Christmasing in Kathmandu

I guess I never pictured Christmas away from home, and I certainly never pictured it in Kathmandu. But here we are, post-Christmas, and I am reflecting upon our first ever away-from-home celebration of this wonderful holiday...

Amos and I are both pretty nostalgic and sentimental, and we definitely felt the absence of familiar traditions, sights, and sounds--things that seem to give Christmas a feeling, a spirit, a comfort that we cherish. We also felt the absence of the sometimes overwhelming hustle and bustle, the blatant consumerism, the awful tunes that somehow pass for Christmas songs but that we always end up humming to.

So. We found ourselves with mixed feelings, as is often the case. It was lovely to just be together, to have no obligations, no 12 days of Christmas parties, no wintry mix, no throngs of shoppers. In some ways, it seemed that Christmas was stripped down, its layers peeled away. It took some creativity to recognize it this way. More than ever, we were forced to contemplate, to remember, to reflect upon the meaning of the season on our own, and we found that to be a beautiful experience.

Of course, on the other hand, our hearts very much ached for family and friends. We also really missed attending our church's Christmas Eve service, something we could not quite replace here.

A group of Christmas carolers (from the Nepali church we have been attending) came to our home and surprised us with the most festive, enthusiastic, rhythmic caroling we have ever experienced...tambourines and dancing included. Nepalis sure know how to sing and dance, and they won't just let you sit in your chair and watch!

We had fun doing some decorating around our apartment, stringing garlands of chili peppers (which are quite plentiful here) and popcorn, buying a poinsettia (also very plentiful) and setting our gifts beneath it. We baked cookies and sang some carols, read the ancient Christmas story with new perspectives, and we even got to open gifts with my family...over Skype! We took some time to enjoy the brilliant day, and on Christmas evening we wandered through the Garden of Dreams, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is a beautiful oasis of calm in the middle of busy Kathmandu. We lingered there, and ate dinner out...the first time we've ever eaten out on Christmas day.

It felt strange, but lovely. We will remember Christmasing in Kathmandu forever, no doubt.

We hope you all had a wonderful holiday!


The Christmas Carolers


Amos breaking it down


me trying to dance


Showing off our ginger & spice cookies

Waiting

It’s Advent season so it feels appropriate to talk about waiting. I find myself waiting a lot these days… for the sun to break through the fog in the morning, for the electricity to bring light back to our apartment, for hot water. I wait in traffic jams and for public buses that aren’t already filled with people. I wait for my colleagues who are constantly late for meetings (or maybe I’m early?). I wait for my morning newspaper which never seems to arrive on time. In my weaker moments, I’m waiting for this service term to end so I can get back to my real life. I’ve never been particularly good at waiting. It’s not that I mind sitting around…I just prefer to do it on my own terms.

In the larger scheme of how the world works, I also find myself waiting… for us to figure out how to live without killing each other, for the Church to overcome its pettiness and start exhibiting alternative ways of being. I’m waiting for food prices to decrease so mothers don’t have to decide which child eats and which child dies. How long will we have to wait until we have an economic system that doesn’t depend on exploitation? Until we stop the AIDS epidemic and find a cure for cancer? I’m waiting for the financial crisis to end, along with the Bush presidency.

On a more personal level, I’m waiting for my own redemption, in ways that are too numerable to name here. When will I finally get past the fear and lack of vision that so often paralyzes me and start relying on the creativity of the Spirit? When will I stop using stereotypes and prejudices to define the people I encounter and start seeing them through the eyes of love and compassion? When will I be willing to put aside the individualism that tempts me and embrace a more communal way of living? Definitely not today and probably not tomorrow…so I wait.

