a carrot's hometown

The other day I went to visit a friend and the feisty grandmother who lives in the room next to her brought some carrots over for lunch that looked like they could have been on display at the national natural history museum. I thought I was saying 'where are those carrots from?' because honestly I was a little nervous, but apparently I said ' where is that carrot's hometown?' The difference being riotously funny to the grandmother who had to pop a squat because she was laughing harder than she had in most of her adult life...

Never did figure out where those carrots' hometown was... and didn't get sick after eating them either.

That has nothing to do with what I'm about to tell you anyway.

The bus stop where I was waiting with my friend wasn't so much a bus stop as it was a mob of people just aching for the opportunity to crush each other into the doors and sides of rusty squealing buses that didn't dare to pull up to the stop but just tapped the breaks in the middle of the street to give people a chance to get on. The situation alone made me wish I had been wearing full body armor but my shy, timid friend with a long black pony tail and pink sweater didn't seem to notice. We too stepped squeezed onto the bus.

For the first little bit of our ride we were knocking heads with the people around us. The bus was slammed with the typical odd assortment of grandmothers spinning wheels to everyone's peril, teenage boys taking drags on cheap cigarettes and coughing spittle onto the people next to them, nomads with bags so large that their presence on the bus instantly reminded me of those glass bottles with ships inside. We rode the bus into the dangerous part of town known for thieves. We rode the bus past that part into the poor part pretty much unknown and inhabited by tumbleweeds. When we got to a deserted intersection on the very edge of town we got off.


This is where I work, she half laugh half whispered, and this is where I live.

We spent the next three and a half hours together. Just walking through the dusty temporary kitchen where she cooks for a construction crew, then across the street into the tiny first floor room which is only big enough for a pile of blankets, a stack of books, a bed, and a stove. She made some endearingly salty butter tea, we talked about the lyrics to English songs, her family, the other friends we have in common. We walked down the street populated with lonely pool tables and children with splitpants to buy vegetables in a dark shop.

When we entered the Chinese man squatting in the corner obviously recognized my friend and immediately gave us two lollipops as he chattered away. My friend brought the small cabbage, zucchini, and potatoes over to the scale. The man threw some green onions in free of charge. We stepped out of the darkness into the blazing though slowly dimming edge of Lhasa sun. She wrapped her arm in mine and said his wife is a c, I go with her to study and then with eyes sparkling I think Lhasa has so many c's.

When we got back to her room we immediately dumped out the now cool cups of butter tea, refilled them, and went to work washing and chopping the vegetables we had just bought. Then we went to work making noodles from a big block of dough she had made earlier that day. As we cut and stretched and rolled the noodles, dropping them into the boiling water and occasionally the floor, she told me...

I came to Lhasa 10 years. I first time here I live with another family. They have a cow. Everyday I get cows milk and then I sell it. This work for four years. When I was a child I never went to school. Only boys go to school in my family. I then met Korean teacher. We study the Book. I believe J. Now I love to study. I want to study more. But job is so hard to find. Room also. What can I do when this job finish? Must find a new one. Maybe can work in some shop. 

The noodles were finished, she flicked on the second burner and began to make a concoction of bits of fried yak and the vegetables we had bought that smelled so good I had to wipe drool from the edge of my mouth.


When I first came here I cry every day. So lonely. But now not bad. My brother lives in Lhasa too. He makes this one.

She reached in the cupboard and pulled out a stick of incense. I smelled it knowing already that it smelled like a temple. Her brother is a monk.

She dumped the noodles into the pan of fried vegetables and then spooned some out into bowls. Upon first taste I immediately wished I hadn't eaten anything else that day because they were so good. We ate until we could hardly move, then finished off the butter tea, then she stood up to walk me to the bus stop before we missed the last bus of the evening.

So we walked through the barren lot of fine dirt to the edge of the street, my arm over her shoulder her arm around my waste and I glanced around me at the garbage, rubble, and bits of discarded cardboard and said: 'I know our Father is good. I know He is good because you are a Tibetan girl who never went to school and came here to sell milk when you were young and I am an American girl who all I ever did was go to school and I came here to teach English and we are here together and we are the same. He loves us the same. So I know He's very good.'

And she said: I know He's a very good Father. 

And I gave her a hug and promised her that I would come back to see her because now I knew where it was and so easy to get there and the rusty bus shuddered to a brief stop and I jumped on and waved at her through the mucky window.

And as I sat on that bus that drove into the setting sun and into the city that has beaten me and blessed me... I knew... I just knew as sure as I've ever known anything in all my life, that my Father was going to provide for me. He was going to do it right that moment, and He is going to do it next year when I go back to America, and He's going to continue to do it as long as I live and then on into eternity. And I knew that though I know nothing else I would trust Him. And the security of the knowledge filled me with such a peace that I nearly fell asleep... man beside me hacking a thick wad of spit out the window and all.