Sometimes, when lying on the roof, staring up at the vast night sky, I turn my attention down to the activity of the valley. All over the horizontal rows of earth are little splotches of light. I try to imagine the specific source of each, and its purpose. One tiny house’s fire cooks the night’s spiced potatoes and chapati. Another illuminates a small room, while in a house down at the bottom of the valley, a little boy curls up by his fire to study his English textbook.
Four nights ago, if anyone across the valley were to be sitting, looking up at the stars, and happened to notice the far glow on Mr. Verma-ji’s roof, he would most certainly have been looking at my friends and me, our headlamps alight as we readied ourselves for our mini Rosh Hashanah celebration. For Joe, that meant reading as much as he could of Harry Potter (and the prisoner of Azkaban) before Andrew finished cutting open his sticks of honey. I’d already poured a small portion of maple syrup into a small metal bowl, and fresh Indian bananas (the best you’ve ever tasted) waited, soft and sweet, beside the bowl. Genevieve, Christina, Binit-ji, and Lizzie sat in the circle with us, quietly and patiently waiting while I explored my pocket prayer book.
I didn’t know what prayers were to be said for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. My book knew what to do on normal days, on Shabbat, on Hannukah, even what to say on Purim. It had served me well in Kausani: on Saturday morning, after I’d finished a super-abridged Shabbat service, and I noticed the Himalayas had come out, the book provided me with the blessing for “seeing the majesty of the heavens, high mountains, or other glorious phenomena of nature”.
I searched and searched, and could come up with nothing for Rosh Hashanah. My companions were understanding and flexible though, and in the end we decided to say the shehechianu. “Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam,” I began, and Joe and Andrew joined in. “Shehechianu vikiyamanu vihigianu lazman hazeh.”
The prayer thanked God for “giving us life and sustenance, and bringing us to this happy season.” For me, the blessing was perfect.
In its short and succinct Hebrew way, its words encompassed all that I wanted to say and more. Thank you, God, for making sure that admissions officer had been in a good mood that day. Thank you, the prayer said, for catching our eyes on the short blurb about Princeton’s pilot Bridge Year program, and thank you for instilling in us the courage to explore beyond our country’s familiar borders. Thank you for giving us the strength to write yet more essays about why us. Thank you for keeping Skype functioning long enough to be asked what we would do with no toilet paper for a year. Thank you for getting us past surprisingly intrusive swine flu checkpoints in the airports. Thank you for holding our wheels to the ground as we flew through the crowded, noisy streets of Delhi, and down the impossibly bendy one-way roads of the mountains. Thank you for keeping intestinal craziness, while clearly inevitable, to a minimum. Thank you for ensuring that our instructors were more knowledgeable and experienced than we ever could have hoped for. Thank you for inspiring us each morning with lush green hills, unearthly flowing wisps of clouds, and high, piercing Himalayan peaks. Thank you for allowing us to see our potential to improve lives, even in the small way that we had, helping to reconstruct Sadu’s small house. Thank you for giving us life, sustenance, and bringing us to this happy season.
And thank you, in advance, for everything to come.
Wednesday, October 21
The Machine
In seventh grade Performing Arts class, Mr. Agalias asked for a volunteer.
“Someone go to the center of the circle, and start doing something. Anything. Move your arm up and down. Turn your head left to right. Make a noise that corresponds with your action. ‘Swoosh swoosh,’ maybe, or ‘boing boing’. Just do something repetitive.”
Dan, one of our braver classmates, went up first. He turned his knee out, then back in again, saying, “Whee! Whee!” He continued the pattern until Mr. Agalias tapped my head and told me to find an action and noise that fit in with Dan’s. I bent down, and put my arm in the empty space his knee would create, pulling it out every time his knees came back to center. “Boom. Boom.”
We were the machine. One by one, Mr. Agalias would tap us on the head, and each of us would become a working gear of the contraption. Before long, we’d become a bouncing, buzzing, busy cacophony of middle school actors.