Advent forces us to wait. And it’s not a waiting that means we can sit back and relax. It’s a disciplined waiting that requires reflection, examination, tension. As with so many things, the waiting I experience here in Nepal, the more indefinite waiting for the redemption of myself and the world…there’s a temptation to skip the gestation period and jump immediately to the birth. We don’t like the preparation that Advent requires, the long hours sitting in the dark waiting for the sun to rise. I don’t like the moments when I’m standing naked in the bathroom (don’t picture it), waiting for the water to reach a temperature that is bearable. I feel vulnerable and cold as I’m faced with my own inadequacy- there is nothing that I can do to make the hot water come faster. And there’s nothing to distract me from the waiting. Buddhism teaches us to live in the moment, to constantly be aware of the present. This sitting, reflecting, anticipating asks for a discipline that many of us would rather not nurture. We know our Savior is coming so why not go ahead and get on with it? We’re tired of the hard work of being here, being now.

I’m waiting with all of these thoughts this Advent. I’m reminded that although this Advent season will end overnight when we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, my redemption, the redemption of our communities, systems and structures, the beating of swords into ploughshares, is a much longer process. It’s a process that requires all of the disciplines that come with waiting- patience, awareness, endurance, reflection. And so this year, perhaps more so than in the past, I’m trying to live in the present that is Advent, to breathe this air, to feel this darkness…knowing that one day the sun will shine.

Getting Away

Having lived here in Kathmandu for a little over three months now, Heidi and I are already aware that we will need to regularly escape the confines of this city, getting away from the noise, concrete and commotion. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to do so. A ten-minute walk from our apartment takes us to rice fields and quiet villages. A thirty-minute bus ride takes us to the hills that overlook the Kathmandu Valley, hills filled with trees, birds and beauty. These escapes reconnect us with God's good Creation, energizing our spirits and calming our minds.

Below, you can see a few pictures from our getaways, along with a short reflection I wrote after our latest visit to Pulchowki, a preserved forest that contains over 300 species of birds:

I need air that I can breathe, Earth that I can touch.
I need silence that I can hear, flowers that I can smell.
I need green and brown and red.
I need rustling and crunching.
I need open spaces, clear skies.
I need water that I can drink, stillness that I can join.
I need beauty that I can see.
I need to get away, be alone.
I need dirt and bark and stone.
I need the sun to warm me, birds to sing to me.
I need simple.
I need calm.
I need to be able to walk unaware.
I need to be able to stop.
I need butterflies and birds.
I need.


A traditional Newari village during harvest time



A not so traditional bearded birder

Kathmandu Taxi Ride

Walking, meeting, asking, cheating, bargaining, agreeing, leaving, joining a mass of cars, trucks, buses, mopeds, pedestrians, motorcycles, trash, smog…headlights, brake lights, faster, slower, lurching, gears shifting, hanging on, weaving, roaming cows, swerving, wide-eyed and white-knuckled, tight squeezes, dodging, dust flying, horns blaring, creeping, car stalling, exhaust fumes pouring, whistles shrieking, policemen pointing, bumping, close calls, heart pounding, sudden stops, inhaling fumes, sharp turns, potholes, short-cuts, forced merges, sleeping dogs, random jams, arriving, stopping, paying, thanking, leaving, sighing.

Pokhara

Last week, during the Tihar Festival (also known as the Festival of Lights), Amos and I and Ben headed to Pokhara for some quiet, fresh air. Pokhara is a very winding, scenic 7-hour bus ride from Kathmandu. It is located in a valley surrounded by hill after hill and by the Annapurna Mountain range. The elevation is a bit lower than Kathmandu's, and the weather was a bit warmer...just wonderful!

Our 5-day stay included hiking to the magnificent Peace Pagoda, viewing the Annapurnas at sunrise atop Sarangkot (a perfect high point for seeing the mountains in all their glory), boating across the serene Phewa Lake, eating at lovely little restaurants with beautiful gardens, watching the festive dancing in celebration of Tihar, visiting a Tibetan village, seeing Devi's Falls, browsing the many craft shops, and simply resting in the peace of this little town.

Here are some of our pictures...


The Peace Pagoda


the mountains' reflection in the Phewa Lake


row, row, row, your boat!





some traditional dancing...


sunrise from Sarangkot


atop Sarangkot


a section of the Annapurna Range


the hike down from Sarangkot


the hills are alive with the sound of "moooosic"

A Moment of Hope?

