Maoist Effect

It's late already, but today was packed with impressions, so I'll write a quick entry anyway. I had strange dreams last night and very restless sleep, so I wasn't enthusiastic about waking up (on my one day without yoga) for class with Kopila at 8--but it wound up being a great two hours. We finished going over the major kitchen spices, but even more interestingly, we had a long conversation about various subjects related to medicine in general, Ayurveda, and Kopila's own work. She intends to become a gynecologist, and eventually work back in the village where her family is from and start a clinic there. The district is called Lamjung and is rich with medicinal herbs, and home to a somewhat famous river, the Marshyangdi. There's a hydropower project in progress there; it was supposed to completed in 2005, but due to the political unrest it's now due to be finished in 2010.

The Maoist insurgency has caused problems directly related to medical care, of course. Kopila pointed out that women have a lack of mobility in the villages, which becomes more severe the more remote they are from Kathmandu. While all villagers have this challenge, the men often leave for work, and for all the expected reasons women are basically rooted to their homes. When Kopila was part of a traveling health campaign that moved to a village spot, over a thousand people came in only two days; she said 90% were women. The Maoists stopped doctors (and anyone, really) from traveling freely in the districts, so places where access to professional health care is already a rarity were deprived of even those opportunities.

We also talked about surgery and the removal of "unnecessary" organs. Putting aside transplants and vital organs, it was curious to note that treatments for problems like tonsillitis or appendicitis are not being researched currently; such simple surgical procedures to remove these features of our anatomy have been developed that it seems futile and redundant. However, think of the fact that this is really an extreme trauma to the body, no matter how smoothly it can be glossed over now; when these operations are done in childhood, what happens to the mechanism of these organs? Where does the normal flow of energy in the body get redirected or stunted in a way we don't understand?

Kopila also said that as a new doctor or a resident, it can be easy for a medical professional to almost enjoy a disease; it becomes exciting to make a correct diagnosis and understand what illness is being dealt with. Sometimes a medically-minded person can forget that they are dealing with a human being who is suffering. This is why Ayurveda always treats the patient as a person; primarily the individual and secondarily the disease. This, I'm sure, is what Dr. Badmaev was talking about when he said that the Western world does not sufficiently see man as a psychic phenomenon. We talked about the allocation of resources; how doing a surgical procedure on a man of 40 might extend his life significantly, while for a man of 70 it might merely be torturing the body fruitlessly. Is the medicine or the procedure increasing the potency of the person's life? Kopila said that medicine is usually focused more on the quantity of life than the quality of life. I find that a shocking insight.

It is a principle of her practice, then, to "be patient with the patient", which I'm sure is an axiom repeated in medical schools all over the world. There are diseases that are curable and patients who prove incurable; conversely there are diseases that are incurable and patients whose life potency manages to increase miraculously. It is hard for newcomers to feel intuitively how to practice medicine; she said that what we see in other people, really, is what we have inside ourselves (particularly our minds). This applies even more significantly to a person in a healing profession than it does to the average person, though it's true of everyone. Kopila said that when Western doctors find in practice that they are unable to diagnose as needed, or that they feel their practice is not really helping their patients, that they turn to alternative therapies and Ayurveda for a deeper understanding of the holistic approach--a way to open the door to a better practice. No medicine is perfect, she said. Everything has to be a combination; everything depends on the person, the place, and the time. Funny...I'd heard that exact statement before--in a book by Idries Shah on Sufism.

So aside from learning a great deal about the inner workings of my spice rack, the lesson was very enjoyable. Later in the morning I went with Tais, Ama-la, and Diki (her 12 year old daughter) to Diki's school "fete" or fair, at the Himalaya International Model School. It wound up being quite a psychological experiment, bringing up all kinds of associative memories of such events from when I was in elementary school. I sensed a profound discomfort in Diki's presence, and recalled vividly the same feeling. Despite being 20 years old and immensely different from the painfully self-conscious preteen I used to be, it was at some moments really hard to bear the environment. My sensitivity was transported back in time, to some extent. I find it fascinating, though not exactly pleasant. We all had a good time though; eating momos and watching Ama-la win (she had a Midas touch with the booth games).

