the himalayas are alive

I just got back from trekking in Langtang and it was absolutely breath-taking, both because of my surroundings and because I reached 5200 meters walking vertically up a mountain. I am hurting. Still, it was stunning. I loved being back in nature and having traffic congestion caused by yaks and horses instead of cars and buses. The scenery changed so much over the whole hike, from mountains similar to the Appalachians, to an enchanted forest in which I was waiting for Hobbits to scurry out, to a desert wonderland, to the glaciers themselves. We became so close to our guide as well that we cut our trip short one day to visit his village and meet his two children (he is 26 and his wife 23, and they have 6 and 3 year old sons) and family. We spent that night sitting around a fire singing and dancing to Nepali drumming. It was almost as magical as the trek. Here are some photos from the past month:

my house
sunset in my villagemy brother and sister peeling cornmy brother with his "corn hair beard"
the squat toilet
the view out of my house now that the corn has been cleared
the rooftop groupDoa showing us his monastery
the inside

the sunlight coming through the windows created patterns on the floor that looked like Nepali characters to me...probably a Buddhist sutra

the swings made of bamboo the village children play on
the Durbar Square in my hajuraama's village
view from the bus still 6 hours away from where we started trekking
along the way......a monastery in the mountainsthe view from 5000 meters
walking in a cloudtrafficrelaxing in a guesthousemy guide's villagemilking cows with his grandmother

the hills are alive

Sorry for the long delay. The past month has been an emotional roller-coaster -- the older wooden variety though, nothing too overwhelming. Between homesickness and sickness-sickness, there have been a few days in which I really want to nap on my family room couch and watch Father of the Bride. But, as books often convey a powerful message the reader needs to be reminded of in that moment, I read The Alchemist on one of my low days and realized "If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man... Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we're living right now," and I have been thoroughly enjoying my days since.

The work site has still been moving slowly. We're still moving sand into the building to make plaster for the walls. But the paid construction workers have not been on site for most of the month because it's raining too hard to work or the festival has kept them home with their families. Not to say that they don't work extremely hard when they are on site. I am constantly amazed at the strength of these three 20ish year old girls who carry probably 60 lbs. of bricks in a burlap bag on their backs connected to their foreheads by a piece of rope, up two flights of stairs -- and by stairs I mean a wooden plank with little wedges for your toes to grasp onto -- for hours on end. Hopefully the progress will pick up again soon, but it might just be a Nepali way of (not)accomplishing things. Either way today two new volunteers are replacing the two volunteers that are leaving this month, and they are ready and excited to move sand. A breathe of fresh air.

The festival Dashain was a really beautiful celebration of family. It reminded me of the Jewish high holidays, and the first day actually fell on the same day as Rosh Hashanah. I have noticed several similarities between Judaism and Hinduism that I never knew existed. Probably because both religions have been practiced for several thousand years, and both depend (at least partially) on the lunar calendar, the same symbols and similar words appear in both. On all Hindu gates, the Star of David is a recurring pattern for the ironwork, though I have yet to understand what it signifies for Hinduism. The Nepali word for mom is aama and the Hebrew word is imaa; father is baa and aba. I also could have sworn I heard my brother playing the shofar (an animal horn used to create musical tones representative of those from the ancient temples during the Jewish high holidays) every morning of Dashain, but it turns out to be a seashell that is blocked on one end and when blown into creates a similar sound. Because it was Rosh Hashanah, I went into the village next to mine and bought apples and honey for my family. They looked at me like I was insane, cut my apple for me and made me eat it in my room, alone. I convinced one of my sister's to try a piece dipped in honey, knowing that they love anything sweet, but I couldn't decipher her reaction. I wondered whether they would think I always want honey with my apples and didn't understand it was for the Jewish New Year, but I have been given apples since, sans honey.

The other traditions I noticed during Dashain was the ringing of bells every morning (to connect to the realm of the spirits in which earthly voices would not do justice) and the slaughtering of 108 of several animals, several days. Let's just say that the non-vegetarian volunteers got a lot of mutton those two weeks. Though the Hindus that I asked about the significance of the number 108 didn't know the reasoning, either because "there is no reason" or the tradition has been passed down without the explanations, I learned in a book a recently finished called Zen Baggage, about a Seattle native's pilgrimage through China to the temples involved with the major Zen Buddhist patriarchs, that for Buddhism 108 represents the number of afflicitions broken down as: Three Poisons of Greed, Anger and Delusion during each of the Three Periods of the Past, Present and Future throughout each of the Three Realms of Desire, Form and Formlessness, and in each of the Four Directions: 3 x 3 x 3 x 4 = 108. So perhaps Hinduism has a long history of similar symbols with Buddhism as well.

