughly confused when we were unable to tell them the name of the village we were trying to get to, since we were going to such great lengths to get there!  These village men arrived at a good time.  A. and I waded into the river, holding onto each other for stability, and they were crossing at the same time.  Right in the middle, where the current is strongest, I started to lose my footing.  All of our electronics were strapped to my back, and A. was far enough behind me at this point that we couldn’t really steady each other.  One of the villagers reached out to grab my hand and helped me across the rest of the way.  On the other side of the river, we were feeling quite accomplished, and laughing at the absurdity of the situation.  It was pouring rain in the jungle, and here we were, teeth chattering, riding motorbikes with total strangers along a completely insane road, to get to a remote village whose name we didn’t even know.  
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          Little did we know that in the remaining four kilometers to the village, we would have to cross similar streams three more times!  At one of them, the younger driver decided to make a go of it with A. and all of our gear still on the bike with him.  Despite the bike having died twice in lower water, it somehow made it across that time, with only a little bit of nerve-wracking bouncing and tilting right in the middle.  A plastic bag holding our shoes also fell into the water at that point, but the second driver waded into the river, sprinted down the opposite bank and caught them just before the disappeared around the bend!

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          After nearly an hour on the motorbikes, we arrived at the home of the family with whom we are planning to stay for a few weeks.  They hung up a string across the living room for us to hang out all of our wet clothes to dry, gave us chai and lunch, and showed us to our room to take a long nap.  The rain hasn’t let up yet, and the family says they haven’t even been to the market in three days because of it, but if the weather ever does clear us we’re looking forward to exploring this beautiful area.  We’re surrounded by bright green rice fields and big trees, and we can barely make out the silhouettes of mountains in the distance through the mist.

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A candle lighting our room during one of the nightly power outtages

Kathmandu

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           A week ago, we were in the village market, loading into a crowded, beat-up jeep bound for the nearest town.  We had decided to change our plans and head into the interior of the country earlier than planned.  Between the people riding on the roof, the men hanging onto the back, and the rest of us stuffed into the back, there were close to thirty passengers.  As we bumped along the unpaved road, crossing shallow river beds and charging over sudden drops, steep slopes and loose rocks, we were amazed that the jeep actually stopped for MORE passengers!  People lined up across the tailgate, children climbed onto the laps of people already crouching on the floor, and one woman made herself comfortable sitting nowhere in particular but leaning her full body weight against my chest.  Forty-five minutes in that rugged wagon brought us the same distance it had taken A. and I two hours to cover on foot a couple days before, and once we hopped down from the jeep we headed to the local bus station to buy tickets on the public bus to Kathmandu.  

          We loaded our backpack on top and settled into our seats at the front of the bus, right behind the driver.  We had a terrifying view of the windshield throughout most of the journey as our driver surged toward oncoming motorcycles and schoolchildren walking down the side of the road, and played chicken with buses and overloaded trucks which, like ours, were decorated with garlands of plastic flowers and painted in circus colors with slogans like, “slow drive, long life” and “speed control” written across the front as they hurtled toward us with alarming velocity.  Although the journey to Kathmandu took about 18 hours, our bus stopped along the way for just about anyone standing beside the road, bus stop or no bus stop, and served as local transport between villages and small towns along the way.  The longest stops, however, were at military road blocks and armed police checkpoints which we hit several times each hour.  We were never quite sure who or what the soldiers were looking for as they boarded the bus over and over again to look through luggage and shine their flashlights at people, but in spite of the frustration of waiting in lines of traffic at several of the checkpoints, we slowly came to appreciate the safety that these checks probably represented.  As we drove past a village gate crowned with a communist sickle and hammer, and past weathered farm women with actual sickles tucked into their saris as they walked home from their fields, we were reminded that this area has been known for Maoist insurgent activity over the past several years.

           By early the next morning, the scenery changed from fertile plains of wide, green rice fields and forests to more mountainous terrain.  The “highway” (narrower than two lanes and little more than a dirt road in some places) curved along the side of a mountain gorge with little waterfalls cascading down the sides here and there, feeding into a fast-moving river at the bottom.  The same driver had been at the wheel the whole time, without sleep, and if he felt as tired as we did from trying to sleep all night in our uncomfortable chairs, then we were worried.  But he managed to finish the journey, continuing to aggressively pass traffic along the winding road with the same ferocity as he had used on the straightaways the day before.  We arrived in Kathmandu mid-morning—exhausted and relieved to have survived the journey!  And that fascinating city did not disappoint.

Source: New feed