I have seen the world end.

It was dark when I piled into a taxi with three of my former students this morning. Pre-sunrise Lhasa is a different city. The only sound is the scritch scratch of the stick brooms of the street sweepers in orange reflective coveralls. Pre-sunrise Lhasa reminds you of a sleeping child. It's deceptive of course. Lhasa is really just a hungry beast.

It was cold when our bus filled with an assortment of pilgrims bumbled and shuddered over the dirt path up the mountain to Tsupu Monastery. Icy blasts of wind slicing through cracks in the old bus. When the bus stopped everyone on it had the same idea: make a beeline for the small tea house at the foot of the monastery. Inviting only because yak dung smoke seeped forth promising warmth.

It was uncomfortable when we found ourselves in the midst of the most active monastery I have ever visited. In every room monks bustled about, mumbling, pouring pale butter tea, making statues of tsampa, rearranging the butter melting in the lamps, banging drums, ringing bells, coming up with long and barely intelligible explanations, making change for pilgrims. And intertwined with that melee was the endless circling, spinning, whispering, offering, line of pilgrims ranging in age from birth to as close to death as you can be and still moving. Head ache indusive and repetitive to the extreme I counted over two dozen pictures of the same monk and at least three over two story high metal statues. Just frame someone wearing burgundy or prop something gold up and these people will worship.

It was unsettling to see the expression on the honored child monk's face as he sat on a bench and lifted a wrapped book to lightly pat the heads and backs of each of the pilgrims stood waiting in a snaking, panting, sunflower seed spitting line at the peak of a mountain. Total unrelieved boredom. He accepted kadas and cash, and only registered mild surprise at a glimpse of the foreigner standing politely off to the side out of range of the dropping book. Outside it began to sleet.

Then the world ended. It ended the same way it had done countless times that day already. Only this time I distinctly recognized it.

Another room in another temple. It was crowded enough to be warm already in addition to the flickering butter lamps. We had to ask where to go and were directed to the place. Its walls were covered in the standard oil painting of Buddhist mythology, moldy tangkas hung from the ceiling, and cases of golden statues could be made out in the shadowy dankness of the room. People began to circle clockwise and stick the equivalent of dimes and nickels in any crevice they could find. A monk in burgundy garb and a yellow north face jacket languished against a pole in the center of the room.

Then he spoke. And it ended. The whole world stopped moving. People stopped breathing, stopped chanting, stopped offering, stopped circling and just pooled up in the room in a circle around this young man. Eyes glazed over and the only thing that assured me that they were still alive was their nods and moans of assent every time he paused to take a breath. As long as he spoke in his gravely chanting distorted voice, the world, the whole world, stood still. Perhaps it ended.

My leg fell asleep.

Then he stopped, he resumed fiddling with the butter lamp wicks. People groggily shook themselves back into their spinning, circling, mumbling, offering. Nobody even so much as thought a question for the monk in regards to what he had said. They just accepted whatever had come out of his mouth... after all, he had in a single breath caused their whole world to stop. I rolled my eyes.

The world ended many times today.

It was getting dark again when we got back to Lhasa. An evening spent resting out in a field amidst some mountains and a small village home to a handful of rowdy children in dirty clothes provided a pleasant detour thanks to our bus driver with one gold tooth and a black stain on his shirt. When the bus stopped in Lhasa, I and my students immediately went to eat our fill of fried potatoes and sweet tea. I fell asleep on my student's shoulder once we had caught another bus back to our school.

I have seen the world end... and it was so frustrating I would have ended it myself if I had the ability to. Luckily I don't. Thankfully it didn't really. But you would never have known that looking into their beautiful faces.

take a little picture put it in my pocket

I want to remember things.

I want to take a little picture of everything. I want to carry the picture around in my pocket so I can take it out and look at it and remember.

I want a picture that captures an entire evening spent with a dorm room full of boys wandering around the room that serves as my apartment as they go about the laborious task of making Tibetan meat dumplings. One kneads dough until his arms become visibly sore, two dash out to reappear with the largest thermos of butter tea they can carry, one vanishes into the kitchen to grind meat for an hour periodically peeking around the corner with bloody knife in hand and sideways baseball cap, two sit and make conversation and do what they can to appear to be part of the process, another washes bowls, another finds some good music to listen to. The dumplings finished, the light dim, the stomachs bulging, the butter tea thermos dry: a snapshot of eight boys around a table straining to understand their foreign teacher.