One of my favorite nights with my family was when we sat in the hallways peeling corn for four hours. Apparently every six months the huge fields of corn get torn down and re-harvested, providing all the local families with great entertainment during blackouts. My brother started joking around with me and took the "corn hairs" to create a very fashionable beard. My aama jumped in and grabbed some tape to enhance the great look. Some things are universally humorous. I have really come to enjoy the non-language that I have with my aama, in that we both can't fully speak each other's native tongues, but we sure can smile and nod.

And I have fully come to terms with my name being "Rietcha." In fact, when introducing myself to some cousins, my sister corrected me when I told them my name is Rachel. It reminded me of when my mom (mom not aama) went to pick up my sister (Nora) from her middle school music class and introduced herself as Mrs. Isacoff (Is a coff) and was corrected by the middle school teacher, "You mean (I sa coff)?"

In accordance with having all of your family members older than you tikha (the red painted rice that is put on your forehead if you believe in God[s]...in this case used as a verb) you during Dashain, I travelled with my two sisters and my aama to where my aama's family lives -- a six hour bus ride away to Nuwakot. It was the most breath-taking scenery I have ever experienced during a bus ride. The rice paddies are so interestingly developed, and the heights on the mountains on which people actually live is simply impressive. While we were walking to mero hajuraamako ghar (my grandmother's house), we stopped at my aama's four brother's houses and received tikhas. In Badikhel, walking to my house is always a nearly impossible navigation of rocks and cliff edges, but walking through the rice paddies to my grandmother's was just impossible. Just as Ferris Bueller was reminding me to stop looking down at my path and enjoy the world around me, I fell into a rice paddy swamp. Some advice, if you stop to look around, STOP first. And my camera came right along with me. My aama was so sad because the reason my camera was out was because she asked me to "photo catch" her in front of her old house. About 24 hours after she tikha-ed my camera case and prayed for it to work again, the camera was nursed back to health and has worked perfectly ever since! My aama has some real praying power. After two nights and a small mis-communication that led to me drinking a bowl of sugared-boiled-butter (tasted like cookie dough, until I found my dictionary and felt ill), we woke up at 4am (only 45 min earlier than the rest of my family usually rises) and climbed one of the local mountains on which an ancient Durbar Square was built. After the three hour climb, I was completely stunned by the views around me and the architecture of the ancient temples at the summit. Such skill and beauty. Too, the Trisuli River runs through the main town, and looking down on it reminded me of Cinque Terre, only instead of the Mediterranean and surrounding Italian villages, it had a river and rice paddies.

Aside from spending time with my family, I have been able to take a couple days to visit friends at their placements. A bunch of us met in Bouddha where my friend Kevin teaches English to Tibetan refugees for his birthday. The town is my favorite area so far. In the center is the largest Buddhist stuppa in Nepal, and with 30+ monasteries in the area, you are constantly calmed by chanting as you walk around the city. We cooked a great meal (he lives in an modern apartment with a fellow English teacher instead of a Nepali family) and ate on his rooftop, talking with all of his students (including a monk) until 3 in the morning about the meaning of life. It was a perfect reminder of why I'm in Nepal.

Tomorrow I am going rafting in the Trisuli River and then going trekking in Himilayas on the Langtang trek with Kevin, Adrienne and Brooke, three of the people I truly connected to that night on the roof. I will be back on the 23rd with stories and hopefully pictures I can upload! Until then, I hope you are all doing well. Love and miss you!

monkeys, leopards, leeches...OH MY MY MY

I am back in Thamel having finished training and my first week at placement. To sum up training, I learned that if a leopard comes toward you on a path and there are no intersections in the foreseeable future, duck and find a religion. Most other things I read about in preparation, such as feet are are the lowest part of your body in all senses. If somebody's legs are stretched out (which you can only do if nobody is on the other side of the room, or else they can see the bottom of your feet, which is the worst disrespect) they will wait until you move them before thinking about stepping over you. If they must step over something, they will touch their fingers to the object, then their head and then their feet, connecting the highest part of the body with the lowest as a physical appology.

Another useful lesson was to not ask where amaa (mom) is if she is not serving you daal bhaat. She is most likely "impure" (or menstruating) and is not allowed in the kitchen; nor is she allowed to sleep in a bed raised above the floor during this time if she shares a room with baa (dad). We were told to tell our families that our country makes a pill that allows us to NEVER get our periods, if they ask. And they ask everything and anything. The first question I got with my training family was if I am married. The second was have you eaten daal bhaat in the last 30 minuets. This did not mean that they were offering me food before dinner time, but it is simply a formality to ask if you have eaten daal bhaat, since they don't ask "how are you?"

