Wandering

Yesterday I went to Boudha for the first time. I briefly met Ama-la, and Amchi Namgyal and Tenzing, my Tibetan teacher. We didn't really get a chance to interact because Yanik was escorting and we didn't have much time. However, I got to see the stupa for the first time...it was a brilliant sight. This enormous white structure with blinding gold at the top, monks everywhere, chanting coming from every direction, prayer wheels spinning all around the walls. We did a kora and headed back to the Passage House, where I spent the afternoon doing work that I didn't manage to finish before leaving the States.

Today was a big day, moving in with my home stay family. It was also the first day I got to branch out, and thus forced to go it alone in the wilderness of Kathmandu. I woke up obscenely early, around 3:30, running away from another dream. If this keeps up my dream life is going to become more confusing and intense than daily life. I got up around 7 and spent some time online in the morning, then met my Nepali teacher--we decided to split the week so I do three days of Tibetan and two days of Nepali. I asked to do that because Nepali seems quite easy to pick up and I would love to be proficient in the language by the time I leave.

We got to the home stay house around 12 and had a leisurely lunch. Tenzing came over and we walked back to her place together, where we worked for an hour an a half. Out of that hour and half I got a (very basic) familiarity with the thirty Tibetan consonants--mind you, disregarding all vowels, superscript, and subscripts--and learned a few basic questions and answers:

Kerung ki tsen kare yin?
Nga Miki yin / Nye ming Miki yin.

Kong ki tsen kare rey? / Kong su rey?
Kong Yanik rey / Kong ki tsen/ming Yanik rey.

Kerang kane yin?
Nga ari ne yin / nga ari wa yin.

Kong kane rey?
Kong nepal ne rey.

All I have to say is...this is a frustrating language. It's tough to learn, especially since I have zero exposure to it in a colloquial way. However, with study, I have faith that it's possible to...learn something. Haha. Tenzing is very patient.

After the lesson, I walked around Boudha by myself. I did a few koras (circumambulations) of the stupa and got quite lost on my way back home. In fact, I might have been stuck out before dark were it not for an American woman wearing monk's robes and a lot of pierced jewelry. She was walking with her daughter, who was maybe five and clearly had a developmental disability or illness of some kind. She kindly offered to walk me back to where I needed to go, so I swallowed my natural paranoia. The little girl grabbed my hand and dragged me most of the way, and I let her, snot and spit be damned--according to a learned rinpoche, one of the requirements to study Tibetan medicine is to not consider excretions of patients as filth.

On the way, the woman told me how her son had also been sick and had died after a lot of futile treatments with Western medicine. When her daughter was born, she decided not to stay in America and do the same thing, so she came to Nepal a year ago. Since then she's used only Tibetan medicine--they live in Boudha--and she's been taking her daughter to various lamas and rinpoches. Last year her daughter had been getting seizures. When she finally got to see a particular high rinpoche, the girl had two severe seizures in a row, like never before; then the rinpoche said that she would be okay, and she hasn't had a seizure since. The woman talked to me about how karma and health are related, and how surgical removal of tumors and such doesn't do anything to the karma, so disease will return in some form. About then we reached the house, so we said goodbye and that was that. It was an unexpected encounter.

Another woman arrived shortly after I got home from Brazil; Tais. She's in her 30s and studying at the monastery nearby. We get along swimmingly so far and had a good time hanging out with Popo-la (grandfather) tonight during the dark hours, sans electricity! We also walked around the stupa for about twenty minutes after dark, which was beautiful and very different from the daytime bustle.

Now I'm exhausted and am going to bed!