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.