Yesterday morning, Heidi and I watched the results of the American election at Phora Durbar, the American club, here in Kathmandu. We have both been fairly staunch supporters of Obama throughout his campaign and were excited about the possibility of watching the results of this historic election with other Americans. As we sat crowded in the café of the American Club, eating our American breakfast (with a few people enjoying a beer at 9 in the morning) and watching projection after projection, it became obvious that basically everyone in the room was rooting for Obama (except for the U.S. Embassy staff who were required to remain neutral). I’m not sure if this says something about the types of people who live overseas…or if it says something about how well people resonated with Obama’s message or how well they didn’t resonate with McCain (and Bush by association)…maybe it merely says that people who voted for Obama had nothing better to do on a Wednesday morning in Kathmandu.

When the inevitable was finally announced, the room erupted. I’ve never witnessed the outcome of an election that brought so many emotions. A woman behind us broke into tears saying that Bush had sent her to Iraq for a year and she hoped now the war would finally end. Strangers were hugging each other. People were crying, laughing, shouting. I felt myself getting choked up as I looked around the room and saw so many of my fellow Americans being overcome by emotion. Perhaps it was a symbol of our naïveté, our unwarranted hope in one man or in one man’s rhetoric. I like to think the emotions that we felt in these moments were the result of a realization that we have been going in the wrong direction. For a moment at least, we were united by a faint glimmer of hope that this could be the start of an important shift in American politics, and perhaps even in the American lifestyle. In the midst of continued racial injustice in our country, the fact that a black man even had a shot at the presidency is in itself a glowing sign of hope. As significant as this accomplishment is, this election seems to represent even more than that. For me, it represents the possibility that my country will stop using war to solve all of its disputes. We may actually start talking to our enemies again. Perhaps now, we will recognize the need to change our lifestyles…to wean ourselves from the idol of materialism and the broken ideology of individualism. Perhaps now, our image in the world will begin to be restored. For a moment yesterday morning, I think I felt something that can only be described as patriotism, a feeling I hardly recognize these days…not a patriotism that thinks America is God’s gift to the world…but rather a pride in my fellow Americans for choosing a different path from the one we have been following for the past eight years, for ignoring the calls to fear and instead recognizing the power of hope…for electing a black man, a man with a strange name and an unusual family tree to lead us during an incredibly difficult time.

Let me step back from what could be read as an overly idealistic blog entry. Of course, I realize that Obama’s win will not usher in the Kingdom of God. There will not be peace on Earth anytime soon…the hungry are still hungry, the poor are still being oppressed. If I needed any more indication of this, I only had to look around…after all, I was celebrating this election victory in an American oasis on prime real estate in downtown Kathmandu, surrounded by people who sleep on the streets…people who will never experience the luxury that resides within the walls of the American Club. Our country will continue to use violence to “defend” its interest…politics will continue to be politics. I realize that many American policies, which I believe are oppressive and sinful, will continue under the Obama administration. As a Christian, I am called to consistently resist these policies, regardless of which party is making them.

But for at least a moment yesterday morning (and perhaps for only a moment), I was an American and that was okay.

Thoughts On Being Grateful

Over the past two months here in Nepal, Heidi and I have been struggling with what it means to be grateful in this place. I decided to post some of our thoughts and questions so that our friends and family members who read this blog can see how and why we’ve been wrestling with this idea. I’m grateful (an appropriate sentiment for this blog entry) to friends who have listened to us and shared their own reflections on the concept of gratefulness in contexts similar to Nepal. I’ve taken the liberty of stealing some of their words and thoughts.

Should we feel grateful in this place? grateful that we were not born here? grateful that we can basically leave whenever we want? grateful that we have the economic power to give someone on the street more money today than they will make this year? Should we be grateful that our apartment is bigger than most peoples' homes and has far less people living in it? We don't feel like we should be grateful for these expressions of inequality. Rather we feel like we should be ashamed, humiliated, outraged. Perhaps instead of being grateful for these things, we should be grateful that despite our accumulation of wealth, despite the legacy of oppression and imperialism that we have inherited, despite our own complicity in systems of injustice, God has mercy on us. We should be grateful that we can be here, that we can experience the pain and beauty of this place, that we can enter into relationships with people whose feet we are not worthy to wash, that we can be redeemed, born again, made new. We should be grateful that there is still hope for us, that we can find joy in emptying our hands.

