Walk with me.

An ode to the semester so far and those who have dared to walk with me...

Walk with me and you may be surprised

at the hopes and the fears that sparkle in eyes

of students and friends and the odd stranger too

ignored by the many but heard by the few. 

Walk with me and your shoes may grow thin

the stories they stop and they start back again

and each step we take begs another appear

as freedom and rest replaces the fear. 

Walk with me, let your story be heard

speak every line, don't leave out a word

laughter and joy and heartache and pain

escape from shy mouths like a shower of rain. 

Walk with me and don't mention the time

the mountains before you together we'll climb

as we walk on, the route harder still

we'll know the glory of the King's realized will. 

Walk with me and you'll walk by His side

and step by step we'll align with His stride

then we'll feel the pulse of His unending grace

the peace of His presence, the light of His face. 

Walk with me friend if your journey is long

if your soul cannot rest or remember its song

because I walk with a Savior who's been good to me

and in His steps alone I have found myself free. 

The garden

Three bananas, two oranges, some ham, and some alfalfa sprouts sat patiently together at the bottom of a black plastic shopping basket. I rubbed my eyes in the fluorescence of what I still have to convince myself is an appropriate place to buy vegetables and listened to the conversation between the cashier and the customer in front of me. 

Are you giving me change again? (some mumbles) You're still sixty-two cents short so it's not enough. (more mumbles) You want me to take something back? Alright. 

The customer's shaky, wrinkled hand reached into the unforgiving plastic bag at the end of the check out to remove one of the two bottles of soda that were in there. I fumbled in my own bag quicker and pulled out a dollar. Here, I said to the cashier, I've got it. The cashier smiled and asked You sure? before finishing up the soda purchase and moving on to my own restless fruit. 

The tall, somewhat stooped black man with a few crooked teeth and a terrible habit of mumbling looked at me with round, sepia tinted eyes that had obviously seen a lot of not very beautiful things. His lips quivered and he nodded a thank you that I didn't do much to deserve and slouched away into a world as graceless as a cash register. I wondered who the second soda was for. 

*************************************************

In the beginning the Father created a place for man. A garden. Filled with trees and fruits and flowering plants and nourished by clear rivers it was a home that was pure and perfect. It abounded with beauty and was saturated with peace. A garden of exquisite detail and harmony. The Father was there with man and man interacted in utter freedom with the Father and all that was in the Father's garden. Sometimes the Father would scoop up a handful of dirt and make a living thing out of it and ask man what its name should be. Man would name it and it would fly, or crawl, or swim, or walk, or wander away. The Father didn't want man to ever be lonely so he put man to sleep and took out one of his ribs and made woman. When man woke and saw woman he knew that she was part of him and his heart beat in the rapture of completion. 

They did not know guilt. The garden was theirs. It was the beginning. 

*******************************************************

I walked with my plastic bag through some dingy automatic doors out into a dingier parking lot that was as gray and gravely as any I'd ever seen. Nothing about the dented metal shopping cart holders or the rows of dusty, tired looking cars bore any resemblance to a garden. But the sky was blue. I had almost forgotten to look. 

The overlap

I sat around a table of friends as the clock measured out time and told a story that came out too long and and ended with a sigh. I knew they were my friends because they listened, with rapt attention, to the entire thing though the food got cold in front of us. It was the first story I had told since I've been out of Lhasa.

I got lost driving around on a too warm Sunday morning and walked into a tiny room filled with sparsely populated pews with just enough time to marvel at the attention the people sitting there paid to my dimples before I took a seat, trying to catch my breath, up near the front. I told them a story too, a story about a Spirit like the wind and how He's blown around for three years and I couldn't tell them where He came from or where He's going but the story was too long and I ended with a heart that was full. Afterwards I was led by the arm to a plate heaping with wonderful things I'd almost forgotten like butter beans and cornbread and chicken salad and was amazed at that all of these strangers had entered so overwhelmingly into my life and made room there as the dearest of friends. We are given so many things we don't deserve.

I pulled together a few strands of time out of nowhere one precious morning and sat on the bed and dialed phone numbers into the computer. Voices that were as familiar to me as breathing echoed out of the screen and I took deep breaths desperate to memorize every syllable that came out. I can hear you like you are next to me! You must take care of your body. I am same old. Kelly teacher I asked all the foreigners if they knew you. It is so surprise to hear you! Today is my happy day! I am wait for you. You must come back quickly.... so the melody of another life played on in the room of this life now quite different. When time, that rascally thief, ran out... only pinpricks were left in my soul.

I walked across a university campus I had once known and am now slightly shocked and disgusted by into a dining hall to appear before a cashier whose care for all who come in resounds with the deep care of a Shepherd for His flock. In a moment of tenderness and tears I was caught up in a hug that numbed me by the resemblance to another tearful embrace from another cashier in another land now far away. This dear woman gushed with praise to our Father on my behalf, and moved me with the totally undeserved depth of her joy. She introduced me to everyone in sight, demanded that I be given anything I wanted from now until eternity and the phantoms of free vegetables and calloused hands scratched achingly close to a place I hadn't let myself return to yet.

Later I found myself around a table with a Mexican girl whose heart mirrors my own and a Kenyan girl who I discovered was actually a long lost friend telling them a story that brought me to and kept me in the land of darkness for three often long though now seemingly short years. It was too long, as all my stories are these days, and ended with a flicker of hope amidst a burning flame of trust fulfilled. When I later revealed that I was only to stay one semester at this university the girl from Kenya's face suddenly transformed into all the faces of all the people I had to leave behind in Lhasa. Grief looks startlingly familiar, and I begged her not to take me back to what I had just left so soon.

The overlap of the life I had and the one I now live is messy, often painful, and precious to me. Memories like so many transparent pictures fall on top of and into each other. Everything looks like everything else and what I have never seen before. I am caught up in a tearing sensation of going forward too quickly and going backward too suddenly and I know that at some point I need to take some steps in the reverse in order to move ahead. I am sure that moving on means rummaging through all the boxes of memories and experiences that I never sent, unpacking all the things that I never really packed to begin with but instead left scattered all over the land somewhere at 13,000 feet. I'm going to have to pour out the cups of tea I left cooling up there on the rooftop of the world, and wash them, in order for them to be filled with everything that this next moment might hold.

Soul, do not be taunted by that old gypsy man Time, be still and soak up the overlap.

Like jellybeans...

I have been in airports and needed nothing less than the strength of my Holy Heavenly Father to lift my feet towards the security check and on toward my gate. The constant motion of life is making me seasick.

I have been in classes where the professor said, in a statement of quite basic reality, most of life is saying goodbye. It made me lose my breath and grit my teeth. I'm over goodbyes.

I have been a foreigner in many lands under a sky that is far too beautiful for this earth and wondered why it should be content to hang there above us while we go about in dirt and business ignoring it. All this wandering is making me homesick.

