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.

Oh, hey there!

I'm going to make the conscious effort to bypass the disclaimers and self-justifications that often typify first blog posts, mainly because its awkward and also because I sense my posts are generally going to be very long-winded and without pictures, so maybe this way you'll actually get through the first one. (Damnit, that turned out to be a disclaimer).

What I'm not going to bypass is the explanation of the title. Unfortunately, the internet here is too slow for me to find the dictionary definition of "lucid dreams" that I so desperately need after lamely naming my blog after a topic that I know nearly nothing about, but in this post-modern world I'm just going to try pass it off as it being my personal understanding of and commentary on the concept of lucid dreams that this blog will be extremely loosely based on. The basic idea, for those of you who don't know (pretentious), is tapping into one's ability to become aware of his or her dreams and subsequently have the ability to shape them. I think. I mainly connect to this idea because I think that I'm a damn good candidate for this type of exercise, seeing as I almost always have long, detailed dreams that I remember vividly, and also because I often become aware of the fact that my dream is a dream while within it and repeat it to someone within the dream. Inception stylezzzz. This is almost certainly a reflection of an arrogant habit that I've had from at least grade 6 of telling my dreams to people the morning after as if they really care.

So one of the suggested ways of 'training' oneself to have (?) a lucid dream is to meditate on the action you would like to carry out in dream world as you're falling asleep. I once (yup) tried to do that and found myself at a loss for what my all-powerful Dreamself would ideally do - flying seemed 'over done', going into the past or future seemed dangerous, and hanging out with people I constantly miss just seemed creepy and sad. So I pictured myself (in very mini form, cause I had to fit into my own head) doing the MSN emoticon dance (either you know or you don't). I went to sleep laughing out loud and proceeded to have a (non lucid) dream that involved me walking in the snow in flip flops and ended with me being in a portapotty on someone's lawn as it tipped over. That was me retelling a dream - annoying right?

The only time I have successfully had a lucid dream was this summer when I, for the billionth time, had a reoccurring dream which consists of a much less glorified Dreamself with her mouth suddenly full of chewing gum. I find myself, always in the public sphere, having to embarrassingly remove endless glob after glob of gum out of my mouth, while simultaneously covering up what I'm doing. Research has shown this to be a very common dream, symbolizing anything from onsetting fatal diseases, sleeping with an open mouth, unhealthy relationships, or a problem with self expression. Blah. Anyhow, this summer I became aware that I was dreaming during one of these messy episodes that has led Wakingself to be unable to chew gum, and I directed myself to a mirror. There, I forced Dreamself to open her/my mouth and see that there was no gum inside. In short, it was heroic. And I haven't had that dream since. Boom.

So what's this all about, those of you who are still reading may be wondering. Basically, those experiences helped me have a little bit of an awakening, pardon the pun. I came to realize that dreams aren't necessarily about forcing Dreamself to do things that Wakingself could never do, but rather about developing my consciousness in a way in which I can affect positive change in myself. So consciousness. That's what it's all about. Or so they say. When I run through the last few years of my life I realize that it's kind of been about exploring my consciousness from different perspectives. When I started to 'become religious', so much of that which guided me was the exploration of myself within in God-context. I was trying to develop an awareness of Divinity in the world and the way in which it affected the way in which I saw myself and my obligations in this world. That naturally led to a journey inward, which was about developing a (healthy) self consciousness about my strengths and weaknesses, my fears and limitations, my desires and motivations, and how these slightly-arbitrary-yet-good-sounding-couplets influenced my relationships.

Now that I've successfully mastered those two areas of life (ha), I'm finding myself meeting a previously unexplored sphere of being that demands me to expand my consciousness to define my role in the world. Ambitious, I know, and also so "not me", despite the fact that I'm wearing a Save Darfur shirt right now when I legitimately have no idea what the deal is over there anymore. Or at least what the news is saying about it. And I never really ever did. And that brings us to the place you've all been waiting for...Kathmandu, Nepal.

In short, its truly been wonderful so far. I'm here on a program called Tevel b'Tzedek, which is comprised of one month of orientation and three months of volunteering. For this first month, our special group of 22 Jewish mostly Israelis plus a few North Americans and a Brazilian ranging from the ages of 21-63 (she has 9 grandkids...rock freaking on, Chaya.) are living in an are called Swayambhu (sp?) in a big ass house where we undergo intensive education - Nepali language lessons (embarrassing), politics, culture etc. as well as the development of human rights movements, the effects of globalization on this region, and other such topics that I've never been exposed to in any meaningful way. The group is incredible. I was nervous that me and my beloved fiance (just had to throw him in here...so freaking fun!! he says hi) would find ourselves among a bunch of naive, granola eating, pretentious, take-themselves-too-seriously, renounce the west style folks, but we are part of a dynamic, honest, fun-loving, curious, respectful and down to earth group of people who are each here for their own reasons.

However, it has been this encounter with such an intelligent, involved and active group that has highlighted  how little I've been involved in social issues, locally or globally, how completely ignorant I am about politics and current major trends and their implications, and perhaps, how self-involved my journey thus far has been. Not that I think it should have been/will be any other way from here on in. And I also wonder if its even possible. So instead of feeling self-conscious about it in a self deprecating and unproductive manner, I'm going to try to see this as a continuation in what will hopefully be a life long process of expanding my consciousness (exhausted at the thought). I'm excited to learn with and from these people as well as the local Nepalis with which we will be working over the rest of the program (more on that later), and hopefully over the course of this experience I'll come to a greater understanding of my obligation to the world around me and the best way for me to fulfill it.

In other news, its freaking gorgeous here...especially because I was preparing myself for the indescribable nastiness of Delhi. I open my penthouse window to gorgeous mountains and the sounds and smells of Buddhist prayer services, yet I close them because otherwise the monkeys will come in and steal my crap.

With love.