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.