A homeless baby (named Shiva) gets a monsoon bath at Buddhist Child Orphanage
Sweltering heat seemed to press on my head as Kelsang and I walked from one place to the other, getting business done. I felt you could cook an egg on my head. The monsoon rains were a little late, and everyone was talking about how dry the Terai was, an area of much rice production. It seems in Nepal, there is either too little or too much rain. The headlines in today's paper screamed out about "Diarrhea Kills 10 More in Village". It seems each summer when I'm here during monsoon I read about the water going bad, either because there's not enough of it, and villagers drink old, polluted water, sometimes the poor are driven to drink from stagnant pools. Or if there's too much rain, fecal matter runs into water sources and pollutes drinking water. The feces are there because many villagers still practice "outside defecation," and thus the other headline: "NGO Toilet Facilities Not In Use". This is because villagers, I read, prefer the great outdoors then a tiny, hot, stinky NGO made toilet. Since we're an NGO that has made two toilets in village areas, I found this news disconcerting.
"Snake Bites Kill 8 Villagers-More On The Way!" read another story in the paper. It went on to say more and more people were showing up at a hospital outside Kathmandu with poisonous snake bites. The entire emergency ward, it said, were all victims of cobra and krait snake bites, and 8 had died so far, others, especially the young, were surely going to die also. Most of the victims were bit sleeping and working in the fields, which did not make me feel any better than the toilet story, since I've done both things in villages. Often in bare feet. It seems the snakes are another result of the rainy season, being driven from their holes during monsoon flooding.
Monks may not be in the news here, but they are big news for me. One of the side attractions for me in Nepal is being able to study Buddhism and be around those with a daily practice, allowing me to experience what it's like to be in a country where it is the norm, not an oddity. Red and Orange robed monks and nuns with shaven heads, long mala beads swinging and always muttering the Buddhist chant from compassion "Om Mani Padma Hum" is NORMAL here, people, not some freak sideshow as it would be in the USA. I purposely single out monks to talk to, teach English too and listen too, a very easy task in this land of Buddha's birthplace.
One drawback to monks is, they tend to be early risers. Sleeping as I do at monastery guest houses, I am constantly woken up by the ringing of bells and chanting. I decided to move from Tharlam Guest House and Monastery the other day when I began to curse the monks who seemed to be getting up earlier and earlier to ring bells, bang gongs and crash cymbals. The Tharlam monks go the extra mile, blowing on these ancient long horns that take 2 monks at least to hold up while A third blows hard, making a sound much like 100 cats who's tails are being stepped on at the same time. "Damn those monks-why can't' they sleep in!" I heard myself mutter, looking at my watch- 4 a.m.! Really? You need to start prayers at 4 fricken a.m.?!?
The monsoon is not such a bad time to visit. While the heat was frying my brain, once the clouds come and rain starts the temps drop drastically and it becomes very refreshing. Because it's a warm rain, it's easy to carry on business with an umbrella in hand, The downpours can be intense, but usually it is brief with light rains before and after - and mostly early morning or late at night. It's pleasant sleeping weather with windows open, listening to the patter and sometimes thunder.
Our music enterprise, with the Ranchers for Peace song "Tell All The World" was coming along nicely but I was wondering how to film the children with my iPad-would it pick up their voices and show their charming faces? Then I met Rajendra, the young man who was once a street child himself. His story is such an inspiration, I am planning on buying the book his father/sponsor Allan Aistrope wrote and read to my class of 5th graders this year. To briefly summarize Rajendra's life, he ran away from home in the Terai, came to Kathmandu to go to school, but like many villagers, found the cold, hard reality that you needed money for school, and so his life on the streets began. He's been beaten, locked in jail, struggled to survive on the streets for years when Allan met him and began to sponsor him in school. "Allan is like a god to me,"Rajendra told me as we talked the other day at Himalayan Java coffee shop. "I don't believe in anything but Allan-he saved my life." Rajendra went on to the University, studied fine arts, was able to buy some video equipment and now makes small documentaries, one I saw before I met him about the brickyard children in Nepal. I knew I had found my man for filming the children singing Tell All the World.
Our little music video will be put on DVD and you can bet as soon as Rajendra edits it, it will be killer good! Get your Kleenex ready and be prepared to have your heart strings tugged. I cried many tears of joy watching the filming and seeing my little kids there sing their hearts out. With each repeating of the chorus "Tell all the world we will still be here" (We changed the ending a little bit from ..'it will still be there') I just wanted to stand up and cheer. "You go kids-You can do it!"
Yep, that's right-we will still be here, in Nepal, doing what we can to make the world a little easier and the future a little brighter for these children!
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