I am finding that America is a land where time passes quickly because no one honors it. We speed through our days the way we gobble down food and make quick work of our checking accounts. Nightmares come true when my peace is shattered on the alter of things to do and jealousy for time, unnumbered and uninterrupted, alone with my Father stalks like an angry giant around in my soul. We weren't made for this American dream.

Lhasa weighs like the stillness of many mountains on my heart. It is a slumbering beast; I can feel it's heavy breathing. But I can't wake it, not yet.

And I move step by shaky, curious step along a pathway of grace that my Father has laid out for me. Friends seem to appear just at the moment I feel that I'm falling, conversations and laughter and phone calls and meals and emails and benches in front of fountains appear like a magic walkway over an abyss I dare not contemplate long.

...and I know I can trust that Lion of the tribe of Judah for another day more... even if it's only with a heart that feels like a jar of jellybeans that someone has thrown so carelessly to the floor and shattered. Sticky jellybeans lying amidst shards of glass and dust.

May He be honored by so broken and confused an offering.

The ends...

In English we talk about frayed ends and loose ends. We talk about them as if they were broken, or we need to tie them up, or they ought not to be that way. But the truth is, that's the way that all ends are... and there's nothing we can do about it.

*** *** ***

It had been raining. Rain made the sky low and the earth seem fresh. I walked through a mist up to meet my friend at the nearest monastery. The uneven street up to the gate was slick with moisture and my friend stood in his deep red robes waiting for me in front of a tea house. We got cups which were filled by a grinning man with a dented kettle. As we sat chatting, the rain played a song that only it can sing on the roof and ground around us. The mountains were velvety green in the misty dampness and the monk reasoned Lhasa wants you to remember it beautiful so that you will come back quickly. Another monk friend joined us and we moved to a bench under a tree to eat lunch. Rain drops splashed in my cup and reminded me of all the tears I couldn't cry. My first tea in the rain and my last tea with monks.

The nunnery had been recently painted and I breathed deep in the cool air and stopped often to admire the purple flowers like jewels scattered on the ground amidst yellow flowers like flames licking up from the rocks as I walked up the mountain towards it. I made a phone call and my friend came out wearing a towel over her closely shaved head. The city looked like a sleepy child waking up in the cool morning and I sat in a room occupied only by statues of idols as my friends came and went and held my hand and laughed with me and handed me small gifts. Leaving them to the busy work of cooking for the rest of the nuns was a little bit like walking away from a bustling and familiar home scene. My first time sharing a nun's tsampa bowl and my last entirely Tibetan conversation.

I and two Chinese students sat around a too small table in a too new Chinese tea shop trying to suck our too chunky tea up wide straws and laughing about the way that the chairs were too small and made us feel fat. The shop was really just a counter with a table and chairs available mostly for decoration as sitting at it nearly forced us out the door and onto the sidewalk outside for lack of room. I stared past my students out into the blue Lhasa sky onto the dirty, periodically, crowded Lhasa street. Suddenly, a small Chinese boy appeared in the door with a little baseball cape cockled on his head. He stared at me and with hand raised he moved as if drawn to our table and left his hand suspended in the air until I instinctively shook it. Then he grinned and disappeared. When we got back to the school my students asked me if I would give them each a hug. My first small child handshake, but my last Chinese milk tea.

Recovery from a night and a day of vomiting horrors was slow and time was exactly what I didn't have. I delayed a dinner with a quirky neighbor for a day and then we went out with a group, greeting my mostly empty stomach with a tray of chicken buried amidst kilos of spice. The rain poured down around the outdoor eating area where we spat chicken bones on the floor and decided to accompany my neighbor to his room for tea later. As the hour drew late and I emptied my tiny glass cup for the last time making it quite certain that I wouldn't sleep well later, my neighbor picked up his electronic dictionary up and handed it to me. I want to tell you this he said. Yi luo ping an was the entry: have a good journey. My first dinner at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the Potala and my last interaction with an odd man transformed into a trusted friend.

I went to her room because I had been to her room nearly once a week for years. It was exactly the same as it always was and she perched on the nearly shredded stool exactly the same girl she always had been. We made sha momos that were exquisitely delicious in their simplicity and familiarity and words spilled from her slightly quivering lips. It was as if she felt compelled to tell me all of the story of her life thus far lived in order to impress upon me the weight of my entrance into it. Your hair is different, and your eyes and skin, but my heart thinks you are the same to me, as my sister she confessed. Something caught in my throat and I could only hope that my eyes could speak everything that my mouth failed to in that moment. My first compliment of such tender depth and sincerity and my last sha momos.

Immediately upon meeting her on a busy street corner she grabbed my hand and led me around the slanted and bustling allies of Lhasa running errands in a last minute rush that demanded our tea be slow and untroubled. We arrived in a tea house and ordered a thermos as though there was nothing different or final about this day. The owner sat down on a bench next to us and suddenly the entire room wanted to know everything about me. When they learned that indeed my hours left in Lhasa were numbered the owner said Don't leave with enough force that perhaps the words would generate reality from the very act of speaking them. They only managed to make my friend and I blink back tears which appeared quite suddenly to both of us. She rubbed my finger as we waited at the bus stop and watched my face slide away from hers as the bus jerked away. My first time seeing tears in her eyes and my last Tibetan tea.

I had begged for sleep. Instead I got dreams. Upon waking to my last morning on my mat which had been my bed for three years to a sky that has become like a confidant and friend to me the only thing that was sure was the clarity of the voice in my dreams which had commanded me to read in the Psalms. I sat up and opened my Book to the first section of Psalms I randomly came to. Psalm 65. Praise is rightfully yours. My first easy breath in days and the last scripture I read underneath that sky.

I sat alone in an empty apartment and felt only slightly sick to my stomach from travel anxiety. A knock at the door. Then an entire class, which I had first thought troubled beyond reaching turned dear, filed into the apartment. We sat and stood around in silence, then one student took my hand. Really we thank you teacher and we love you. My head bowed and silent hot tears filled my lap, filled the room, and the only sound was thirty two sets of damp eyes and heaving chests. My first time seeing all of the students of that class together that semester and my last.

Another knock on the same door and a different small group of students filed into my apartment empty of all except a growing pile of kadas. They wept with me, they sang to me, they laughed with me, they sat with me waiting for the car. In Tibetan we say that tears hold all the words that our hearts can't speak said one. I nodded and tears made rivers down my face. One girl stood up, thank you teacher she said as she slipped a ring off of her own finger and onto my trembling one, she usually wears this one, the other girls affirmed. Into the room walked two Tibetan teachers, one who had been like a father to me this whole time bearing kadas and gifts that only made the tears hotter and deeper. Think of seeing your mother and father said the teacher as he held my damp face and please be happy. My first gift from one finger to another and my last time weeping on the shoulder of this father figure.