The other things we learned in training were about the scams that happen in Thamel. One of which happened to me a few hours after we discussed it. I was at Monkey Temple, and a teenage boy came up to me asking if I would buy him milk for his little siblings. Apparently they take the milk carton and return it for 3/4 of the price to buy drugs. So if I ever think someone is truly in need, I need to open the carton so that they have to drink it. But there is a daal bhaat center for the street kids if they actually want to get food, but there are too many rules for most of the kids to follow, namely don't sniff glue.

In our training village, Bistachaap, I lived with a family with 2 bahini (little sisters), an amaa and a baa, 4 goats, one cat, and 20 spiders. I learned that Adrienne's amaa, who lives in the house across the path from mine was my father's mother...making Adrienne my aunt! Adrienne actually had two amaa's, because the first one couldn't produce a boy, so the husband married another. Now that the husband has passed, the amaa's live together!

Four spider bites on my face, 20something misquito bites on my body, and four leeches on my feet later, training was finished. I am now living in Badikhel, about a 50 minuet walk from Bistachaap. I have a bai (brother), two bahini's, amaa and baa. [Nora..] their names are Ram hari (ramro means good, so I think it means good Hari), Sunita and Sangita. Then I have a third sister named Sarita, but she was married last February and lives in a different village now. I was invited to go with my sisters to Sarita's village for a festival next Saturday, which should be very interesting! The festivals are starting to pour in!

My family is really lovely. Unlike the training family (which didn't work out as well as other volunteer's families did), my perminant family asked me if I liked chilis, and since I said no, they haven't put any in my dhaal baat, making it eadible now!! The father always watches Hindi music videos on his tv before bed, so the girls sit in the kitchen and chit chat over chiyaa. Everyone is very calm and the amaa is always smiling. My littlest sister told me she sees a lot of promise in my Nepali and in 5 months she will help me become fluent!

And the village is beautiful! I keep thinking of the Josh Ritter lyric, "clouds clung to mountains without strings." The rice paddies are a little hard to navigate, especailly when every laughes at the way I jump through them to avoid leeches. The leeches should be gone in a few weeks when the rainy season ends.

The build site is quite interesting. Because of the drought a few months ago, all the festivals and Moaist strikes that prevent the workers from going to work, everything is VERY, VERY slow. Right now, the volunteers are moving sand into the first floor to make plaster for the walls, but it took us about 8 hours over the past two days to move what seems like a shovel full. And then we had to bring 100 pipes down a huge, rocky hill, because they needed to bring them to a different construction site, and no real workers were there to help, and the Jeep can't make it up the hill at all. We moved 50 in 2 hours. All I can say is I will be very fit by the end.

Other than that I have spent my time reading and washing my clothes in the river.

Though I can only remember a time when you are supposed to avoid animal feces while walking, I am loving Badikhel.

More updates soon! Would love to hear how everyone is doing! Taataa! (Bye!)

when toilet paper is a luxury

I don't have a lot of time, but I am doing well and still enjoying the culture shock. The village is absolutely beautiful! I will make sure to write about my experiences next time, but for now here are photos:

Nepal Photos

which way is the street with no name that looks like every other street, but is different?

I SAFELY arrived in Kathmandu, after possibly making the black list in the Dehli airport for not understanding Hindi, and when finally understanding that they were asking me if I had a lighter in my checked luggage I responded no because since I don't smoke I didn't remember that I bought some to light candles. They put my name on the naughty travelers list and confiscated the evidence. The flight from Dehli to Kathmandu was breath-taking, as I watched the clouds slowly reveal mountains and the greenest rice paddies I could have ever imagined. I always found architecture models funny because of the way that foam board creates topography and skips several feet to the next level, but the paddies look exactly this way from the plane.

As a disclaimer to the next part I would just like to state that I love it here and am very happy. However, the drive from the airport to the training guest house almost made me turn around and fly home. I thought that drivers in Rome were bad. Even though they drive on the left side of the road here, you would never know it. If someone has an exit on the right coming up in an hour, they will drive into on-coming traffic for that entire hour. "Merging" is a nightmare. Not to mention the goats, cows and roosters that roam freely and feed off the grass on the side of the highway. I had a ten minuet delay because two cows were sitting in the middle of the road, and since it is a life sentence if you hurt a cow, someone had to nicely ask them to move.

