What happened in Nepal

One of the only goals I really set myself before coming to Nepal was to explore the idea of expanding my consciousness to include the happenings of the world beyond my limited self. Or perhaps more precisely, to expand my awareness to acknowledge that such a distinction doesn't necessarily exist and to find the courage and sensitivity to allow myself to deal with the implications.  I wasn't sure how or if I really expected this to come about, but I thought that if living and volunteering in a remote village of poverty stricken, low caste, mostly illiterate Nepali people wouldn't do the trick then I could just say "its not my bag, baby, I tried my best." As one could expect (clearly not myself 5 months ago!), things turned out slightly more nuanced than I imagined.

I was theoretically in the ideal situation to join a solid group of socially aware, politically active young adults, generally convinced of the evils of globalization and motivated toward finding social, economic and political solutions to the problems of world poverty. Or I was at least in the ideal situation to research even a little bit about these topics, given the amount of times I spent sitting on the floor of a library filled with books with dramatic titles such as "The White Man's Burden" and "The Bottom Billion" and many others to which I committed reading the first paragraph of the description on the back. But it just didn't happen for me, and I casually cruised through five novels (including my first in Hebrew - more of an uphill battle but, come on, 530 amudim!). 

But I met people who really, really care. One of my closest friends is a seemingly sweet, light-hearted, little Jewish American gal who carries the pain of the world on her shoulders and in her heart (surprisingly not in her laugh) and would undergo tremendous sacrifice to alleviate the suffering of one crippled boy in Africa or one victim of domestic abuse in Nepal. But my world is still smaller than that (or perhaps too big for that?). I could comfort her and sympathize with her as she cried, weaving herself into the tragedies of the world around her, but I could never look at her in the eyes and say honestly, "I understand, its just so hard." But what I did realize was my capacity to share in her pain. At the end of the program, each volunteer wrote a letter to all of the other volunteers, and I found myself repeatedly coming across the word "sensitive" in my little notebook. To be clear, I'm not sharing this to brag, but as more of a joke, because as one known for making fun of people's dead dogs (I'm sorry.) and always pushing the joke just one step too far at someone else's expense, that adjective hasn't necessarily fallen into my "first 5 words you think of when you think of Debbie" description in the past.

So when I ask myself, "Do you care about Nepal? About the future of its people, the state of its rivers, the outcome of its battled for a constitution, the improvement of its education system, the sustainability of its agricultural program...etc?" I have to sheepishly avoid my own third eye and say "...not really." It's not that I don't care, but I can't say its a burning passion that will motivate my life path. In fact, I don't think I would have even defined the village I worked in as poor, and I was secretly thankful that the kids only had one outfit because it made it easier for me to identify them from day to day (or month to month). 

But when the husband of the hard-working, gorgeous, devoted wife and mother with whom we lived up and left with another woman in the village (who happens to be her cousin's cousin and a teacher in the elementary school, no big deal), bringing the poor woman to four consecutive sleepless nights spent brewing the local alcohol outside in the cold over a fire pit for income generation to ensure that her kids could be taken care of.....I felt her pain. And when her 8 year old daughter suddenly started having temper tantrums and crying for "bua" and her 11 year old son started wandering around the village in his father's oversized jacket...I felt their pain. I felt it tear my heart apart as it tore this family to shreds and the close-knit village community into two teams. And when I spent a long night crying with a friend over a deep loss in his life, I felt his pain. I felt the boundaries of our make-believe worlds dissolve away with the tears.

To be honest, I can't say I'm jealous of my beloved friend who travels the globe embodying "The White Man's Burden," nor do I deny that she may "have it right." It's simply not where I'm at. When I described this distinction to Uri he listened thoughtfully and simply concluded, "yeah, that's because you're a normal person." I think we all come her with an unlimited yet different (if that's possible) capacity to grow and love and allow people into our worlds and hearts and find the strength and bother to step into theirs. I'm so grateful for that opportunity I had to take a step in that direction, but where I may have hoped that I would find place in me for all of the world (or at least it's Bottom Billion, or at least it's rural Nepali dwellers), I found that stepping out of my comfort zone perhaps only enabled me to step into the worlds of the individuals in front of me. And, I gotta say, that's enough for me right now.