Outside students were milling about in teary groups and teachers stood solemnly next to each other and we waited for the car and wept quietly. When it came roaring around the corner, the tears came harder and mouths opened to speak and instead only moaned. My students rushed toward me, one who was particularly close to me who had remained relatively composed until this moment rushed throwing her arms around my waist and laying her head on my shoulder to sob convulsively and I became sure that dying couldn't feel worse. Handshakes from teachers I could see only through a waterfall of tears and hugs and kadas and tears and I was gasping for a breath that wasn't damp from inside the car. My first time holding broken students and my last time offering any kind of consolation whatsoever.

The car made a quick stop at the gate and the sweet old gate grandfather who had forced me to sip his home brewed barley beer at new years, a request I had submitted to only because he is my friend, ran out calling my name. He flung the car door open and I leaned forward tears lashing my lap and hands as he reached in to present me with a kada. My first gift from him and my last time to look deep into his discolored, aging eyes.

I sat in the car heading dizzingly quick towards the airport with three Tibetan teachers who had become like sisters to me. We held hands and laughed about memories and watched the Lhasa river float lazily by the window. I believe we will meet again I believe it, I feel and I believe it was the chorus of our trip until my eyes became painful with dry redness and puffy from emptiness. At the airport we dragged one hundred pounds of luggage over to the check in and found out that I would be charged for half of it. Nothing could be done, no excuses were good enough, no amount of begging compelling enough. We walked over to the cashier counter who calculated the bill. As I threw bills onto the counter the cashier looked hard at the ticket. Nevermind she said this plane is big enough to handle the extra bag, you don't need to pay. My first free luggage and my last moments with dear friends.

The flight out was perfectly on time and boarding had never been less stressful. I leaned my throbbing head and heaving heart against the plane window and winced as it left the tarmac. The mountains just underneath the plane were painted in a thousand beautiful patterns and colors, green and brown and purple and orange and white and I gasped at the beauty of this place that seemed to be somehow more vibrant, more brilliant in this, my last vision, of it. My first time to see the mountains with such a clarity of their awesomeness and my last glimpses of a place that had wounded and taught me repeatedly for three years.

These are my ends. They are loose and frayed. There is no fixing them and no tying them up. That's the way all ends are.

Good-bye Lhasa, until another time... if hopes and tears add up to anything substantial at all.

Did you get the message?

My last text messages from Lhasa...

Ok, don't be sad, I know, we will can meet, you need take care of your body! Jigme and me never forget you!

Surely I will contact you! yeah, I am sorry not to see you off at the airport. It is a pity! and it is lucky not to go for I am afraid I can not control myself. I am moved by the students. We will miss you. No one talk to me in the office. No one will enjoy tea in Mr. Liu's.

Where are you?

Ok, hope everything goes well~best wishes, my forever friend~

I already miss you.

Teacher: Good luck. Have a good and successful future. I will miss you. God bless you.

Dear Kelly, I know you will leave for America. But I can't meet you. I thank you for you are my teacher. I'm glad. You will go back. I must miss you. I will send message for you usually in the future.

Do you remember we are first meet at beside our school door and conversations I will don't forget forever. I hope you will keep touch in me and take care of yourself.

Dear Teacher (Kelly) what a pity you are leaved our. I don't know you are leaved our today, I feel very sad because I love you very much and I will miss you! good luck to you!

I hope make laugh with you forever! Goodbye my best teacher!

Ms. Kelly I am so sorry. because you are about to walk tomorrow. I shall miss you. Wish you a pleasant journey.

Ms. Kelly. I will go on writing poems. I believe we can meet again. although you will go back. a friendship between you and us.

Ok, I wait for seeing you in Tibet again someday.

Damp things...

It's raining again and the ground will be mushy tomorrow but that's not what I mean.

I sat on a broken chair at the front of the classroom on my last day inside it and asked the Father of grace to surround my students and bring them safely to His side while they poured over their books and notes searching for answers for their open book exam. I blinked hard and the knowledge that this might be the last time I see them all together became a damp thought threatening to spill over my face. I turned to the painful brightness of the sky outside and breathed slowly letting the dampness sink into my stomach.

Sometimes they, my colleagues in the office and around campus, look at me too hard and I can't look back lest I be overcome with thoughts too damp to hold inside.

I had lunch with a student and tea and sadness sloshed around in my stomach and stayed right there because when she asked about one more time together I knew it would be so. Only when our eyes met did they glisten with some damp thing.

There was no chair for me in the last classroom in Lhasa I will ever be in, so I stood. I stood behind the desk I've stood behind nearly every week for three years and looked out on a roomful of students that taught me how difficult love is. I asked the Father of mercy to continue in His patience with them until they are brought safely to His side. I told Him that the next room I wanted to see them in all together again was His throne room. Dampness made my face heavy and weighed on my chest.

As each student finished their exam I took it and handed them a good-bye letter and a photo. One student, in the front sitting alone put her head on her desk and let the dampness run down her face and cause her eyes to redden. I squeezed my fingers, hoping that my damp thoughts would pool up there instead.

After class, a roomful of students made slow and silent with so many damp things walked out to the football field. They handed me a gift of handmade, beautiful Tibetan shoes that I have often seen on the feet of nomads and envied, which only fit when I'm not wearing socks. They took turns and heaped forty kadas around my neck. By the time they had finished whispering their wishes and gratitude to me it was my cold hands that had to stuff all my dampness back into my eyes.

I went to dinner with two girls who had been my students until this semester and who are consistently brave enough to overcome their entire culture's worth of shyness to speak to me. We went to the teahouse we always go to because we know the owner and he's funny. We ordered the same thermos of tea and three bowls of noodles we always order because it's delicious and the predictability is comfortable. We sat down at a dented ma jong table in the quiet tiny room, just the size for three, upstairs. The tea came and they pulled out their gifts: incense, jewelry for my family, a jar filled with paper stars, a purse...


Oh these are very perfect, I gushed, I'm so happy to have them, I assured, I will take them back to America and remember, I cracked.

The world became watery. Dampness can blur even the hardest of crumbly teahouse walls.

A teacher and two students sat at a dented ma jong table and didn't look at each other because the table was slowly becoming stained with splotches of dampness, damp drops splashed in our tea, tissues were turned into fortresses which melted in the damp. When the student sitting across from me put her head on the table and sobbed openly, in a way that is uniquely not at all Tibetan, all my hot damp thoughts from the day ran down my face like streams. Our meal was eaten through sniffles and seen through eyes of glass.

This is my last week in Lhasa. All my things are damp.

Boundless trustworthiness

If you had been standing under my window this morning and heard on the breeze a girl's voice demanding that a new song be sung by all the earth it would have been because the Spirit told me that today, my tenth day left in Lhasa, would be a psalm 96 day.

