Saturday, February 21, 2009

Leaving for the Solu Khumbu

This will probably be my last post until the end of March. This week, I will be taking a bus to Jiri, and walking through Solu to Khumbu, the Everest region. I will be traveling with Tendi, a deaf Sherpa guide, one of four deaf guides in Nepal. He is a graduate of the Naxal School, and apparently, I am the first deaf person he has ever led into the mountains. Usually, he communicates with trekkers through written notes in English, but I am looking forward to a month of focusing on Nepali Sign Language. The route from Jiri was used by the old Everest explorers, such as Edmund Hillary, and is rarely used anymore. As a result, it hasn't been as profoundly impacted as Khumbu, and there are more opportunities to see "traditional" village life. Tens of thousands of trekkers fly into Lukla each year, bypassing the Jiri section of the trail (Jiri is about a week's walk from Lukla). Tendi Sherpa will be introducing me to other deaf people in the area, and I look forward to visiting his village, Chaurikharka, which is near Lukla. From there, we will be doing excursions into Khumbu. I plan to fly from Lukla back to Kathmandu at the end of March.

Kavre School art project

The best part of being back in Banepa was the Rotary Club's art project with the Kavre School. The Seattle Rotary Club funded all the materials, which included paints, brushes, and pottery from Bhaktapur. All of the students painted their own designs (I'll upload pictures when I return from the Solu Khumbu next month). There was a magic show for the kids, a dance performance by a group of girls from the school, and a fabulous Newari feast cooked by a member of Kavre's deaf association.

Back in Banepa

This past week, I made two visits back to the Kavre School in Banepa. It was the first time I visited the school since September, my first month in Nepal. In September, Melissa and I stayed in Dhulikhel, a small Newari town on the rim of the Kathmandu Valley. I wondered if the narrow streets and brick buildings would seem as magical as they did then, after five months here. I wasn't disappointed. I'm at the halfway point of my Fulbright experience, and returning to this place provided a sense of continuity for me.

Two visits to the school: my first to help prepare for a Rotary art project, under the supervision of Robert Rose (www.trifc.org), and my second was the art project itself, which included about a dozen American Rotary volunteers. Robert was instrumental in helping me get letters of affiliation for my project, and even wrote one himself. Robert has also been a dedicated volunteer in Nepal for more than a decade. Most of his projects benefit Nepalis who are deaf or have other disabilities. I had the chance to meet a blind Nepali woman named Nirmala, who did a Fulbright in Colorado a few years back. She is now working at a Bhutanese refugee camp in eastern Nepal. While I'm not a Rotarian myself, I was impressed with the community spirit of all the volunteers, many of whom have also volunteered in places as far flung as Guatemala and Ethiopia. Robert has projects both at the Naxal deaf school and the Kavre deaf school, as well as at the Durbar Newlife Center for children with disabilities.

This past Thursday, we made a visit to the Hospital and Rehabilitation Centre for Disabled Children in Nepal (hrdcnepal.org). Set on a hill above the town of Banepa with a view of the Himalaya, the center treats children from all over Nepal. Club foot is the most common ailment. Babies have their legs in casts to correct this condition, and their mothers sit in the sunny courtyards, breastfeeding them, or carrying them in slings. Other children have more serious conditions. Doctors were using a power saw to release a girl from her full body cast, and I could only wonder how long she had been imprisoned in there, and how she felt to be free again. There was a boy in the physical therapy room, standing between two bars for support, looking at a mirror. What does he think of his two prosthetic legs, or the fact that he was missing one arm? His therapist told us that this was the first day he'd ever been able to stand on his own.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Writing...

The last few weeks, I've spent my days at Boudhnath stupa, a large, whitewashed dome where Buddhists from all over Nepal (and elsewhere) come to pray. Many of the women wear traditional Tibetan dresses, and in particular, the clothing of various mountain people are on display as worshippers make koras (circumambulations) of the stupa. It's a beautiful and peaceful place, my favorite in Kathmandu, and my preferred location for the more introverted part of my project: the writing of stories.
I am gradually putting together a collection of short stories about my experiences here, almost all of them pieces about the deaf in Nepal. While they are fiction, all are based on real stories in one way or another-- the isolated deaf Tamang farmer I met near the Tibetan border, the young woman at the Naxal deaf school who was terrified at the prospects of getting new hearing aids, or the Naxal student who was a child soldier in the Maoist army before escaping (eating only leaves, practically starving, with a dwarf as his guide). These are stories you can't make up. As a writer, fiction allows for a different kind of reality, a conflation of events, a liberal dose of imagination-- but my hope is that these stories will ultimately ring true to some part of the deaf experience here.

I recently had the opportunity to workshop my first finished story with several writers: two American expats as well as Manjushree Thapa, the author of a novel, short story collection, and non-fiction. They all offered excellent advice, and I'm looking forward to getting involved in Kathmandu's literary community, even if I'm only on the periphery.