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.)