Musings from the Mountains

Over the past few weeks I’ve finished up the volunteering portion of my stay in Nepal and had the chance to do some trekking and travelling around. Although my experiences in the village certainly need to be processed and digested (because how could I simply let them influence or not influence me without being intellectually aware of what was going on?!?), I think that’s going to take a little bit of time, and right now I’m busy taking in even more new experiences.

Disclaimer: the following post is dramatic and ‘ra ra ra’ in every possible way, but you’ll have to excuse me – it was written on a week long trek through a Himalayan beauty so powerful, extreme and pure that it simply had to come out the way it came in. But just so you know, my poetic musings were interspersed with an internal and uninvited playlist of only the most annoying songs that were for some reason playing on repeat in my head, including hits such as “Son of a Preacher Man”, “These Boots were made for Walking”, and “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”.  And, yes, it was awesome to sing them aloud and hear them disappear into the abyss.

As we hiked the first few days through enchanted mossy forests on a glacial blue river, the following poem took shape, a little heavy on the alliteration, but whatevaaaa:

Majestic yet humble,

Her jagged peaks slice the sky
Towering over a small, sweet spring that trickles between smoothed stones.

Powerful yet soft,

Her raging rivers roar through violated valleys

Leaving behind a green blanket of moss to warm every revealed surface.

Destructive yet nurturing,

Her icy winds burn and freeze all that is in their reach,

Yet her caves promise refuge, and those same winds spread flowers across the earth.

Twin tree trunks twist together

Strangling each other

Embracing each other

We live within Her paradoxes.

This cyclical beauty

That contains within her all the balance we seek and everything that we could ever be.

Although I believed this on at least some level when I wrote it, it was not until the following day when it came together in a way that I could touch and feel on all levels:

After passing a few hours in a small cabin huddled around a fire with strangers to take refuge from the storm, the room was suddenly bathed in a light we had forgotten to keep wishing for. We rushed outside, letting the gushing wind send our cards flying in excited anticipation. The sky was on fire. Burnt orange clouds blazed behind the mountains, deep red embers glowed around smoky clouds, protecting the last oasis of icy blue clarity. The snow spotted peaks stood strong against the changing sky, watching it fade to a deep soft purple with one final flame of orange spreading across like a shooting star.

I remember once playing with the idea that the “bad” is only there to help us appreciate the “good” by enabling us to feel the contrast. I concluded that it is entirely not worth it. The incredible beauty in the world just doesn’t seem to justify the depth of suffering faced by humanity each day. But tonight I realized it doesn’t work that way. Experiences of beauty and pain, goodness and evil, love and betrayal, are not comparable to one another or to any other type of experience. Each one stands along, a burning moment frozen in a place where all types of “good” and “evil” lay down their arms and their egos, swirling together to create an unprecedented and unreplicable space.

The sunset would not have been “less gorgeous” without the storm clouds – that breathtaking moment where fury and serenity met simply would not have been. And the question was never posed to me, “would you rather it not have been, given the challenges retroactively hinged upon it?”, for my role was simply to be a part of the moment as it passed, doing my best to fully appreciate and grow from the revelation.

With that, I thank you all for coming to Nepal with me. I’m heading back to Israel in a few days and am not sure as to the status of this blog upon the return to my version of normalcy, but I think its been good for me, and I hope its been at least mildly interesting for you, so we’ll see what happens. 

Trash Talk

Yesterday we were summoned by our fellow volunteers condemned to city living to help them with their "Winter Camp" project building a garden in one of the schools in which they work. This cursed establishment sits between an indescribably filthy river and some sort of market based on stuffing dried fish into burlap sacks. Needless to say, its one of the most repulsive places I've ever been (including Delhi). In order to plant the garden we first needed to clear a plot and clean up the layer of trash that coats the schoolyard. As I held my breath and put my health in danger I had two main questions running through my head.
1) Why the hell am I cleaning up someone else's trash? and
2) What the hell am I going to do with it after I collect it? (as I've mentioned before, there is basically no waste management system in place beyond 'toss it in the river').


