A nun, a midget, and a foriegner walk into a tea house...

Actually, the nun was waiting for me at the door and the midget just invited himself to the stained bench with a piece of plastic tacked on which served as our table. Though I never figured out where he came from or who he was, his English was better than my nun friend's and so I was content to let him stay. Maybe I imagined him.

We made three unlikely study partners to say the least.

The situation was attracting so much attention that my nun friend decided she had had enough of the midget and the melee and marched me up the crumbling, greasy concrete steps into the locked sliver of a room that served as a bedroom for four nuns working at the tea house. There was literally room enough for only four beds and a tangka of some series of buddhas hanging precariously on the dirty wall.

We sat close together on the towel covered wooden boards that were their beds and I wrote English words and translated them into Tibetan for her. I threw my arm around her shoulder as she tried to sound out the words. I grinned when she did it correctly. I was lost entirely when I realized that though she had been a nun for the majority of her life she struggled with spelling and writing in her own language. When I corrected mistakes she made in her Tibetan spelling it dawned on me that she couldn't read.

I glanced into her sparkling eyes blinking in the dim grungy light and her shaved head with a small towel thrown over it to protect from the flies and was filled with total fury at the injustice of such overwhelming poverty. This woman was condemned to live in extreme simplicity and impovershiment bordering on squalor since her childhood by a family that expected that her presence in the nunnery would earn them heaps and heaps of merit. She is beautiful and intelligent and hardworking and kind and generous... and forgotten.

Silencing what was mentally becoming a roaring lecture on the mounting evils of such a belief system that would encourage such a fate to a totally oblivious and absent audience I slid closer to her on the bed and encouraged her to practice writing every day. We chatted for a bit longer and as I stood to leave she said to me: nga ranla gaboyu, onea ran nea rogborisha.

I like you, really you are my friend.

She walked me out of the tea house and I gave her a hug to the shock of everyone on the street whom it is getting dull shocking so frequently.

A nun, a midget, and a foriegner walked into a tea house... the midget disappeared and two friends walked out... one of whom had been granted a more acurate vision of reality than she had ever had before, the other who had learned the meaning of the English word 'pee'. And the sun set. Another day.