Today I find myself part of a very different machine, several thousand miles away from that small theater in Grover Middle School. The machinery of our efforts is much the same as it was those years ago, though our purpose is decidedly more useful. I am in the small tropical paradise of Kanda Valley, working to put the roof on a high new house.
It all begins with the young man on the ground, wearing a shirt reading, “URBAN CHAOS!” He is stamping dirt and rocks and cement together, while a man close by shovels it into metal pans. These pans are picked up and passed, man to man to man to man, up an efficient design of makeshift stairs and scaffolding. Their rhythm is continuous, the pattern accented by grunts and laughs and Kumaoni calls. Cement dumped out on the roof, the trays are passed down to me. I make eye contact with the man below me, and he raises his eyebrows, wordlessly signaling that it’s safe to slide the trays down to him via fraying plastic slide. Whoosh. He runs the trays to the shoveler. And the cycle begins again.
One of the volunteers above me wipes the sweat from the back of his neck, saying, “Man, wouldn’t this be easier if they just had a machine to haul all that cement up here?”
I watch the activity all around me, and shake my head. Look at us. We are the machine.
“Someone go to the center of the circle, and start doing something. Anything. Move your arm up and down. Turn your head left to right. Make a noise that corresponds with your action. ‘Swoosh swoosh,’ maybe, or ‘boing boing’. Just do something repetitive.”
Dan, one of our braver classmates, went up first. He turned his knee out, then back in again, saying, “Whee! Whee!” He continued the pattern until Mr. Agalias tapped my head and told me to find an action and noise that fit in with Dan’s. I bent down, and put my arm in the empty space his knee would create, pulling it out every time his knees came back to center. “Boom. Boom.”
We were the machine. One by one, Mr. Agalias would tap us on the head, and each of us would become a working gear of the contraption. Before long, we’d become a bouncing, buzzing, busy cacophony of middle school actors.
Today I find myself part of a very different machine, several thousand miles away from that small theater in Grover Middle School. The machinery of our efforts is much the same as it was those years ago, though our purpose is decidedly more useful. I am in the small tropical paradise of Kanda Valley, working to put the roof on a high new house.
It all begins with the young man on the ground, wearing a shirt reading, “URBAN CHAOS!” He is stamping dirt and rocks and cement together, while a man close by shovels it into metal pans. These pans are picked up and passed, man to man to man to man, up an efficient design of makeshift stairs and scaffolding. Their rhythm is continuous, the pattern accented by grunts and laughs and Kumaoni calls. Cement dumped out on the roof, the trays are passed down to me. I make eye contact with the man below me, and he raises his eyebrows, wordlessly signaling that it’s safe to slide the trays down to him via fraying plastic slide. Whoosh. He runs the trays to the shoveler. And the cycle begins again.
One of the volunteers above me wipes the sweat from the back of his neck, saying, “Man, wouldn’t this be easier if they just had a machine to haul all that cement up here?”
I watch the activity all around me, and shake my head. Look at us. We are the machine.
Hamara Dost
Today, as we were walking home from the village, we passed Gautham, a little boy in our homestay family. He was walking home from school with his friends, who were all dressed exactly the same way, looking like a little herd of Gauthams in their identical light blue uniforms and crooked dark blue ties.
“Gautham!” we shouted. “Gautham! Our friend! Mayra dost!”
All grammar out the window. Too excited.
I don’t really know what we expected. Did we think he’d run, arms outstretched, to embrace us? Lick our faces like a puppy? Happily introduce us to his little buddies, proudly telling everyone that these Americans lived with him?
Whatever we were expecting, we didn’t get it. He pushed one of his friends in front of him, and continued to walk, keeping his head down.
“Oh my God,” said Joe. “Did we just embarrass Gautham?”
Luckily Gautham got over his embarrassment pretty quickly – only after he coerced Joe into a game of pretty intense game of hide and seek when we got home.