I want a picture of the cigarette burned backseat of the bus where two ten year old Chinese girls sit giggling and translating every English word they know to the neighboring foreigner. Then the small girl with short hair and high heels reaches into her bag and pulls out a camera to take pictures of the foreigner so as not to miss such a unique opportunity: a snapshot of a moment with a stranger.

I want a picture of my Tibetan friend's face when the creepy old butter smelling grandfather picked up our dented, stained thermos of sweet tea the second time and poured our drinks before hobbling back to his busted wooden seat to resume his career of watching us. A snapshot capturing the exact instant before a face as black as death burst into the uncontrollable laughter reflecting the giggles which I had desperately been trying to stuff back into my mouth and labeled with the rebuke "don't smile so loudly or he will come back!"

I want a picture of the monk with his foot propped up on a pillow and wrapped in gauze as he beams proudly knowing that the entire monastery is now at his beck and call. An old man paces back and forth, cleaning things, filling cups with revoltingly bland tea, humming. A monk leaning on burgundy pillows amidst burgundy sheets and a cool breeze blowing through the cracks in the wall. A foreign teacher and a student and a bag full of food and medicine squat in various positions on the rough floor. A snapshot of unusual friendship and a quasi king with a broken leg.

I want a picture of the straight bangs and long curly hair framing the dimpled face of a Chinese student who uses 'ok' to mean 'I think so too' as she knocks on my door to hand me a crocheted handbag made by her mother and shipped in from mainland complete with large pink flowers. A snapshot of hospitality at its most endearing.

I want a picture of my small Tibetan friend as she haggles for a cheaper price for the cushions as I stand conspicuously silent and shy off to the side and the stacks of bedding sway from the intensity of the argument. It would necessarily contain the shops full of miscellaneous junk watching us battle the stumble drag of the awkwardly shaped cushions to the back of the taxi, and the lid of the green tea bottle which promises us a free one to our disproportional excitement. A snapshot of a relationship cemented by home improvement projects.

I want a picture of my student as he sweats through his midterm exam after not having come to a single day of class the entire semester yet. The bench groaning as he shifts his weight in a struggle to remember things he's never really been taught. My own surprise and relief as he manages somehow to pass and his expression of confusion and something entirely different as he hears a teacher beg him, in his own language, to come to class because she is so proud of him. Something it's obvious he's never heard before. A snapshot of the exact moment when a boy decides he's going to change his life.

I want a picture able to capture the intonation of Mr. Wu as he teaches about parking tickets to a glassy eyed class of freshmen in a Mr. Rodgers meets Eeore spoken English to the unending amusement of the foreign teacher observing him. The dust swirls on the chalkboard around his childish drawing of a police officer and the pale yellow curtains turning the gray room a shade of dingy never before imagined. And his expression of utter joy and slight surprise upon recieving a slip of paper containing a list of praises she had written during the observation. A snapshot of gaps bridged.

I want to take a little picture which has every cup of tea, every minute of every conversation, every expression, every molding bench, every crumbling wall, every sweetly scented bush with small flowers, every sunrise, every crystal clear night, every soupy oily bowl of squirming noodles, every sticky grain of rice, every mildly revolting bus seat, every tiny oddly pink hued bird, every gift, every person, every wrinkle on every face, every line of dirt under every fingernail, every glimpse of every life of joy and pain, struggle and success, mundane and miraculous...

and I want to put it in my pocket.

and I want to remember.

Dusty desperation

The school gate is a large stone edifice vaguely resembling an ancient tomb and stands as the singular entrance and exit to the school of some three thousand students and several hundred teachers. Guarded only by some metal grating and a grinning grandfather in military uniform sipping tea and squinting in the sun, it is in use nearly all day.

On one side of the gate resides the relative order and tranquility of a bustling teacher's college. On the other side all of the chaos, madness, filth, and darkness of city life teems.

On the other side of the gate, every day, three children sit, nearly obscured by dust. Looking as though they are perhaps made of dust. Dusty hair, dusty faces, dusty fingers, dust encrusted clothes... a painful reminder that our lives, filthy as they are, are perhaps little more than such dust.

The children dance around the school gate, they chase people, they beg for small money, they put their grubby hands in students' clean pockets, they sing, they hug their nearly empty cardboard box. They are tiny. They are desperate, they are despised, they are ignored, they are nearly trampled by the coming and going around the school gate. Their existence in such a state is proof of all the world's evil.