Some days I wake up and read something and I don't know why but I have to read it again... and then once again...

And in my mind these words stick and I know my Father's trustworthiness is uniquely boundless, and then I have confirmation days that go like this...

I delivered a plant to a bare little office inhabited by an awkward Chinese man before class and the timing was perfect because we got to have a long chat despite the minor interruption of being given a gift from the Language department chairman who considers himself my father. 

I had exactly seven minutes before my last class of the year to go down the hall to another office to pick up my exam copies from some friends who had nearly made me lose it in tears at the banquet the night before. 

I was shocked to see more than thirty students in a class that had been averaging around twenty and was blessed that they all seemed to want to be a part of a class picture outside on the football field not an hour later. 

I went to lunch with four students who I needed to have one last lunch with to give them a small graduation gift and I know the lunch was meant to be because until the food arrived none of us could look at each other because we were all trying not to cry. 

I got a phone call and described the situation to the students I was with who gladly finished quickly and helped me give a book bag of goodies to my beggar children, which was certainly an ordained moment because His goodness and plenty were given witness. 

I climbed the crumbly stairs to my apartment and thought about calling my endearingly odd neighbor about when this weekend we could have a last dinner and right as I did that my phone rang and it was him. Come to my house he said. 

I went to his room and we found a good time for our dinner and he revealed that this dinner wasn't actually his invitation but another friend's who wanted to have dinner with me. Then why didn't you invite me? I inquired, because I want to have a lunch with you another day he laughed of course all the same people will be there. 

I rested for a moment in this soon no longer mine apartment and praised my Father who makes all things good and thanked His Spirit which had so obviously guided every single minute of the day thus far. 

I marched into a nearly completely full afternoon class and knew that the students were far more concerned with taking a class picture than reviewing for their exam and so we went outside and took care of that. Moments were sweet as students asked me to come visit their family once more, stand here for a picture, and can all our classroom boys take one together with you? 

I took one last picture with our gate grandfather to his delight and walked arm and arm with a student who I wish for all the world I could just take with me. 

I waited in my apartment for a former student to arrive and take my last plant home with him. He came, flopped down on the couch, and bemoaned the empty room shaking his head I can't believe you are leaving. He drank a cup of water and said I have a gift for you, but I wouldn't bring it because I didn't want this to be our last  time to meet. 

I walked with him back out to the school gate to wait for some teachers that needed to take me out to dinner. As we sat in the taxi one who has become a dear friend of mine leaned into me and whispered, I think all of the English teachers will see you to the airport, I am going to arrange for the school to send a bus.

I ate dinner with them and ran into a random friend and we walked around an island arm in arm as the wind cooled our overheated, overfull bodies and I couldn't help but comment again and again at how green all the mountains were this year.

Could it be that the mountains are green and the breeze cool and the day  perfectly timed because it all heard me this morning saying again and again...

Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice; let the sea and all that fills it resound. Let the fields and everything in the exult. Then all the trees of the forest will shout for joy before Him, for He is coming.

And days like today are evidence that the heavens, the earth, the sea, the fields, the trees, and I do all that... and I can be sure that His proimse to return is found sure somewhere in the depth of His boundless trustworthiness that revealed itself to me today.

He is coming, back.

and I trust Him.

A love story.

This is a story of love.

It began with pain; a bruise on the leg of a beggar child after he was kicked by a passing student.

It was breathed into being by grubby hand prints, and hungry faces. It was nurtured by a single persistent request for money and confusion in watery child eyes when people ran away from her filthy presence. It was birthed when the children revealed their names, their family, their simply childishness, their desire for some milk more than money.

This love story grew up in poverty and grime. It dragged cardboard boxes around in the streets and didn't wear socks and one time lost all of their shoes in the stinking ditch near the school gate. It broke their skin, cracked their noses, chapped their faces, tore their fingers, and one time left open pussy wounds all over the face of the smallest one. This love story only grew stronger and went out looking for the children to clean them, washing their faces and skinny arms up to their shoulders, and nurse them back to relative health.

It grew, not in time, but rather in packages of chicken which were bought consistently every time the children appeared. The love story started to include not just the beggars but the shopkeepers, students, and even people in another hemisphere. It matured until the beggars became claimed and watched for and packages were sent on their behalf and a grand plan to celebrate this love story was hatched and they asked students and learned the name of the pale one they used to believe was called 'Hello'.

Ms. Killy, when will you go to your hometown? they asked one day in a surprising change from their normal question which was can we buy something to eat?  

And then they disappeared. For more than a week there were no children.

This story of love became a story of agony as a book bag, bought by a friend who heard the story and became part of it, filled with stuffed animals, coloring, books, and socks from America, as well as toothbrushes, snacks, tissues from here, sat getting dusty in a quickly emptying apartment. The police are collecting the beggars and sending them away this month, another friend sadly considered and the love story became frantic.

Love reaches entirely new levels when it can do nothing more than return to the source of its perfection.

************************************

A phone call: Ms. Kelly, the beggars are here! They came back! They are at the school gate! I will tell them to wait for you!

A teacher and three students quickly finished lunch, dashed to the school gate, scooped up the two smallest beggars as the oldest road a rusty bike that was at least ten sizes too large for him behind them.

A book bag bulging with things was ushered down from an apartment to a quiet place in the shade behind the building, right into the arms of the slightly confused, though happy, children.

A threesome of students unzipped the bag which the children didn't know what to do with and started to unload its contents on the grass for the wide-eyed, silent, dusty children to observe.

A tear, then two, then many ran down the faces of the students as they saw all that had been given. The children tilted their heads in disbelief until a stuffed monkey was drawn from the bag and the smallest one started giggling.

A love story was celebrated by three little ones, the very picture of every poor little one that the Son of perfect Love loves, shuffled down a broken, dirty sidewalk balancing a too large bike between them carrying a book bag filled with more than they had ever owned.


Ms. Kelly, today I am very moved. I know you really love those beggars. I... I want to be like you... I think you are like god declared one, rather choked up, student.


Now I will tell you which god I'm like...

And a new love story flinched with its first signs of life.

Don't go... and other things I heard today.

"You are thinking too much, this is bad for your heart."

"Without you I don't want to think, I will be so bored and miss you always."

"Teacher, we never forget you."

"We will all miss you."

"I... I can't say."

"This isn't beer, it's tears... I have many words to say but only remember this: take care of yourself."

"Tell your father thank you thank you."

"Kelly, oh Kelly it will be okay, only be happy now."

"Teacher, what size shoe do you wear?"

"She has been our teacher for three years what does the price matter?"

"You should go back to America, get married, have a baby, and then my heart is so happy."

"When Kelly came to the school my English got so much better, she is my friend."