But there was something therapeutic about the process I went through, digging in the ground with my hands, pulling up all sorts of lost treasures, old shoes and plastic bags. By allowing someone else's problems to become my own and taking some measure of responsibility in finding a solution, I felt like I was slowly creating a place where things would hopefully one day grow in the future, and that this process is being paralleled in other less concrete aspects of my life right now.


Cleaning up the trash around me helped shed light on a challenging situation our group went through over the weekend, where we were forced to clean up the trash between us. Whereas most of our group seminars have been centered around or work and volunteering, because we are approaching the end (that's right folks), this seminar was just about having fun and enjoying our time with the other volunteers and the Nepali staff we have been working with, living with and learning from for the past few months. Our group was asked to present a short skit comparing Nepali and Israeli/western norms, and we were really excited about it. We pulled together a hilarious performance about an Israeli volunteer who fell in love with his Nepali staff member (played by Uri, of course) and brought her home to Israel to meet his family. Without reliving the traumatic experience of presenting the play itself, I'll simply say that our performance was met with dead, cold silence. While we thought our exaggerated reproduction of foreign customs would help us laugh at ourselves and bring us closer together, it turns out that after three months we simply do not understand enough about the culture to know where to draw the lines. We unintentionally sullied the sacred, deeply insulting Nepali cultural and national pride. The horrible moment of looking up and seeing the faces of our Nepali friends riddled with pain and embarrassment was followed by an agonizing conversation in which we emptied our cultural trash bags in a giant smelly mess in the middle of the circle and then slowly started to sort through it, everyone sheepishly looking toward the ground.


But it turn out that we were just revealing some of the trash - the misunderstandings, the gaps, the challenges, the barriers -that come along with these types of cultural encounters, and what started off as a funny joke and quickly spiraled into a mortifying mistake and then a painful conversation, ultimately ended in a fun drunken party. By putting the trash on the table, getting our hands dirty, making each others problems our own and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, we were able to sort through our own garbage and make room for a fresh start and a deepening in our relationship.


And today I realized that the same goes for me as an individual dealing with my own trash. The challenges of volunteering and group living in a remote village in a foreign country have definitely brought up questions in all of us over here, but I find myself constantly projecting my own personal challenges onto the people around me, seeing my trash as theirs instead of the other way around. The less we (I) communicate our (my) challenges and the more we (I) blamed them on those around us (me), the less able we (I) are to see ourselves honestly and remember that the problems in our relationships often reflect our own insecurities. But I don't think that "the" answer is to suck it up and take the blame, but rather to open ourselves up to the people around us and invite them to do the same, letting our garbage mix into one big smelly mess, and then sort through it together, finding ourselves and each other in the process.


So sorry that there wasn't much comic relief in this post, but no one said being a garbage (wo)man was an easy job. With hopes that we may all find a way to clean up the trash around, between and within us with devotion, sensitivity and honesty, and maybe one day even some laughter, as we create a clean space for growth. 

Big, small and other related subjects.

 I spend the vast majority of my time here in Sunderwotti (and perhaps on Planet Earth) occupied with things so small they should really be irrelevant, but instead they occupy all of my brain space and daylight hours. Whether it is picking weeds out of the farm, bugs out of rice, rocks out of lentils or, most frequently, imaginary lice out of my hair, I am almost always looking downward, my field of vision bursting with tiny-ness and my fingers constantly sorting between good and bad (which are very relative if you are an ignorant weed whose seed happened to land on the wrong side of the garden or an unassuming bug who crawled into an illfated sack of grains). But then this crazy thing happens to me – I look up. I find myself among massive mountains (in both their size and gorgeousness), surrounded on all sizes by postcard views of valleys hewn by rivers, terraces in every shade of green and clouds whose patterns have come to define or reflect my mood at that moment. And it's kind of baffling – how can my life be so small in such a big place? (Excuse my use of meaningless adjectives there). But then I look at the lives of those around me and realize that perhaps it couldn't be any other way, maybe exactly because of the enormity of 'it' all.