The oldest boy, a wise six years, grins when you catch his eye but when he doesn't know you're looking his expression betrays a grim hopelessness, eyes which should bear a spark yield only a void. Perhaps a mirror of his destiny. His name is Puchun.

He asks for money but has learned to take anything he's given. Especially from the strange pale one who gives him and his little sisters potatoes, drinks, candy, fruit, anything she has on hand except money... and she knows them, even when she has nothing she speaks to them. She has asked their names.

The dust swirls and settles etching patterns into their skin and turning their hair lighter. Puchun and the smallest sister hum and huddle together. The day is warm and the dust is thick. They are tired of calling out and hope that their presence is enough to persuade someone to empty their pockets into the busted cardboard box they carry. Then out of the sky they are handed two bottles of orange juice, bought just for them. Another dusty one materializes out of nowhere and the two orange juices already given out all that's left is a bottle of sprite. Quickly handed over as though it was bought just for her the third one squats next to the other two.

The giver of drinks turns to leave and feels a tug at her shirt. The last dusty one has followed her, has left a dirty hand print on her clothes. Through eyes of liquid surrounded by banks of dust she stares deep into the face of the pale stanger... mutters a deliberate "xie xie" and dashes back to the edge of the school gate to drink and be consumed by dust.

The gate stands and the students and teachers come and go. On the outside of the gate watermelon and popcorn sellers hawk their wares from rusty bicycles. The sun glitters and the trees green leaves wash the street with shade. The gate grandfather has stepped inside to take a nap. On the inside of the gate the school slumbers in afternoon repose. Clothes hang on the nearby bushes to dry. A teacher chats with some students before strolling back to her apartment.

And three little dusty ones live lives of quiet desperation on the other side.

The madness I love.

It's the student midterm speaking exams during which they all have an opportunity to tell me anything they want in simple past:
One time there was a girl I liked. I was washing my hands at the WC and she also came to wash her hands. So I plucked up my courage and said "you also have urine on your hands?" and she became angry.

It's the confessions that students make about the impact of my eating habits which would make my mother proud:
Ms. Kelly after I meet you my habit changed. Before I had bad style and I would always leave so much food. But after we eat together I understand I should not waste food, should always eat everything. Think about the beggars.

It's the ten o'clock at night phone call of riddles from a friend who is forever starting a new project and knows where great momo restaurants lurk throughout the city:
Kelly! I found a partner for my company, she has twenty percent of budget and I have eighty percent... now I have a question for you: what do I put on my business card?

It's the teacher who catches me laboriously coping Tibetan writing from a text book and sits too close to me on the bench and has no qualms about coughing in my face as he offers me advice:
Speak Tibetan.

It's the friend and self declared personal nutritionist who cannot help but to get up on her soapbox every time she sees me:
You never eat outside, you are hungry you come to my house. Even you come every day. I cook for you... other food is bad for your body. You must never not have health. Come tomorrow.

It's the student in the front row who leans forward mid activity to the teacher's desk just to inform me that:
Ms. Kelly you really are beautiful.

It's these things that frustrate me to the point of madness and yet manage to cause me to fall hopelessly in love with a people who battle horrid pronunciation just to tell a story in hopes of a laugh, who notice habits you have long forgotten you had, who call on a friend for absolutely anything, who force you to do what you long to do and feel totally inadequate doing, who treat you like a small child because they simply can't do anything else for you, who can't help but say what is on their mind.

They make me crazy... but they wouldn't have me any other way. And I love them. And the One I serve does too.

wasteland.

A quickened heartbeat after a quick march up a flight of stairs greets a student's sallow face outside of the dusty concrete classroom. Hair disheveled, voice dim, trembling hands and damp eyes relay news of a classmate's mother at the hospital, bad situation suddenly worse, and can he be excused today Ms. Kelly? A teacher catches her breath which has managed to get stuck like a wad of cotton in her throat of course.

A girl sits in the second row face completely concealed and shoulders crushed under the weight of something no one can see. Her complete withdrawal from everything shocking as she embodies absence. A ten minute break in the lesson. A teacher slides into the empty seat next to her leans in close whispers what is wrong. Broken detached phrases articulate a hometown destroyed, a brother missing, relatives dead, and a tear streaked face glances upwards: flooded eyes meet flooded eyes. A teacher's hand rests on an absent girls back and words disappear and a heart crashes to the floor to join the other.