“Count to ONE HUNDRED!”
“Oh no! I only know up to ten! Ek, do, tin, char, panch, che, sat, ot, nau, dos….. 18! 52! 65! Here I come!”
A good game of hide and seek fixes everything.
“Gautham!” we shouted. “Gautham! Our friend! Mayra dost!”
All grammar out the window. Too excited.
I don’t really know what we expected. Did we think he’d run, arms outstretched, to embrace us? Lick our faces like a puppy? Happily introduce us to his little buddies, proudly telling everyone that these Americans lived with him?
Whatever we were expecting, we didn’t get it. He pushed one of his friends in front of him, and continued to walk, keeping his head down.
“Oh my God,” said Joe. “Did we just embarrass Gautham?”
Luckily Gautham got over his embarrassment pretty quickly – only after he coerced Joe into a game of pretty intense game of hide and seek when we got home.
“Count to ONE HUNDRED!”
“Oh no! I only know up to ten! Ek, do, tin, char, panch, che, sat, ot, nau, dos….. 18! 52! 65! Here I come!”
A good game of hide and seek fixes everything.
Scooby Doo* and the Mystery of the Anasakti Ashram
Scooby Doo wasn't actually with us on the trip, and I can't confidently say that he would have been much of a help. While he's led his posse of eager cartoon characters through dark forests and past evil creatures of the night, our mission was fairly high on the impossible-o-meter.
Christina had handed us a sheet of paper, a long checklist of everything she hoped Andrew, Lizzie and I would find in the village of Kausani.
"Are we really supposed to find all these things?"
She looked at me, her lips curling up at the edges, the way she does when she's amused. She likes it when we figure things out ourselves. Experiential learning. Get used to it.
Here's something you should know about Kausani: they're not used to tourists here. You can "Namaste" all you want, wear your traditional Indian suits, modestly look away from males, and pretend not to watch, enthralled, as an elderly man guides his cow along the road, but your blonde hair still screams, "I'm so completely different from you!"
As we made the several-kilometer trek down to the village, we tried to decide what we'd get first. Tea lamps? An Indian Flag sticker? Three handprints from the local children? When all you can confidently say in Hindi is "I am not married," the possibility of communicating your need for an Indian tongue cleaner is severely limited. We decided to start with "A pamphlet from the Anasakti Ashram."
When we came to a fork in the road, we went to the right, heading uphill on a winding path to the Ashram. Finally, we found a plain white stone building, several stories high. A sign on the front told us we were very welcome to the Anasakti Ashram, and we began the ascent up several flights of stairs.
Each stair, carved into the stone, was short. Not one was parallel to the ground, and as we climbed higher and higher, trying to keep our balance on the steps, we felt more and more like visitors to some strange location Dr. Seuss might have written about. I half expected to find the Onceler from The Lorax waiting for us at the top. When we did reach the summit of our treacherous climb, we found, not the Onceler, but a middle-aged man doing some kind of squatting meditation, looking out over the mountains. We had stumbled up onto the landing rather loudly and ungracefully, and I felt painfully out of place as his head turned slowly to face us. Behind him, a group of men were engaged in some sort of worship inside a room. A sign above the door said that everyone was required to be "present at prayer."
"We should... um... pamphlets?" I whispered, and turned to see that my companions really didn't know how to handle the situation either.
I looked back at the man, his eyes round as he watched us. I looked down at Christina's sheet. "Talk to people: make some friends!" the instructions reminded me. I looked back at the man. Back at the sheet. The man. His eyes seemed to be burning into me, branding a big "O" for "outsider" on my forehead.
"Let's go upstairs," I said.
Again, we climbed. Finally we came out onto some sort of balcony. There was a high podium covered in Hindi writing, and in the corner, a group of men in simple brown robes. They noticed our arrival, then turned back to their conversation, keeping one eye on our movements.