The people of the village would be defined by international standards as ignorant. Many of them don't know the name of their village or country and it is in the merit of the last cohort of volunteers that a select few now know that the world is, in fact, round (which for some reason people think is really important to know). So where do they live? Here. The furthest many of them have ventured is to this town an hour away in which I now sit, which boasts attractions such as internet, cream donuts and a hospital that hangs the x-ray results outside on a clothesline. So we have a bit of a conflict here: to expand their world or not?

We watched the movie Avatar the other night, crowded together on 2 single beds around a tiny netbook, and we couldn't help but laugh as the white man marched into Pandora (Panderwotti) with oxygen masks and equipment (water purification pills and hiking boots) offering "the blue monkeys" English classes and other things they simply cannot live without. It goes without saying that we came here to learn from the people, experience the novelty of their daily lives and expand our own realities, but the question still stands.

We were at the wedding of a wonderful guy in the village and I found myself constantly asking myself where culture ends and health and ethics begin. Among the many appropriate and controlled fun loving guests were also drunken men and women whose hands wandered to inappropriate places, distinguishing not between adult and child, male and female, Nepali and westerner. Young children wandered around inhaling helium from balloons and sipping dishpans full of the local rice alcohol (gross, for the record). I walked into a home the other night to encourage women to come to our early morning Women's Empowerment Group the next day - despite the fact that they work literally from dawn to dusk gathering, drying, smashing, sorting and other verbs that magically transform grains into flour (threshing and winnowing have got to be in there somehow) – and I was shocked at what I saw: 2 children that couldn't be more than 4 and 7 in a room filled with smoke holding their newborn baby brother dangerously close to the fire. Their mother was out of sight yet they were watched over by a family of goats who sleep in the kitchen. Knives and farming tools scattered their surroundings and I thought to myself, "there is no way that this kid is going to make it". But he will, and they all do. Well, that's not really true. The child mortality rate is pretty high, but each day I arrive at a school full of children (when school isn't cancelled for a wedding or lack of teachers or something) and I struggle to decide, once again, which ideas to try give over to them and which are not relevant, objective or even applicable. I got the kids to help me clean up all the trash that they throw on the ground outside their school (which happens to be situated in the prettiest place in the village) but when I approached the principal to ask him where to dispose of it he said to just toss it into the river. I subsequently bought trash cans for each classroom as part of our unit on hygiene and to encourage them to respect their learning environment, but I know that in the best case scenario the garbage will ultimately be burned or buried, neither option ranking to high on the ladder of health or environmental awareness.

So I don't know where it all comes together, but I find myself switching in and out of the big and small pictures – the ideal situation vs. the realities of their daily lives; the constant need to compare in order to understand; my own effort to be immersed in my daily life here while also having enough distance to appreciate it and reflect on it. But I also find that the big and small come together the deeper I allow myself to connect to the community in which I am living. The youth group here that we are involved in put on a play for the community the other night depicting the social issues of which they are all aware but no one talks about – domestic violence, alcoholism, violence as discipline in schools, sanitation problems, drop out rates and the dangers of drug abuse, crime and child labor that many village children fall into when they go to Kathmandu. Although they performed it as a satire that left the audience rolling with the laughter, I sat uncomfortable, sad and stone faced, watching a boy depict his drunken father and a girl depict the abuse she endured as a domestic worker in Kathmandu. Suddenly I see that their worlds are bigger than I thought, that their self awareness is painfully expanded, and that whether or not they know the name of their village or country, they are acutely present within the joy and pain of their daily lives. It sometimes makes me feel like my world is too big for me – too many options, too many decisions, too many problems to be aware of that are way beyond my sphere of influence. This can lead to an overwhelming feeling of helplesness and overwhelming paralysis. Their worlds, in contrast, are the perfect size for their lives - they are completely in touch with the tangible aspects of their lives and many of them are becoming more and more motivated to both change and appreciate them. 