"What I admire most about you is that, in three years, you never complained. You give me a good impression of foreigners."

"If you ever have opportunity to return you must take it."

"Oh I will miss you SO much."

*********************

"Don't go."

The fittings

We will eat quickly, she said, then I want you to try on a Tibetan Chuba.

When Tibetan friends get that tone in their voice it would be vanity to refuse. So I stretched on the rickety bench, grabbed another cabbage dumpling with my chopsticks and eyed the flies bouncing lazily into the sheer sheet wrapped around the otherwise open nunnery tea house.

She had just bought a new, very pink, sun hat which her boyfriend now held on his knee. Do you like this hat? I asked him. This one eh? he asked back, then, in Tibetan, it looks like she picked it up from the ground. She glared at him while I nearly choked with laugher and tea.

We ate quickly.

Let's go, she said, arranging her picked up off the ground hat neatly on her head, but first I want you to see something. I sighed as we three darted down an alley towards what I knew was a temple which I was tired of having to see. But when we arrived, instead of golden colored idols sitting in rows, she pointed out to me pots of flowers. It's a beautiful garden, I know you like flowers, she said. I beamed with delight and freedom.

We ended up wandering around the alleys of downtown Lhasa, in and out of Tibetan clothing shops as she bemoaned the fact that they only sold grandmother cloth. We arrived at a shop the size of a closet and she let go of my elbow and said here, now you must choose a color you like. 

A ream of turquoise cloth later and a coral colored shirt to match and she was satisfied only once the addition of a striped apron made the ensemble complete. As I stood being awkwardly measured by a small Tibetan girl, who continually commented on the good shape of my body, my friend's boyfriend paced a little staring at his sandals. I think the colors are very perfect, he said.

It's so special they agreed, and we arranged to pick it up a few days later.

****************************************

First we we shop for a surprise, my colleague said, then have lunch.

When Tibetan friends get that tone in their voice it would be vanity to refuse. So I and two colleagues got on a bus on a too hot afternoon and I cradled a jar of ice water on my knees. We got off the bus and again entered the labyrinth of downtown Lhasa alleys, occasionally scraping someone with the edge of our umbrellas, only to end up in a small shop roughly the size of a closet filled with cloth and a small woman with a tape measure around her neck. I smiled. Surprise! they said.


Pick a good color they said and we rummaged through a stack of cloth in dozens of different patterns and colors. This time I chose a purpleish maroon one with some gold details and my friends bubbled with delight. Now for the shirt, and they dragged me two steps to the other wall of the shop. Before I even had a chance to survey the options one colleague had decided for me on a white sheer shirt with blots like oil spills all over it. So beautiful! they said nodding eagerly.

The woman with the tape measure put me in the shirt and threw the ream of cloth over my shoulder. A Tibetan grandfather spinning a rusty looking wheel tilted his hat back as he rested in the shade of the shop and surveyed the goings on. When I made eye contact with him he gave me a toothless grin and a thumbs up. Is it beautiful? I asked him. So beautiful, he said and shuffled away.

As I stood with my arms out, once again being awkwardly measured while the woman commented on the shape of my body my friends nodded in silent approval. We thought a long time about this surprise they said and asked the woman to choose a striped apron to complete the ensemble.

It's so special, they agreed and we arranged to pick it up a few days later.

We ate a uniquely Tibetan lunch of luhbi, fried potatoes, patsuhmogu, loco momo's and a Tibetan rendition of a samosa. As we sat chatting and picking through our odd assortment of plastic bags of food in a restaurant that was so narrow one could almost reach the opposite wall from where you sat, I considered my two recent fittings...

Until this past week, I have never had the experience of being fitted for anything that was made just for me as a gift. Now, I've had it twice.

And I agree wholeheartedly with my friends: it's so special.

Sunflower Seeds

It's as if I'm seeing everything in these last two weeks in Lhasa through glasses that have the opposite of their intended effect and blur things. A tint of something sad shades nearly every moment and little weights attach themselves to my words so that they sometimes, unexpectedly, stick in my throat. Though my walls are almost bare I can still see the places where the pictures had hung.

I have not yet dusted off the suitcases. 

***********************************************

I walked into my student's relatives house only to be greeted by an ensemble of Tibetans that looked as though they might have walked right off the plateu away from their yak herds not an hour before. I sat next to one smiling woman who grabbed my hand and leaned towards me, in a moment of mutual vulnerability, to tap my forehead with hers. There is something about an embrace of foreheads that is uniquely endearing and I vowed to do it more often.

As I and she and a small group of her relatives piled into the car another woman leaned in the window and grabbed my hand drawing it teary-eyed to her forehead. She is sad because this is only her first time to see you and you will leave soon my student offered as an explanation. All the people I only met once flitted through my mind like ghosts of butterflies.

When we arrived at her small village in the middle of gentle looking mountain ridges and fields so green they made your mouth water we filed out of the car and into the kitchen where her mother, an older rendition of my student, stood pouring fresh, warm milk into small bowls. I would later meet the cows.

My first moment in the kitchen time stood still. Her mother's eyes watered over and she pinched her mouth shut and the look that she gave me tried to speak, speak ten thousand beautiful things, that I couldn't understand. It was as if all of the stories her daughter had likely told her about me just materialized in front of her and she couldn't decide if I were real.

When her brother bounded into the kitchen moments later and caught sight of me, he leaped backward out of the room in a nervous giggle. It would take the rest of the day as he, like a nervous animal, would watch me from a distance and alternately come too close to me and then dart away before he decided I was, relatively, safe.

We walked around the garden, ate too much bread, drank milk that tasted like every good thing I had forgotten, or never known, that milk should taste like, swished flies away, watched her mother work the loom, laughed and took pictures. It felt so natural, normal, peaceful, to be just a part of a family again, even a family unlike any I have ever been a part of. Her mother disappeared for a moment and came back with a bundle of cloth.

My mother worked very hard to make this for you. Try it on. Does it fit? She had never seen you so she only guessed. This takes a long time to make. I think it fits well. Never wash it with water. Do you like it? 

And I found myself in a Tibetan jacket made just for me which smelled exactly like the sheep's back they sheared the wool from. And I took up the mother's dye stained, calloused hands in my own and I couldn't look her in the eye. How could anything I've ever done deserve the amount of labor from this one jacket of infinite worth to me?

We walked down the empty nearly paved streets to the local monastery to visit her uncle, a monk of thirty years, and became the first, and likely last, foreign guest to ever visit the tiny place. Obviously proud, her uncle and his monk friends showed us every single room and we drank tea and were kadad in a room reserved for their highest teacher, should he ever return from exile and show up in the middle of the countryside for a visit. The chances are much higher that I would return. A wrinkled, grinning grandfather whose ears stuck out at odd angles neglected his endless rotations around an oversized prayer wheel for a moment.

