We thought we were living simply here but we seem to have accumulated so much stuff. The good news is that a family from New Zealand will be taking over our flat and will buy all our furniture, kitchenware bedding etc. On 4th December a nice company come and pack up the stuff we need to take to UK and transport it for us. On 11th we travel with 2 suitcases to Heathrow via a week in Thailand….. And meanwhile there are people up in Jarjarkot who still don’t even have warm clothes, after the earthquake destroyed everything. Individuals here in Kathmandu are organizing clothes and blanket collections. ECTC will be going as a whole team (except me) from 3rd – 16th December to give psychological first aid. But at least I can support with some of the planning.
One of the guesthouses where we stayed on our recent (final) trek had this disturbing Nepali poster that said ‘Change and become the best.’ There’s a lake with a white duck, next to a duck-shaped paddle boat next to a red sports car. The implication being the car is the best.
This is KarChung a lovely lady who owned another guesthouse on our trek. She spoke Nepali nice and slowly so we could have a good conversation. She said that although she would like more job opportunities for her children and nearby healthcare, she basically said ‘You have the stuff but we have the joy.’ My Nepali friends speak longingly of their childhood in remote villages where they didn’t need much cash. They lived off the land and played in the jungle. I’m aware that we ‘supportive’ Westerners have come into Nepal and brought all kinds of stuff with us – Plastic, materialism, pollution, trafficking, fundamentalism individualism… All this reminds me of a phrase in one of Dervla Murphy’s travel books;
‘Perhaps I am no longer quite sure that India’s dire poverty is worse than the dire affluence through which we had been driving twelve hours earlier in London’
In one weeks time it will be my last day at ECTC. Recently we celebrated ECTC’s 14th birthday and Irmgard the founder passed over the ‘baton’ to our manager Persis.
Getting ready to leave anywhere or anyone significant makes me acutely aware of time and mortality. It’s like arriving on a beach on a summers day with the sea way off in the distance. Then the water gets nearer, then it starts lapping at our feet and we move bags up into the sand dunes to keep them dry and realize it’s nearing the end of the day…
Haunting or hopeful?
We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep’ Shakespeare.
‘Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day…’ The New Testament.
‘At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door…But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with he rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in’ CS Lewis.
nepaljennyji 