Sundarwotti: where gratefulness meets guilt

I wrote in my first blog post about how one my main goals here (other than to fix third world poverty, of course) was to expand my consciousness from personal growth oriented to focus on my role and responsibility to others. Its becoming clear to me, however, that I forgot that in order to expand a border you have to break it. I'm not facing this new territory as an untouchable external force, but rather as one who will inevitably be influenced and changed by it. Part of the reason I felt ready to come here (other than not really feeling ready for anything else) was because I felt as if I was in a period in my life where my blessings were very clear to me, which led to a feeling of abundance, gratefulness and confidence that would obligate and enable me to share and give to others. I just graduated from university with a degree I mostly enjoyed, had a satisfying and challenging summer working with an incredible group of youth and traveling Israel, had an incredible visit in Canada which left me feeling like my relationships with my friends and family were in a strong place and, of course, got engaged to a man I'm totally in love with. So while there are always strong underlying currents of fear, doubt and insecurity, I was generally feeling every type of material and emotional blessing and, perhaps more importantly, I was feeling very grateful to God and the world for granting that to me.

Of course on some surface level I have always been aware that each of my blessings is counterbalanced by someone else's suffering - generally an African child around dinner time - but I never internalized this enough to make me feel anything - guilt, obligation, anger, sorrow, helplessness, or any other emotion that would just as likely lead to heroic action or deep depression.  I was also always slightly aware of the randomness of this uneven distribution of luck. As a Jewish history major, I would learn about the tragedies my people suffered in the past and marvel about how I could so easily been born 70 years earlier in a shtetle in Poland -but the only feeling this left me with was gratefulness.This gratefulness guided me through my first month here in Nepal quite comfortably. I felt I got the best bed in the best room with the best roommates during the orientation, and then that I got the best bed in the best room with the best people in the best place for my three month placement. And again, I felt the randomness of it all, and how my gratefulness granted it meaning.

But here in Sunderwatti I've begun to feel my gratefulness being expanded by the invasion of foreign feelings. Suddenly, my gratefulness isn't enough o transform random luck into something meaningful because I'm staring the counterbalancing suffering in the face and its tinging my gratefulness with guilt and confusion and sadness and helplessness. My bubble is slowly becoming expanded and the experiences of others simply change the way in which I experience my own life. The face of this suffering is dirty faced undernourished hcildren, shoeless women with the work of generations carved into their wrinkles, and toothless men unable to support their families. Now don't get me wrong - this face is almost always smiling and laughing and has been nothing but welcoming and generous to me, but I'm just so aware of how relative our happiness is. The children look too young, the adults look to old....or at least when I compare them to the children and adults that I know back home.

And I see how easy it is to become accustomed to the situation here. We are supposed to teach the community here about health and sanitation, but its pretty hard when I've been wearing the same outfit for 6 days, only sometimes use toilet paper, and took my first bucked shower after five days. Who wants to brush their teeth when its cold and rainy outside, there is no running water in the house and you have to put on shoes and go outside to the river. And plus, who cares? No ones has teeth so its not like there is a social standard to uphold, and the diet consists of rice and lentils and some delicious cross between a potato and radish that I've yet to identify, so who needs teeth anyway?

And this is all only strengthened by a feeling of helplessness. Us seven volunteers marched in here to make a difference,yet today, other an hour of planting zuchinnis with a women's group, we literally just cooked, ate and hung out. We are having a wonderful time together, but much of it ist spent laughing at how Sunderwatti should be renamed "lo-osim-klum-derwatti" (not doing anything). We were warned of the slow pace of village life and how long it would take to get started out here, but essentially we're all beginning to wonder what we'll really be able to do here at all with our limited skills, pathetic language abilities, lack of understanding of the culture,and short time span. I'm sure we'll have fun and provide some positive experiences for the people here - some good programs, some warm relationships, some positive attention - but more that that, I'm not really sure.

So that's where I'm at. My gratefulness has made way for some more complex emotions with the help of a beautiful, poor, welcoming mountain community, and I'm not quite sure what to do with it just yet.