There are some places in the world that want people to come visit, places that encourage travelers to peak their heads in and poke around for a bit. Those are the kinds of places that take the time to write up pamphlets. But after experiencing the energy of our surroundings, we were very sure that the Anasakti Ashram was not one of those places.
In the end, we decided to take a picture of a posting of the Ashram's rules. We kept the camera low, expecting some holy man to see us with our camera and kick us out. Then we kicked ourselves out, hurrying back down the steps (as safely as possible) and back toward the village.
By then, any chance we might have thought we had of finding everything on the list was pretty much shot. “Neem” for example, does not grow in Kausani, and it was therefore useless to ask for. Nobody had any Coriander seeds, and after a few awkward attempts, Andrew stopped pursuing the Indian tongue cleaner.
In high school, I was so used to getting an assignment, and completing the task. Everything was doable. But Kausani was totally new to me. Some things were available. Some were not. Later, Genevieve would tell me that this was India. If I expected to be able to do everything completely, all the time, I’d go crazy.
We bought some vitamin C from the pharmacy, a package of bindis, a bottle of apricot oil, some postcards of the Himalaya Mountains, and a prickly green vegetable we didn’t recognize. We asked a friendly shopkeeper to tell us about Ravi Shankar, the Rig Veda, and the Prime Minister of India. We even found some things that weren’t on the list. Andrew and I bought matching hats (we’re basically bhaaii-bahan, after all), and I got a beautiful notebook painted with powdered rice made by women artists from Kumaon.
So what if the Anasakti Ashram didn't have pamphlets? By the time we made it back to the Chevron Ecolodge, our legs were tired, and our bag was full enough. Experiential learning. We're still getting used to it.
*By "Scooby Doo," I of course mean "the adventurous and open-minded BYPies, specifically Shaina, Lizzie, and Andrew because Joe was sick, and Chhaya's still recovering from surgery." But unless you're Sufjan Stevens, some things are too long to turn into a title.
Christina had handed us a sheet of paper, a long checklist of everything she hoped Andrew, Lizzie and I would find in the village of Kausani.
"Are we really supposed to find all these things?"
She looked at me, her lips curling up at the edges, the way she does when she's amused. She likes it when we figure things out ourselves. Experiential learning. Get used to it.
Here's something you should know about Kausani: they're not used to tourists here. You can "Namaste" all you want, wear your traditional Indian suits, modestly look away from males, and pretend not to watch, enthralled, as an elderly man guides his cow along the road, but your blonde hair still screams, "I'm so completely different from you!"
As we made the several-kilometer trek down to the village, we tried to decide what we'd get first. Tea lamps? An Indian Flag sticker? Three handprints from the local children? When all you can confidently say in Hindi is "I am not married," the possibility of communicating your need for an Indian tongue cleaner is severely limited. We decided to start with "A pamphlet from the Anasakti Ashram."
When we came to a fork in the road, we went to the right, heading uphill on a winding path to the Ashram. Finally, we found a plain white stone building, several stories high. A sign on the front told us we were very welcome to the Anasakti Ashram, and we began the ascent up several flights of stairs.
Each stair, carved into the stone, was short. Not one was parallel to the ground, and as we climbed higher and higher, trying to keep our balance on the steps, we felt more and more like visitors to some strange location Dr. Seuss might have written about. I half expected to find the Onceler from The Lorax waiting for us at the top. When we did reach the summit of our treacherous climb, we found, not the Onceler, but a middle-aged man doing some kind of squatting meditation, looking out over the mountains. We had stumbled up onto the landing rather loudly and ungracefully, and I felt painfully out of place as his head turned slowly to face us. Behind him, a group of men were engaged in some sort of worship inside a room. A sign above the door said that everyone was required to be "present at prayer."
"We should... um... pamphlets?" I whispered, and turned to see that my companions really didn't know how to handle the situation either.