A slow dragging of one foot before another across the school yard after class. A student stumbles behind words spew forth she is like my sister but sad like this for many days I told her don't be like this never cry... A teacher stops mid-stride, turns pauses corrects If you were really her brother your heart would be like hers, you would be the same as her, not tell her this wrong thing... A student stunned. A breeze blows an empty bag across the ground. I told her say om mane padme hum then she is okay. A teacher stares in anger deep into the eyes of the student, rolls her own, turns away from such nonsense. The walk continues the chat continues. The teacher stops one last time Listen. Anything, anything I can do I want to do... you tell her also, and as for you if you have some hurt you tell me. You are my students and you are not alone. And deep dark Tibetan eyes blink back a watery ocean.

See I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.

I'm living in the wasteland... I just didn't realize that the streams were going to be tears.

Life droplets

Mr Wu: I am not good at telling stories. I will go on telling stories.
Me: Jai oh!

The breeze felt cool even as my face prickled with heat foreshadowing probable sunburn. My plodding walk down the nearly deserted backstreet away from the monastery shuffled dust on the asphalt. I paused to watch half a dozen small boys with their pants rolled up to their thighs, yet still wearing socks, wading through the mucky runoff of a nearby pipe. My mind jostled with the discouraging deadlock I had just reached with a friend over lunch...

Soba: The problem is that we are both decided about two different things.
Me: The real problem is that only one of us decided correctly.

I walked on.

Arriving at my friend's room in a house in an alley in the middle of nowhere a little early I was welcomed as if I couldn't have come at a better time. Tea was immediately poured and after an hour of Tibetan lessons to the amusement of a relative whom no one could remember the name of the room cleared out and I was left to sit with only her. Tender after the hollow week I'd had before it didn't unsettle me in the slightest to find myself mirroring her tears as she recounted her life's misfortunes, the stream of which ended with the death of her mother last term and included harrowing accounts of years and entire villages' incomes in hospitals, the loss of opportunities as a result of poverty, the loss of hope as a result of debt, concluding only that her family has so much tsampa but never enough money...

Tsomo: my sister says I should never cry in front of you.
Me: your sister is wrong.

We finished the tea.

The evening still light I walk with my student back to the school. It could have been a long walk with the dappled shadows of the newly green leaves of the trees caressing the silence between us. Instead, the soft spoken mumblings of far too shy English gushed forth from a student who I've spent countless hours with but never had what amounted to more than ten minutes of actual conversation with. Tales of her studies, her observations of the past week, her time with annoying nephews, her hopes that I would continue to teach them new words, her frequent desires to talk to me thwarted by her crippling shyness, and her cure for homesickness. The littered road was too short, the evening light too dim, the time escaping like a kite through clumsy hands and we arrived back at the school...

Qamju: I hope teacher can every day be happy, never sick at heart.
Me: Thank you.

I turned towards my building.

Mr. Wu: In the end the boy dies and the girl lives. The meaning is love can never without pain.
Me: That's a horrible story.

The tin man

In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy comes across a man so dry and stiff that he can barely ask for the oil he needs. Nevermind that he's completely hollow, even lacking a heart.

Shiny on the outside; empty within.

He turns out to be the second of her most loyal companions. Through a series of misadventures it becomes obvious that the reason the Tin man is perpetually dry and stiff is that he is perpetually heartbroken. He cries himself stiff. If it weren't for his fragile heart, which he claims he doesn't have, he would never get into such a mess.

In the end, the wizard graciously gives him a new one.

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

This week my defining emotion has been hollowness. Empty. You would never know it. I look healthy. There's nothing wrong with my body, but look again, tap me, there's nothing inside.

This is my tin man week.

The truth is I have so much to rejoice in (opportunities with the staff, encouragement from friends, advancement in language learning, improvement in my students, hilarity from my boss...) just no ability to do it. It's like some part of me gave up. Like all the small things that I count as triumphs weren't enough, like the never ending stream of blessing that has been promised to me missed the cup and spilled all over the floor instead. It's like all the hurt, all the lostness, all the darkness, all the confusion, all the inability, and all the smallness of every moment of daily life here suddenly rose up to greet me... and I cried myself stiff and dry and am no longer able to ask for the oil I need.

But you're going to ask for me right?

Because truly there's too much to do, too many chances for the kingdom to break through, too much need, too many opportunities to let light and love come rushing through the door for me to stand stiff in a corner with my back to it all pleading through dried up lips for oil. Where is that fragile heart of mine?

This week I'm the tin man... but I know what it is to be the scarecrow and the cowardly lion too... and it's not too rare that I find myself as Dorothy wishing for some magic ruby slippers.