As we piled back into the car hours later full on milk, and laughter, and sunshine, and family, my student's mother stood by the car window. I clutched the bag of jacket like a precious jewel in my lap and opened my mouth to say anything at all. And I couldn't. My words had made a swift getaway somwhere between the last drop of milk and the car. And I blinked hard several times and her mother waited, and before I could make a second attempt she patted my hand through the window and said, Zeama, it's time to go. So we left, making dust clouds in the otherwise clear and spotless day.

I leaned into my student and couldn't speak until we had arrived back in Lhasa. And I can't now remember anything I said then.

When I got home I immediately put the jacket on again. It does fit well. And I even found some sunflower seeds in the pockets like memories of too many odd things now heartbreakingly familiar...

... like all the things I can't take back with me.

This is my Tibet

The beginning of the end.

Today I hugged the grocery lady from behind. She laughed and her husband took another drag on his cigarette before smiling broadly. Then she started speaking to me in her fierce Sichuan Chinese and I called down the street to my friend begging her to come over and translate.


Before you leave for the summer, she said holding my hand tightly, make sure to come over and take whatever things you want for the trip. It was what she said to me every year, and I saddened thinking of all the fruit and vegetables and laughter and hand squeezes and smiles and even the odd meal they'd given to me free of charge over the years. Tell her that I'm sad because I don't know when I will come back, I begged my friend to translate. She did.

Then the grocery lady burst into tears. I did too.

What could we do but cry?

The timeline...

7 am: I awoke to what sounded like a bulldozer driving in circles around my bed and realized groggily that it was just a fly roughly the size of a quarter. My ears still tingled from the English-song-competition-followed-by-KTV-with-the-leaders evening of magic. My head throbbed with anger at so loud an uninvited guest at so early an hour and I wondered why flies weren't created to be silent. But the morning sky was cool.

9 am: I walked into a classroom and was shocked by more than half the students in attendance. I looked at one boy who I hadn't seen anywhere near class for over nine months, blinked hard, and he was still there.

10.37 am: I finished class three minutes early and walked outside to the quickly warming day and saw a former class of my students sitting in the shade some distance away. "God bless you Ms. Kelly" one boy yelled to my surprise and delight. Even sleep deprived, I know He has.

10.46 am: I made a cup of tea and poured it into a jar I could carry with me. I knew there was no way I would make it through the rest of the day without a cup of tea.

11 am: I sat waiting for a colleague to go oven shopping with me on a bench near our main office. A student, who has recently changed his style to looking something like Jon Travolta in Grease, came to sit on the bench with me. Normally sullen and distant he openly confesed his frustration with the job he'd been given, and his desire to take a tour guide exam, though he never removed his MP3 earbuds.

Noon: We, finally, found an oven. But we didn't buy it. Go figure.

12.45 pm: I sat around a tiny table with two Chinese colleagues eating what amounted to a Chinese rendition of what in America might have been a chicken salad. They had so wanted ranch sauce, demanded I make it for them, and so we dipped bits of vegetable and chicken into it with chopsticks to eat.

2.15 pm: Another bulldozer invaded my room and my sleep, and met with the same crushing result as the first one. I don't know how they got in without opening the door, and I can't remember the last time I was so angry.

3 pm: I tried to rub the sleep off my face as I blundered down the hall to my neighbors house to ask for help to send my last two boxes back to America. He sat drinking tea with another neighbor and the two of them laughed at my sleepy half awake condition. I leaned back into the pumpkin shaped pillow and enjoyed their company.

3:45 pm: I watched a man seal my boxes with shocking dexterity and thought: here is the only efficient man in all of China. Nearly 600 yuan later my over twenty kilos worth of things that at the moment were important to me were on their way to America.

4 pm: I leaned against a bus stop and pondered the shattering blows to my own heart as I listened to my neighbor speak of everything broken in his life and the world. It has been a long time since I have so clearly seen the result of the Fall. I wanted to weep, but paid for our bus tickets instead.

4.15 pm: I became the amusement of the bus when I surprised two middle school girls by telling them in crystal clear Tibetan that really I wasn't 'SO' beautiful.

4.55 pm: I glanced at my watch and felt sad that I had to dash out of my neighbor's house where he had been pouring me tea and continuing to chat as if we had never left that exact position hours earlier. Promising to have a few last events together before I left in surprise at how the Father can change an odd, grumpy man into a dear and helpful friend.

5.40 pm: Three Americans and a Korean left a Tibetan restaurant because they weren't serving any meat during this holy month of Sacadawa.

7.30 pm: I had to forcibly restrain what threatened to be a flood of tears as I commanded our Korean brother over a table littered with dinner remains to not forget his first call and the brokenness of these people. They were words that I myself needed to hear.

8.45 pm: I refused to say good-bye to the man who would tomorrow return to Korea with his family and chose instead to say see you later because it was my wish and their's that that be more accurate.

9.10 pm: My student saw me return home in the dusk and stopped me in the street to chat. Eerily close to her was a small, eager looking Chinese boy. We had the following conversation:
I: Who is this boy?
My student: He? I don't know... hehehe
Boy: FRIEND
My student: haha. No.
I: See you in class tomorrow.

9.17 pm: I searched through layers of dust thick enough to make my skin crawl for my friend;s house key she'd hidden above her door. I needed to get into her house to pick up the oven we didn't buy earlier that day. Apparently, the oven buying process is beyond my understanding of shopping.

10 pm: A phone call from a dear dear Lhasa friend like water to my soul. Refreshing, encouraging, so much light.

Midnight: now.

Sleep comes slowly when there is too much to process in a day and only 18 days remaining anyway... tears come quicker.

Everything I know about mercy...

A year ago I knew that mercy was the same color blue as a clear Lhasa sky and sounded exactly like the tinkling cow bells from the ditch outside my window. 

I've learned a thing or two about mercy since. 

*****************************************

Mercy feels like a low cloud of fog on a cool morning and takes your breath away like the beginnings of a green or purple tint to mountains you've memorized as brown and you have to strain and blink to make sure you're not just wishing it so.

And mercy tastes like tea poured from dented thermoses into questionable cups and fish hot pot so spicy your stomach burns in anticipation. It smells like a rainfall and cut grass and a breeze rolling directly off of snow capped mountains.

And I know that my Father is merciful when my students write essays to me entitled: Take Care Teacher, and words get lodged in my throat and I can't say them and I'm overwhelmed with stillness knowing that I don't have to because my face communicates perfectly the state of my heart.

And I know His mercy is deep when my boxes are packed by peace and I don't feel rushed though time continually mocks me like an arrogant child and the birds sitting on the power line running frighteningly close to my window sing as if only to me.

And I know that His mercy is extravagant when I think about the cold, dark days He's brought me out of and the way He fixes it so that I am reminded that He is still at work in my students and friends lives and the process is slow because step by often weary step is the only way to walk through life.