I also loved the mottos painted above the doors to the school halls: "The roots of education are bitter but the fruit is sweet", read one. Another solemnly proclaimed that "Obedience is the mother of happiness." Others included quotes from His Holiness. (Side note--Pa-la told us the other night that "Dalai" is actually a Mongolian word pronounced "dalee", not "da-lye", meaning "ocean"...it's not a Tibetan title.)

Tais and I left the fete a bit early and headed into town. We had planned to see a film on Emperor Akhbar, but it was sold out. Before going on an epic quest to find the Kumari movie theater (a hike away from the Jai Nepal theater), we stopped to get coffee and check out a little shop that was going out of business within a week or two by the Hotel l'Annapurna. We wound up spending probably two hours there! It was full of quirky little things, jewelry, and so on. I think each of us got some precious junk as well as some lucky finds...a very nice spot. On our way down the street, we stopped into an expensive jewelry store and became engrossed in conversation with one of the more interesting people I've met since getting here.

Akbar Khan clearly knows his business--we began chatting by discussing the various kinds of jade. I know something about it because of visiting the jade factory in Beijing; he knows much more. Somehow (as usually happens, especially with Tais around) the subject came around to Buddhism, and he started talking to us about his own ideas regarding faith and religion. He's Muslim, but his philosophy was purely from experience...and the simple fact that, as he said, every person is going to his own destiny; all our different paths--religions, businesses, etc.--are just the medium.

When we talked about fanaticism and dogma, Akbar said that "people can be dogmatic, or people can be human-matic, it doesn't matter", because nonetheless we go to our own grave. And this led him to say something I think is of great value. He said that the worst thing in the world a person can be is criticizing; critical. In that case they are focused on the opposite of making themselves better. This makes perfect sense, and it was a beautiful reminder of a strong principle; not to condemn other people because of their inevitable immoralities, but to constantly strive to become better in ourselves.

When Akbar mentioned that nobody but us goes into our grave, I had a flash of recognition. Something Rupesh mentioned in our first yoga lesson was that we always try to stay within the space of the mat, and to be aware of the boundaries of that space--to extend awareness according to the body, and the mat, and then moving outward etc. Immediately following my memory of him telling me that, I remembered a short workshop in pantomime I took part in last summer. The classical pantomime that everyone knows has a few famous "acts", one of which is being trapped in an invisible box. The invisible box, the limitations of the yoga mat, they are like representations of the space of our own grave--we carry it with our physical body, dead or alive, and wherever we are. In this way it can be a metaphor for a prison or a gymnasium, but either way it is a reality of the physical body and how it relates to space.

Interestingly, this most certainly would have implications in the cultural anthropologist's exploration of proxemics, or social space. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of relation, most likely unintentional, between social space and the way that a culture deals with corpses, coffins, tombs, cemeteries and graveyards, and so on. Maybe someday I will do a study on it...or maybe it's already been done, and I just don't know!

Eventually we left and made our journey to Kumari, where we proceeded to watch a three-hour movie in Hindi called Super Star. I think the star of it was Kumal Khena or something like that. I thought it was fantastic! There were no subtitles, and according to Tais all Hindi movies are similar, but I loved it anyway. It was tragic and melodramatic to the extreme, there were the expected dance sequences (I love that every Bollywood actor is basically a more talented frontman of a boy band, with backup dancers), and of course, no kissing--although there was plenty of showing off the main star's body; refreshingly, a man and not a woman being overexposed. Generally, I thought that the movie was over the top but at its core had (from what I know) traditional Hindu values and was really sweet. When the protagonist proposes to "the girl" at the end of the movie, he says she must be his "in this life, and for all others to come"...I can't think of anything more romantic!

I've rearranged my program for the rest of the time I'll be here in Nepal; I am going to continue studying Ayurveda instead of going back to Tibetan medicine, and study Nepali instead of Tibetan. For the next two weeks, while Sushila is in Darjeeling, I'll have class with Tenzin (as she texted the other day, "10zin"--cute), but probably focusing on reading. That will be most useful if I keep working at RMA when I get back to NYC. I really enjoyed studying with Amchi-la, but it's easier to learn with Kopila, and the combination of Ayurveda with yoga is working in a more effective way for me both personally and intellectually.

It seems that my dad will be visiting me here in a month or two, which is really exciting! I can't wait...his knowledge of medicine and his ideas about practicing and health are so much more developed and informed than mine, and I think if he can come to lessons with me I'll get a ton more out of them. Besides, it will just be awesome to be abroad together and spend some quality time.