(No time to proof read - excuse the choppy manner of this post and the spelling and grammatical errors.)

Nepall@oncenow

I've been resisting writing this post for quite some time now, as I've been busy searching for the one profound theme that can link together all of the different experiences, emotions and encounters of this unfamiliar chapter in my life right now. And, of course, I've come to realize that the common thread that will tie all of this information into a paradoxically-complex-but-really-ever-so-simple flow chart  either doesn't exist or is simply beyond my grasp right now. So instead of holding out on all the juice that you folks are so thirsty for until I can manufacture some false packaging that will sell it better, I'm just going to spill it all out and hope it doesn't get too messy, if you know what I mean. (Speaking of messy, sorry for using three different and unrelated metaphors in one paragraph to send a message that really isn't so complex. I'm overcompensating for lack of profundity and content.)

I want to simply share some of what I've learned about Nepali society over this past month of orientation and also what different projects Tevel b'Tzedek has set up in response to them. Basically, Nepal is a bit of a mess, searching for her path while torn apart by conflict from within and without. On the one hand, she is searching for her unique Nepali identity, while being sandwiched between two enormous countries (India and China) vying for political, cultural and economic influence. Meanwhile, she's made up of hundreds of ethnic groups each with its own language, culture, customs, goals, narrative, social structure and problems. Throw in a caste system, insane poverty, some communism, a shaky brand spankin' new democracy, and a whole lotta corruption and you've got yourself a party. Oh, and the seemingly impossible task of writing a constitution that adequately represents everyone (including women, "marginalized populations", and "untouchables"). 

Naturally, all of this has lead to a boat load of social problems, which is where us educated white folks step in to save the day. TBT works to empower people through four main avenues - formal education, informal education, women's empowerment and agriculture - in three different areas - the city (Kalamati), the town (Madavbesi) and the remove village (Sunderwati). Men, women, youth, children, families and the environment in all of these regions suffer from different manifestations of the same problems: poverty, education, alcoholism, health and sanitation, child labor, human trafficking and a whole slew of over things. I'm very aware of how vague I'm being, so instead of describing everything in depth, which I couldn't do even if I wanted to (which I don't, and neither do you!), I'll give you one example of an invented, but probably true, story:

Picture an uneducated, low caste family in a remote village - mom, pops, big bro, sis, little bro - fighting to make ends meet. The village is dependent on agriculture for food and money, yet global warming (or something) has led to unexpected rains that don't allow for the family to harvest the rice, which could mean no food for 6 months. Pops is feeling a little depressed about all this and hitting the booze, while mom works ridiculously freaking hard all day and night to try fix the situation. The kids are having trouble in school, especially because they have to learn in the Nepali language instead of their own language, and because there are 70 kids per class and their teacher has only graduated from grade 10. Plus, they don't have money for books and materials. So they just stop going. And they dream of all the opportunity that awaits them in the big city: Kathmandu. Big bro decides he should go try his luck over there at the grand age at 14 - after all, he heard of a friend of a friend who once went there and did really well, or something like that. So he gets on a bus with the clothes on his back and wakes up 10 hours later in a big polluted city where he doesn't know anybody. After wandering around aimlessly for a a few days, he finds himself working as a trash collector on the streets 8 hours a day for less than a dollar a day, and joining a nice crew of other child workers like himself who sleep on the streets, or in restaurants, or cheap rooms, dealing with disappointment of the big city and missing their families by huffing glue. I guess I could go on for a lot longer inventing all sorts of other things about what happens to the rest of the family members, but I think you get the point.