My Father's mercy runs down my face like tears, redemptive, like watermelon juice, sweet and cool, like a shower that cleans my soul. It fills my ears like a whisper, tender, like wind in the trees, gentle, like a symphony that plays the story of my walk. It fills the space around me like air, ever-present, like perfume, fragrant and light, like a warrior that encircles me with protection.

His mercy is a jungle, an ocean, an umbrella, a boat, a tower. It is shade, sunshine, and rain. It is the perfect amount of spice on your one kuai bag of fried potatoes and a fresh loco momo. His mercy was, is, and always will be.

Oh yes, when my days are full and my mornings are free and steam eases my mind as it slips off my tea I know with all my being that He's merciful to me. 

The word that must not be spoken.

You can't make me say it. I won't.

How am I supposed to say it to the friend who taught me everything I know about making noodles and living as a Believer in a family dedicated to idols, who now sends frantic text messages: "are you still here? are you free? we must meet!"? Can I bear it?  Can she?

And can those words really form on my lips to the student who returns after a year away teaching to knock at my door and beg me join her for dinner as she sits starry eyed reminescing about the good old days when I was their best teacher and everyone agreed I was beautiful not only because of your dimples Ms. Kelly she asserts. When the one firm fact that she remembers about me is that I study the Word on Sundays can I really say to her what I don't want to say to anyone?

Who can expect me to say what needs to be said, what is soon coming, to the sisters who throw hours away just to have me over to the junky room where they live and teach me to cook things and promise to send me anything they can afford in the midst of their poverty from Lhasa, should I crave bags of tsampa and spice when I'm gone. She sat engrossed in the Book she'd dreamed about I'd only just now been able to give her, and I couldn't think of a less appropriate time to say it... so I gladly didn't.

I tried to say it to the friends over dinner, but my attempt was weak and they blew it off demanding yet another closing party. I was glad for that too because I nearly choked thinking about the words in my throat as I listened to their amusing banter and memorized their laughter, a vain attempt to save it for a gray day later. I bought a documentary about the history of your Father, one started, and I liked it, very good.

Can I help but to refuse to say it to the man who I know adjusted his glasses and coughed a little right before I answered the phone and he, ever too formal, invited me to try fish hot pot again. I hope you don't mind he mumbled nearly drowned out in my ecstatic agreement, no he will never hear those words from me, because I'm not going to say it.

And the nun who I've been trying to contact for days who called me on an unfamiliar phone number who upon hearing the news of my time line burst into near howls of unintelligible Tibetan though I didn't come anywhere close to saying it to her... would I even dream of it now?

What exactly do I tell the classrooms full of students who have faithfully attended and been my family and my pride for these three years, who have written me into their lives, introduced me to their families, taught me more about themselves than there is things to know about English, and kept all my most lonely moments at bay? I know what I won't say...

And you can be sure that my friend who promised to go oven shopping with me, who grabbed my arm at the school gate and demanded that I accompany her on a dinner date with a man whom you could feel the strange coming from as she totally ignored him and spoke to me in English the entire time saying Kelly you are my sunshine, my boat, my umbrella, you are my lucky... who's eyes I couldn't bear to look into as they filled with tears when I demanded that she come with me to the airport... you can be quite sure friends, she'll never hear me say it.

She won't and neither will my friends who I miss until I can see them the next week, nor the grocery family who give me free nearly everything, nor the beggar children who learned my name, nor the gate grandfather who thinks I'm related to him, nor anyone else because I'm not going to say it.

I will do it. I must. It is right. The way is my Father's.

But I'm not going to say it.

The end of a dinner...

Worth: A journal entry from a student I no longer teach

One walks on a strange road. Listening to a strange song. Missing a strange person. This is a true life. 

I think it is worth to remember something that I had done or had thought. 

I promised to write a poem to Ms. Kelly. 

But I don't know how to write. Perhaps she will go back. I'm so sad. As a student, she helped me do more thing. I'm very luck to become her student. She teached me for two years. But she always play with us. When I am in trouble, she will give me a hand. When I quarreled with Jia Hai Mou she helped us to adjust our problem. Till we had dinner with her. She told us that she would go back. All of students feel sad. 

But every dinner will go to an end. No matter how good it is. I think that is the most worth. No matter it had been over.

********************************************************

After a quiet dinner with a flustered, over-worked colleague we flagged down a taxi in the cool evening dim. 

The price was too high. We shut the door and walked the direction we wanted to go instead. 

After a while, it became quite dark. We flagged down another taxi. I got in. The driver pulled a u-turn in a busy intersection and I watched my colleague walk back home through pools of street light.

The taxi seemed to wade through a city on its way to sleep. When the driver changed a song on the radio I was enjoying I muttered, in Tibetan, how I actually liked the last song.


Oh really? he said and quickly changed it back. Then a conversation unraveled of laughter and memories and familiarity that was like a bed time story I knew and had been longing to hear again from someone else who knew it too...


I know you. I remember you because I used to work for the buses. Do you know me? If I speak slowly you can understand me right? For ten days I worked on 501 and ten days on 502 and then ten days I would rest. Those buses were so fast, the drivers were crazy. It was a good job. Now I am a taxi driver but this work is not good. Too tired. So many of the bus drivers know you. Only two foreigners on the route. I'm so happy to talk to you. I wanted to talk to you but didn't even though I saw you many times. Are you happy in Lhasa? I have a friend who also used to work for buses. She knows you. She often talks about you and has a picture of you and says how you can speak Tibetan and are so beautiful. 

Is your friend's name Dawa?


Yes. 

I can't believe it! Long time I didn't see her. I miss her. How is she?


She doesn't live near Sera anymore. She lives in the Barkhor. She is well, lives with her husband. Now she is pregnant, she will soon have a baby. 

So happy!

The driver pulled up somewhat reluctantly at our school gate. Students milled about in the dark. The meter read 14 yuan. 


Here is your school. Please, you only pay ten yuan. 

Really? I asked. But I knew he was serious.

******************************************************************

I am walking on a strange road, listening to a strange song, missing all kinds of strange people, and mourning the end of a dinner that is of very great worth to me. 

This is a true life.

Broken days

Some things are broken. Some entire days are broken.

I walked a long, dirty road stained with nasty to get to a small, dark room now crowded with familiar. My friend sat with her cousin watching a documentary on the laptop. I shuffled clothes and books around on a bed to make space to sit. Her sister walked through the door with bulging bags of vegetables. The stove was lit to make tea.

The documentary was about the quest to find a lama's reincarnated self. You became cold as the monk traversed snowy heights. You became disappointed when he arrived at empty villages. You became shocked when the chubby child chose the correct beads. But you were never forgiven, you were never ransomed, you never became free...


Finding this child is more important than a thousand of my own lives the monk said, teary eyed.

