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A breakfast of soupy noodles on a hot morning with a student who I only have tea with about once a year turns into a chance to remember odd events that we have experienced together, remark on the remarkable amount of progress he's made, and sypathize with a family that has lost everything in a lawsuit over a car accident. An entire family's livelihood destroyed in a moment and debt like prison chains choke their future.An official school dinner for a departing teammate leaves bellies full of assorted meats and a face so red it nearly blistered. Apparently the chairman of our school thinks I would make a great daughter-in-law. And goodness, his son is 1.8 meters tall! Don't worry, Mr. Boss is already planning my farewell dinner for next year.
A pizza party with no utensils or plates or cups to drink out of is the only kind of pizza party to have in a room stacked with boxes and cleared of everything but garbage. Three Chinese teachers and I laugh and chat and bemoan the fate our building during the lunch break. One inevitably spills pizza on her skirt and is suspicious turned salesperson of the random tide2go stick which didn't make it into the taped up boxes. They leave and I wash the pizza pans before sticking them in a box.
A tea with four freshmen girls is refreshing in its simplicity. My comfort turns to awe when they repeatedly beg me to have class one more time before I leave and get visibly angry when I mention that the possibility is high that I won't be their teacher again next year. The tea runs out and goes cold and nearly solid in our cups before I can convince them that its really way past my bed time. They walk me to my door and teach me the Tibetan word for star in an evening that I never could have dreamed of.
A friend comes to Lhasa to visit for a few days and in a swish of my hand I pull back a dingy curtain and an entire teahouse materializes before her eyes. We eat meat momos so juicy with fat that we can't wipe the spills off the table because they solidify immediately. A woman sits down across from us takes one look at me and remarks in Tibetan: I've seen you up at the nunnery tea house a few times. A small city made smaller. We leave and wander toward the Potala and I explain to my friend my afternoon plans, we sit together on a bench and in a moment that I can barely remember due to its severity a man walks up, punches me in the jaw, and walks away. Dizzy and sore with a reddening mark on my face, I am surrounded by Tibetan onlookers who are possibly even more shocked by the event than I.
In a monk's cell I sit with throbbing jaw and pounding headache and rejoice at the, allbeit slow, healing of a broken leg. In the quiet, through the dizziness, I hear him say: When I think about this question you ask me I grow so tired. So tired. It's like I am just searching in the darkness like a blind man. You say He loves me and I am sure of this... because I have a choice, because I know things about Him. I don't know what I will chose but I must only be myself. You are so strong, so strong, in belief, even I can't believe how you are, I will never be that way. Kelly, when you come back this summer bring me the key that will unlock these doors for me.
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Today I realized, with a clarity that nearly broke what remains of me in half and drew tears to my eyes that the punch in the jaw failed to draw, that.... in fact... there has been an uncannily inordinate amount of cowbells these days.
Mercy.