So as you can imagine, I found myself here dying for a deep and meaningful experience that would be transformative for both me and Nepali society, fixing the conflicts in both worlds in a way that would deeply connect them to one another. But I'm not really so sure how to go about that, so I'm trying to just take things day by day. I finally got my placement, and it appears that I'll be heading off to Sunderwati, a remote and disgustingly beautiful mountain village 10 hours away full of flowing streams, agriculture, and "marginalized peoples" to work in hopefully some combo of formal and informal education for the next three months. We visited the village last week for a few days and stayed with exceptionally warm and welcoming families in their modest mud homes, full of bedbugs, smoke (no chimneys) and love, to get a taste of what the hell is going on over there. My family was wonderful - middle aged parents with 4 sons (2 of whom were married and living in Kathmandu) and a 9 year old daughter who is sweet as sugar. Minus the way in which the mother enviously  grabbed at my North Face fleece and warm sweatpants and made this awful gesture to ask whether we were hungry (think of the pantomime motion for turning a door handle - the grab, the twist, the churn, the hunger I will never understanddddddddddd), we had a swell time over there. Practiced our Nepali, hung out by the indoor fire, played with the goats, ate way too much rice, taught them Shalom Aleichem, you know...

Well, folks, there it is. Wish I could give you more, but I'm feeling a little scattered at the moment and hoping that things will come together once I am with my (really incredible) group in the village and getting started on the projects starting on Sunday. Until then, I'll be here...soaking in my last few days of internet, warm water, flushing toilets, and privacyless-yet-super-fun group bonding. 

Slanted

It was if the entire structure was on a slant, subtly tilted toward the enormous golden structure that sat comfortably at the front, weighing down the room like too much cargo on a ship. A ruby robed monk struggled to open the shades of the window, for while one swung freely open letting in the fresh morning air, the other simply couldn't hold itself open against the will of gravity and the statue, two forces that simply aren't fair to put a simple wooden shutter up against, no matter how beautifully it may be decorated. And so too, the monks themselves seemed powerless against these great truths. Upon entering the giant room, which seemed to be set up exclusively for worship, each one fell to his knees, his hands pressed together falling from his forehead to his heart and, finally, to the cool, green, marble floor. While some gracefully flowed down, a waterfall of royal burgundy, many struggled to control the excessive amount of fabric, seeming to drown in its weight.

Eventually each monk fond his place among the long, padded benches, seated between and across from seemingly identical others to the careless eye. I wondered if a monk ever looked up and, forgetting where he was, confused the image across from him with his own reflection in the mirror. But the first soul stirring beat on the giant turquoise drum awoke me from my ignorance: of course this has happened - it happens all the time as Nepalis close their hands and bow their heads bidding one another "Namaste" casually proclaiming "the divinity in me bows to the divinity in you", whether it be in the monastery or on the street.

Boom boom boom. The drum beats continued, joined by the echoes of shimmering symbols and what seemed like hundreds of tiny bells. The mesmerizing music called my attention to the sudden cessation of a previously unnoticed hum of indistinguishable chants. One monk handed out long rectangular-shaped prayer sheets, carefully counting them, 1, 2, 3,4, before distributing them to the monks. I longed to see one, even though its foreign letters would doubtless be meaningless to my illiterate eye.

A young monk who couldn't have been older than nine or ten swiftly jumped up, drawing attention to the neon pink Crocs he had failed to remove at the entrance to the slanted room as all his comrades had done. Perhaps he was worried his tiny feet wouldn't have the traction to hold him upright, leaving him spiraling helplessly into the grasp of the giant statue, a shooting star of flailing red robe. Boom. Another thunderous drum beat startled  me from this absurd and baseless fantasy. I found myself staring direction at the forehead of this quite steady young boy, as he bowed before me, wiping clean the low table at which I was seated before continuing on to do the same to the rest of the tables in the room.

Each monk seemed to find his place in the slanted room; the Chanters, the Musicians, the Wipers, the Daydreamers, the Gigglers, the Chatters, the Meditators and, even I, the Analyzer. After a few moments of quiet reflection and meditation I released my legs from their twisted lotus position with my hands and climbed out of the slanted room, my back toward the giant golden statue and the rows of rubies that shone before him. And that's when I realized that perhaps it was I and not the room that was slanted, toward and away from forces so large that I couldn't even identity them because I had become them. After all, what could one expect of a simple window shutter open and closed to things against its will, no matter how beautifully it may be decorated.