This whole concept of gratefulness struck us in a new way a few weeks ago. A young Nepali friend invited us over for dinner. We braced ourselves for what we knew would be a living situation that was far different than our own, but we weren’t ready for the “simplicity” of her living situation. Her "house" was a room, smaller than the guest bedroom that we don't use. She lives there with her parents and younger sister and is the sole wage earner for the family. We sat on their single bed while they sat on the floor and served us dinner. They had prepared a feast for us. We wanted to cry and scream. Their hospitality was so genuine. We wanted to get up and leave, run away from it all, back to the comfortable world that we used to live in, where we could be grateful for the “blessings” that we had been given without having to recognize the blood on our hands. We found our way through the meal. It was awkward on many levels, trying to eat cross-legged on a bed, not being able to drink the water they offered because we knew we would get sick, trying to communicate with our small bits of Nepali and their small bits of English- not to mention the fact that all of us knew we live in different worlds. It was awkward and yet in some ways, it was beautiful. We realized that if we allowed our guilt, shame and embarrassment to keep us from being grateful for this gift, we would be adding another injustice to a situation that was already filled with them.

With this experience in mind, we realize that we do need to be grateful for gifts such as these. But it’s not a gratefulness that says “God, thank you for not making me like them”. Heidi and I have both been on too many mission trips where that thought has been the prevailing theme. Rather, we need a gratefulness that acknowledges responsibility. We have to be grateful for these gifts and yet we need to be angry that these inequalities exist in a world where this is plenty for all. Particularly as Americans (who comprise 6% of the world population but consume 42% of its goods), we need to live in and feel this tension. We have to pray a prayer of thanks, along with a prayer of repentance. When asked how we can respond to this situation, a dear friend of ours gave us several suggestions, paraphrased here:

- we can engage in daily acts of mercy, justice and love and so mitigate the effects of evil in and around us.

- we can keep saying “no” to the temptations of consumerism and materialism and keep making more just choices, in small and big ways.

- we can be thankful for the gifts that we are given like the one described above, and by doing so, refuse the temptation to categorize people according to their material wealth.

-we can tell the truth about the world and by doing so, refuse the attempts to rationalize and explain the suffering of so many (like our Nepali friend) and the wealth of so many (like us).

This blog entry is an attempt to carry out the last point. I realize that many of you may read our blog in hopes of seeing beautiful pictures and hearing fun stories about our time here. Certainly, we will continue to post those types of things. But we also feel that by living here, we have an obligation to describe experiences like the one in this post. We do this, not to pretend to speak for people like our Nepali friend or to portray the people here as “impoverished” or “undeveloped”. Rather, we are speaking for ourselves, as two individuals who are recognizing that the world is complicated, that the simple answers we’ve been told most of our lives simply do not answer our questions…we are speaking as two people who are in need of conversion and the grace of God. To remain true to this obligation and to ourselves, we hope to periodically share these kinds of thoughts/experiences on this blog. Thank you for listening.

Nagarkot or Bust

We returned yesterday afternoon from our first vacation...a one-night stay in Nagarkot, 32km from Kathmandu, at 2175m elevation. This resort village is a popular destination for those who want to catch sight of the Himalayas. At this time of year, the mountains are supposed to be on full display at sunrise.

The ride there was certainly exhilarating! All of us (Amos and myself, Charlotte and Micah and Ben) awkwardly climbed onto the roof of an old bus that was too full to hold anymore people inside. An hour later, we arrived in Bhaktapur, wind-blown and achy from sitting on and holding tight to metal bars. Here we stopped and switched busses, once again ending up on the roof--this time with about 15 Nepalis. This time there was a spare tire to sit on, and I was lucky enough to snag a piece of it. Even so, after nearly two more hours of driving uphill on very narrow winding roads, I was (and I think we all were) white-knuckled, cold, and ready to be on ground again. The sweeping view of the valley below...the villages, the terraced farms and fields surrounded by lush green hills...was breathtaking, although I couldn't help but imagine how easily I could be propelled from the bus roof into all that agricultural loveliness. Thankfully, we all made it unscathed.

