A series of days have been happening to me for a few weeks now, and I find that today is the last of those in Mcleod Ganj. Whether this emotion has any place in the constitution of a worthy international journalist (probably not), a few weeks of immersion rendered me momentarily unable to process everything going on around me. Struck with the realization that I'll soon be back in the land of the Great Firewall, it seems prudent that I lay down some reflections.
Beggars make me sad about myself, because they make me think about myself at all when clearly they are the ones without hands, or feet, or enough money to buy milk for their babies. Looking at a person who clearly doesn't have the resources to work on her own—who in India wants to hire the old woman with nubs at the end of her arms?—my first instinct is to try to assuage my guilt. Why doesn't the government help her? Why doesn't that guy who looks richer than me help her? Etc, etc. Obviously, the problem of poverty and inadequate resources for the handicapped in developing countries runs deeper than my self-involved blogging, so I won't attempt to dissect it here. It just sucks. I should do something about it. You should do something about it.
On a related note, I made a concerted effort to give my money to businesses run by those who looked just a few days away from asking for the cash without anything to offer in return. I know you've seen the commercials, but the equivalent of $60 in the hands of a displaced man struggling to sell jewelry off of a table constructed over a sewer really can render him speechless. then again, as Jason reminds me, I don't know where/how those jewels were mined. Everyone's life would be so much easier if everyone was so much kinder.
The Tibetan situation is frustrating, as any Tibetan will readily explain to you. Jason & I both scored private audiences with members of the Tibetan government-in-exile as part of our research for stories we wrote for Lha's monthly magazine. They're running a legit establishment up here in India's Himalayan foothills. They're keeping a close eye (as close as possible) on the fate of their countrymen and women in Tibet. Yet they're working 9-5, as one dissenter and fabulously bearded man told me, on what is, for many Tibetans, a life or death issue. The Dalai Lama will die, and this government with no bargaining chips on the global playing field (except this one: "Hey guys, torture hurts. Like, a lot. Especially electrocution. Please help.") will have its hands full trying to harness the pain of millions of Tibetans, to remind them that nonviolence is golden.
"Don't worry about it too much," Tashi told me in one of our conversation classes. The other day as we climbed a couple hours past the mountain snowline, he reiterated his first lesson to me, the day after we arrived here. Our enemy is our own anger. Your body is a guesthouse, a convenient vessel for you to do as much good as you can while you're here, not for you to use worrying about material things, including illusory homelands. Still, it's difficult to return to China, where admittedly my biggest physical hurdle will be finding a functional proxy to access Facebook, knowing seventy percent of imprisoned Tibetans are monks and nuns put in jail for protesting peacefully and requesting basic rights.
I acquired food poisoning pretty early on, but I've been eating right through it. It became kind-of a game, really, to see if I could eat enough to make input greater than output through sheer volume. Last week I broke down and went to a Tibetan doctor, who prescribed herbal pills that taste like dirt, which I have to chew (chew! three dirt pills!) at every meal. Not knowing exactly what made me sick, I wouldn't take back a single potentially infested meal. Indian food is magical. The presence of properly cooked western food, also magical.
February 14 marked the first day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year (coincidentally the same day as China's this year, though not always). Jason's student invited us to spend the holiday with his family—wife, brother, and three kids sleeping and eating in one room, with an attached kitchen and bathroom—an experience that involved basically sitting still and stuffing our faces with biscuits, candy, fruit, momos (Tibetan dumplings) and more tea than one should consume in a year, for about six hours straight. Felt just like an American holiday. As a thank-you, his student wrote us each a card (this guy just learned the ABC's four weeks ago) and his son drew me a picture of the entire family, which beats any photograph. I had to send the card, along with many other Tibetan gifts and souvenirs, home to my parents, because I can't bring any of it back into China.
We've met a pile of the most outgoing, kindhearted people one could hope to meet in the world. People from every corner (often from multiple corners at once), here to concentrate on their own work, meditate, help the refugee community or the local community, find themselves, nurture discarded puppies, practice yoga, learn about organic, small-scale farming, be of knowledge and be of use. I hope our paths chance to cross again, but often that's not the case. We all just take our cultural enrichment and run, better for the conversation, gallons of chai, and unexpected company.
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