Once I got to the hotel, within minutes I saw my first monkey swinging from the handrails of my neighbor's roof terrace. That night I met two people that will be with me the entire time, and we have been discovering Thamel together over the past few days. The streets are so unbelievably colorful, with Nepali clothing, store signs, incense, and loud noises. The streets are pretty densely packed together, and with all the winding roads I can't figure out if cars and tuk-tuks are constantly honking (honks by the way are made from old shampoo containers) as a courtesy to let you know they are coming around the bend, or take make sure you get out of their way.

So far I have seen Durbar Square, with about 13 temples and pagodas, and went about a 30 min drive out of the city to the river where they cremate bodies and then pour the ashes into the water. It is interesting to learn about all of these Hindu customs by seeing them in action. Though it ruined my appetite when I saw some feet on a burning block, it was nice to see the family waiting for the whole 2.5 hours it takes wearing all white and praying. This contrasted with the bright reds, purples and turquoise of the other Hindus visiting the nearby temple really made an impact on how close families are with each other and how customs are still strictly followed to this day. (Mourners are supposed to wear all white for one year.) Next to this area are also the hermit caves, where devotees locked themselves in rock caves by the water to pray and hope that others will bring them food and water. Also next to the cremation platforms is a house for the dying, so that you won't make your house impure and can easily be transported to the river.

My friend Adrienne and I also took a yoga class together. It was not in the best style for us, but I really felt like I was in the right place. The room was filled with sitting pillows and Hindu statues. The yoga instructor's voice was also completely soothing and I felt more relaxed than I think I ever have felt from yoga in the past.

Thamel really is a Westernized city. So far, in preparation for eating Nepali food for the next 6 months, I have been to great Italian and Thai restaurants. You can also buy anything imaginable when it comes to trekking gear, books, and Nepali-style skirts and shirts. The supermarkets have American cereal, chocolates and toiletries, if you don't mind having your shampoo's expiration dated for 2007. And most meals have cost me about $2 and I couldn't finish my plate.

Today was my first day of training. We had some language lessons (I think I might actually understand!!!) and our first dhal baat (lentils and rice). You get a huge mound of rice, a small cup of lentil soup and some curried vegetables and spinach, and with your hand you mix it together and there you go! I had to sit on my left hand to make sure I didn't use my "dirty hand" to feed myself. This is the meal I will be eating for breakfast and dinner every day for the next six months. Yummm. Adrienne and I are keeping a tally of how many times we can eat it before we get tired of it. She thinks 15, I'm shooting for 30. It's actually pretty tasty right now though.

I'm going to the training village on Thursday and find out which family I am living with sometime next week. In my training group there are 10 people mostly from the States, the UK and Australia. Only 4 of us will be here the whole time I am, but this includes one guy from New Zeland who will be on the construction site with me. (Others are working in orphanages or teaching English.) I believe there are 4 others already on the construction site. Several festivals are coming up that I look forward to experiencing, hopefully I will know enough Nepali to have someone explain to me why they are sacrificing goats that particular day, and chickens the other.

I should stop for today before the power goes out and I lose all of this. Hope all is well with everyone! Love and miss you all

leaving civilization as I know it

Well, this Friday I will be taking off on a day's worth of travel to land on the other side of the world. Before that a lot of errands and packing need to be done, but I will try to be in touch with everyone before I leave! Once I arrive in Kathmandu, I will be in Thamel for 4 days, in which I should have internet access and can inform you all about my culture shock! Then I will be placed in a local village for the rest of training and then to live with a Nepali family for the entirety of my stay. I will try to go into the main city, Thamel, every other week to stock up on toilet paper, use the internet and take a hot shower! So you can expect blog updates during these breaks, though posts may be intermittent at times.

The Volunteer Network describes my program as: "an opportunity to help in a wide range of practical village-based projects. These projects could be as basic as painting or plastering, however, those with additional skills may be able to help in more advanced work. Projects are usually decided upon in consultation with local communities, but you can use your initiative to suggest projects of your own. It is vital to be sensitive to the needs and wishes of the local community. Projects are usually partly funded by the communities and partly by our partner organisation and/or volunteer contributions. You'll work with other volunteers in small groups, usually with minimal supervision. Often you'll also work alongside villagers, learning about traditional methods of building and working. Example projects include school repair and decoration; toilet building; drinking water projects; road drainage projects; recycling projects; stove building; and construction work on our partner organisation's own children's home. You can also take more of an environmental education focus by informing children about appropriate waste disposal, recycling, composting and creating vegetable and flower gardens in the childrens homes."

It seems from the VSN newsletter that all volunteers have been working on building a new children's home that they hope to have complete in April 2010.


I am very excited to begin this adventure and am [hopefully] ready to live with an open mind and enjoy everything that is to come. I want to thank everyone for their support and kind wishes. I will miss you all!