We rented a quaint cottage at "The End of the Universe" (a very fitting name for the resort) for the night, and woke up just before dawn to watch the sun rise over the Himalayas...and while the sun rise was beautiful (aren't they always?), the clouds overtook our view, teasing us with a few brief glimpses of those majestic peaks.

After breakfast at the lodge, we packed up and headed back down to the valley, a four hour hike through the farms and fields we had only seen from FAR above the day before. Village people greeted us and helped us navigate along the way--upholding the Nepali reputation for being the nicest people in the world. (According to me, anyway.) We even got to watch as two village women made fresh steaming hot wheat liquor (raksi) and enjoyed a taste of the surprisingly smooth brew before continuing our hike. Through villages, farms, and jungle, we made our way to Changu Narayan, a village that is home to a beautiful historic temple--its origins date back to the 4th century. We wandered through the ancient village, watched as people dried corn and grains in the hot sun. After seeing the temple at the top of the hill, we rested our weary bodies at a restaurant for lunch, then headed back to Kathmandu...this time inside a bus.

It was probably the least relaxing vacation we've ever taken, but hands down the most purely beautiful and enriching.


going a bit stir-crazy on the bus


sunrise at Nagarkot


precariously perched goats



village women making raksi

Are we losing something?

There’s a festive spirit in the air these days. The streets are aglow with strings of lights, the stores are filled with last minute shoppers, and people are busy preparing to host family and friends. Sound familiar? Here in Nepal, we are nearing the end of the Dasain Festival, which begins on the day of the new moon in September and ends on the day of the full moon in early October. In the weeks leading up to this festival, I have been struck by the similarities that this “auspicious” holiday shares with Christmas. Dasian is the Hindu celebration of the ultimate and inevitable triumph of Good over the forces of Evil, when the Goddess Durga killed the wicked demon Mahisasura who had been tormenting human beings for generations. For Christians, Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ, the pivotal moment in history when the world began to turn from darkness to light. We believe this event set into motion God’s ultimate redemption of humanity, the imminent victory of Good over Evil with the death and resurrection of Christ. There are other similarities- decorations, the giving of gifts, extended vacation from school and work. And of course, there are many differences (i.e. we don’t slaughter thousands of goats for Christmas and Nepali’s don’t believe that an overweight old man slides down their chimneys to deliver gifts for Dasain). However, there is one similarity that has been particularly striking. I get the sense from Nepali’s that I’ve talked to and a few newspaper articles that I’ve read that the Dasain Festival is changing, and not necessarily for the better. It seems this festival is no longer focused on the celebration of a monumental moment in history. It’s no longer about spending quality time with family and friends. Rather, it has become commercialized. Dasain is now a commodity that is bought and sold to the highest bidder. It’s about consuming. Billboards, displaying flashy motorcycles, entice shoppers with a “Special Dasain Giveaway”. Stores lure passersby with “Desain Discounts”. In this impoverished nation, many people simply cannot afford to celebrate Dasain in this new way so they take out large loans that they will be paying off long after the end of this Holiday. Sound familiar? As I’ve read about the fate of many American and European banks over the past few weeks and the subsequent crashes on Wall Street and many other streets throughout the world, I’ve been reflecting on this monster that we in the West have created. We have built systems that require people to buy, not just things that they need but more importantly things that they want (by blurring the lines between “needs” and “wants”). Sacred celebrations like Christmas and Dasain are necessary victims of this monster. In order for our economies to grow, we need people to have more reasons to buy and consume. In the name of “progress”, we sacrifice those things that were once very important to us. Perhaps we are gaining the world, but what are we losing?

Small featured men dancing during Dasain.

Village children enjoying a swing, set up specifically for this festival.

Hundreds of thousands of goats like these are slaughtered during Dasain.