I looked back at the man, his eyes round as he watched us. I looked down at Christina's sheet. "Talk to people: make some friends!" the instructions reminded me. I looked back at the man. Back at the sheet. The man. His eyes seemed to be burning into me, branding a big "O" for "outsider" on my forehead.
"Let's go upstairs," I said.
Again, we climbed. Finally we came out onto some sort of balcony. There was a high podium covered in Hindi writing, and in the corner, a group of men in simple brown robes. They noticed our arrival, then turned back to their conversation, keeping one eye on our movements.
There are some places in the world that want people to come visit, places that encourage travelers to peak their heads in and poke around for a bit. Those are the kinds of places that take the time to write up pamphlets. But after experiencing the energy of our surroundings, we were very sure that the Anasakti Ashram was not one of those places.
In the end, we decided to take a picture of a posting of the Ashram's rules. We kept the camera low, expecting some holy man to see us with our camera and kick us out. Then we kicked ourselves out, hurrying back down the steps (as safely as possible) and back toward the village.
By then, any chance we might have thought we had of finding everything on the list was pretty much shot. “Neem” for example, does not grow in Kausani, and it was therefore useless to ask for. Nobody had any Coriander seeds, and after a few awkward attempts, Andrew stopped pursuing the Indian tongue cleaner.
In high school, I was so used to getting an assignment, and completing the task. Everything was doable. But Kausani was totally new to me. Some things were available. Some were not. Later, Genevieve would tell me that this was India. If I expected to be able to do everything completely, all the time, I’d go crazy.
We bought some vitamin C from the pharmacy, a package of bindis, a bottle of apricot oil, some postcards of the Himalaya Mountains, and a prickly green vegetable we didn’t recognize. We asked a friendly shopkeeper to tell us about Ravi Shankar, the Rig Veda, and the Prime Minister of India. We even found some things that weren’t on the list. Andrew and I bought matching hats (we’re basically bhaaii-bahan, after all), and I got a beautiful notebook painted with powdered rice made by women artists from Kumaon.
So what if the Anasakti Ashram didn't have pamphlets? By the time we made it back to the Chevron Ecolodge, our legs were tired, and our bag was full enough. Experiential learning. We're still getting used to it.
*By "Scooby Doo," I of course mean "the adventurous and open-minded BYPies, specifically Shaina, Lizzie, and Andrew because Joe was sick, and Chhaya's still recovering from surgery." But unless you're Sufjan Stevens, some things are too long to turn into a title.
Sunday, June 21
Saturday, May 23
You have a beautiful face.
"Use of the word “idiot” in blog posts has declined by nearly half in the last six months..."
Very nice.
Monday, May 4
Friday, May 1
Ezra
Ezra's artwork was beautiful, creative, and inspiring. Unfortunately, there isn't enough of it online. What I could find comes from his blog, Charcoal Junkie. I wish you could see it all.
Wednesday, April 29
Rest in peace, Ezra Weidenfeld
Dear Ezra,
I'm sorry for how much I've cried today... you would not approve. Because when I think of you, I remember all the times you tried so hard to make me smile. And how happy you'd get when I did. You had so much love to give, and you spread it everywhere, especially via those massive, comforting, warm, wonderful hugs of yours. I wanted so much to be able to go camping together, and I'm sorry we never got the chance. I wish you were still here, so I could have spent more time with you. But I know you did what you were on earth to do; you did it beautifully. You made a difference in the life of everyone you came in contact with, taught them to think in new ways, look at things in a different perspective. I hope you know how many lives you touched.
But you'll never really be gone. You'll live on every time anyone thinks of K3, or plays violin, or talks about the GK3, or counts to one, or goes sledding in the middle of the night, or watches Planet Earth, or wears a headband, or dreams, or sees or makes beautiful art, or tries to think of someone who personifies goodness. You'll be there. And someday I'll hug you again.
Love for eternity,
Shaina
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