My friend and her sister had seen it more than a dozen times and could quote it. The cousin was transfixed. I was sinking deep into depression as the lostness of an entire people group clamped down on my heart. Before my friend had left for Beijing she had been dreaming of another Word, a better one. Now she was offering carrot cake crumbs to a picture of a demon with human skulls around his neck.

They paused the documentary to take a break for lunch. The picture was paused on the visage of their most famous lama. When the grandmother came in and caught sight of the computer screen she literally froze in what appeared to be awe and wouldn't eat, speak, or blink until the screensaver came on. At which point she started breathing again. I shuddered clinking my chopsticks hard against the bowl. The food tasted like ashes.

Afterward, she walked me to the street corner. The sky was as low as my spirit. You are my only best friend she said and soon you will go. 

The sky dribbled with sorrow.

An hour of buying random gifts with my teammate and getting a Tibetan man to knock forty yuan off a blanket by appealing in Tibetan to his better nature left me with a bag of ground meat walking towards a bus stop, tired.

Walking right into a teacher from our school who I had seen several times, always exchanged smiles with, but never spoken to. Are you going to the school? I asked in Tibetan, assuming that if he was teaching at our school he wasn't able to speak English. He seemed only a little surprised, suggested we get a taxi, changed his mind when our bus pulled up a moment later, jumped on, finding two seats for us near the back.

The bus ride was really just a conversation that made me smile for its awkward use of random bits of language that will make me sick for this place when I'm gone. I found out that he was from Lhasa, had studied Chinese in Beijing, and was pretty much miserable with it. I waited while his confusion of words rushed to my ears and looked at this man who was trapped. His muddle of languages only enhanced his obvious inner struggles with the life he was living.


I'm happy today that we could talk I told him in Tibetan as we neared our school. But my speaking is so poor he muttered.

Back at home I went about the entirely too complicated task of cooking an American meal for my monk friend who had organized our birthday party. On the menu: sloppy joes, mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, and peas. He arrived half an hour late, gobbled it all up, and changed chairs to lean back and stretch it out. After a lighthearted announcement from him that he was only a two day a week monk, I and my teammate agreed to walk him back to the monastery because the evening was beautiful.


How do you feel about leaving soon Kelly, he asked. Nea simpa sulibulichasha I quickly answered.

My heart has become messy.

The walk back was notable for the man walking towards us with his shirt pulled up scratching his nipples in the dusk. My teammate needed to make a quick stop at the copy shop near our school gate and I sat down on something that only after three years in Lhasa I was confident was meant for sitting. Between us we were two yuan short for the copies and in nervous stumbling random Chinese words tried to explain the dilemma to the copy shop people who know and, apparently, love us... luckily, they are our friends, and what's two yuan between friends?

Mei guan xi she said, which I took to mean: no matter.

Maybe I am the one broken.  

Leave me, Noise.

The windows rattled a little bit from the bass blaring from the speakers located at the school across the street. The ensuing roar was a louder volume than I felt comfortable listening to my own music in my house. Visions of small children with bleeding ears and a future fraught with certain deafness danced in my pounding head. Some man directly under my window took to slamming metal pipes around. Dogs barked. A dump truck backed up with an insane bleep bleep bleep for nearly ten minutes. My eyelids began to twitch in sync with the scream of whistles piercing the morning. When sound of the bathroom faucet dripping began to assault my already tenderized ears I had to wonder if there wasn't any silent thing left in all the world. 

This noise level would continue nearly non-stop for the next two days. 

******************************************************

The foriegn teachers' presence was requested as part of a judging panel for an English song compeition. Good thing too, otherwise the charasmatic boy with the large hair convincingly singing the tune of 'we will rock you' without a single correctly pronounced English word woud have walked away with the gold. The high pitched, tragically misprounounced songs were, luckily, loud enough to cover my stunned giggles... but quite unluckily, also loud enough to make my already sore ears sting. The whine of a ill handled microphone ricocheted in my head.

*****************************************

English teachers in China make much of classroom repetition. The few remaining students still willing to attend class after already taking and passing their job placement exams in my otherwise abandoned classroom were no exception. Loud enough to make up for their missing classmates, they chanted conversation clips in unison and the ringing in my ears went up a notch. Then suddenly a long word, their confidence wilted in shame to the back of the classroom, the chanting turned to a very obvious mumble before dissolving into nervous laughter. Though my ears sighed in momentary relief, I scolded them, "Do not be afraid of long words!" and we practiced 'unfortunately' together and their confidence returned with vengeance. 

*****************************

She had returned from nearly eleven months in Beijing, thinner, paler, less prone to silliness, but still herself under a large, beige sun hat. We ate sha momo's and I strained to hear her against the din of the small, though still busy, tea house. Chop sticks clinked against metal bowls, thermoses slammed on tables, tea was slurped, large spit wads where hocked on the floor, and I held a hand over one ear in a vain attempt to muffle all that I didn't want to hear. I have a dream that one day you will get married and come back to Lhasa and I can teach your children she half laughed in an admission that made me instantly remember all of the reasons I had missed her. The sting in my ears had given way to a dull tingle that I still couldn't shake and we walked hand in hand back to school trailing dreams like too many balloons behind us. 

***************

I shook my head. The small forgotten kitchen corner of a smaller tea house was the quietest place I had been in days and I was just beginning to feel the edges of my headache soften. Okay then we stay here my small as a mouse friend decided. Somewhere a baby wailed and I winced. The throaty laughter of the tea house owner crowded the room and my friend pointed to a poster on the wall. She began its story in English but gave up and quickly went into Tibetan and I couldn't tell if I was able to understand the story of Buddha in Tibetan because of the Tibetan or because I already knew the story. He saw all the people no food, no drink, no bed and his heart was empty of happiness and he left his kingdom and sat under a tree... She intoned sweetly like a bedtime story for a child. I sipped tea and tilted my head, letting the pounding headache drip out of my ear and onto my shoulder.

**********

A row on the bus nearly made me late to meet a former student for dinner. His voice little more than a hoarse fog we nonetheless declared our hunger found a deserted upper room in a nearby Chinese restaurant and I quized him on TOFEL questions and gave him tips for practicing and phone numbers of other friends sure to help him. He wheezed profuse thank you's and I called it a quick night after handing him a bag of cough drops from America. You have sympathy for my throat he said in a way that I took to mean gratitude.

*****

Trucks rumble, honk by on the street outside. Dogs take turns populating the night with sound. Every now and then a cell phone blares a Tibetan pop song. The very house creaks and the faucet still drips. Everything makes noise, that's how it proves to itself that it exists. 

But I am convinced, ears still swimming, humming with liquid noise, that I'll never be able to make sense of this day or any part of the Kingdom story here until I hear it in the silence.

So. Shhhhhh.....................