Economist

Dear teacher, clear teacher, good teacher, and my very favorite--teacher sir; I answer to all of the above. My classroom is small, and is usually full by the time that I get there in the morning. But, that does not stop an additional 10 students from filing in the door after me and standing around the walls. In all I have around 40 students (half named lobsang, the other half named sonam or tenzin) a room that is no bigger than 15 X 20, one feeble white board marker, 40 huge smiles, and about a million questions. It is a lot of pressure, really. I spend most of my days preparing material for the class. The first day I thought I would read them a short article, pick out vocab words from the article, and then break them into small groups to discuss. I choose, foolishly, an article from the Economist about deforestation. My bad. 15 minutes of reading and I looked up and saw 40 blank smiles. I needed a back up plan, I did not have one, and so I faked it. This is my forth day and I am starting to get the hang of teaching, or maybe my students are getting used to me... I don’t know but there are not as many blank looks exchanged anymore.

A room of my own, well only sorta’

I moved in with my home stay family today. Our house is 242 steps down from the main road, a hop over the water pipe (it is cracked, so a giant hop over the pipe and the puddle), and around the corner from the laundry drying bush, next to the bakery. To find me you could just follow the smell of the bakery that the family owns. Or ask in town, there are at least 20 people who watch me as I climb up and down the stairs, judging if I will make it without taking a break ( I never take breaks). My room is just off the living room and kitchen. I can come and go as I please, and so can the rest of the family. My bathroom is used by my host mother to do laundry, and my room doubles as the family alter. Correction, 1/4 of my room is the family alter, and it always smells like incense which is lovely really. I sleep on a Tibetan carpet and it is comfortable enough, it is easy to sleep in mountain air so it doesn’t matter if the bed is hard.

We had breakfast together this morning, and as far as I can tell I have five siblings all younger than me, three, maybe four uncles, a father and a mother. Pretty lucky. I like them, and they are going to cook for me and do my laundry so it is going to be pretty easy living.

Tomorrow I have class for the first time, I am teaching a beginning and intermediate English class for two hours every day. The class is about 25 students of all ages, I am petrified. Armed with some tongue twisters and conversations topics I am going to go see what I can do with the hour that I am given. We will see…

Train to the Himalayas

The train plays it fast and loose over the tracks. My head bounces on the pillow all night long. From my top bunk I can touch the three walls of my berth. Every time I open my eyes there is a cockroach crawling along one of the walls. I tell myself that it is the same roach, and that he does not have a multitude of brothers, yet he keeps changing sizes.

It seems as if I am the only woman, and for that matter foreigner, on the train. I am definitely the only one in my present car. More disconcerting than that, no one seems to have the slightest idea what I am doing here. They are--or appear to be, entirely perplexed by my existence. I am supposed to reach my stop Pankot at 7:20am and I am wondering if I will know it in any other way than at 7:20 the train will stop. It has occurred to me that this is not like missing Back Bay and instead getting of at South Station, which I have done on occasion. If I miss Pankot, I am in Kashmir and very nearly in Pakistan. I have arranged, and classically overpaid, for a car to take me the remaining three and a half hours into the mountains. I am excited for tomorrow, to meet the people I have been in contact with, to see the beautiful scenery, and to find my new home.

Guernica

Pablo Picasso painted the instant that the world changed. Now, standing on front of Guernica, January 19 2009, MLK Jr. Day, the immediacy of the moment is again overwhelming. Picasso’s deconstructed, cubist, realism represents today's reality. Tomorrow, there is a chance for change, at 12 noon Barack Obama become the 44th president of the United States of America. Tomorrow, we will have a chance to reconstruct a better reality; a reality, where tentative cease fires are strengthened and made permanent, where allies are friends, not merely brothers in arms. Tomorrow, in this moment of change, I am boarding a plane to India to serve--as best I can, the Tibetan population that has been brutally persecuted. The horrors that have confronted them, and all of us, cannot and will not be undone. We have a chance to change the reality in which Picasso’s Guernica was created, and reconstruct a new, better, reality.

A short note from Dad

Rah,
In reading your blog I recall my reaction to seeing Guernica for the first time in the long room in the back of the Prado. I had never understood or really thought much about modern art before seeing that work. Did you get a chance to visit the valley of the fallen? It is F. Franco’s monument to the fascist soldiers killed during the Spanish civil war. Although I am generally not a fan of fascism it is pretty impressive.

love
Dad

Hi Guys,
There are several themes of this trip that we would like to bring to
the forefront before we get started. 1. we love trains. 2. eric
walks at about an 8.5 and I am about at a 5, so I pretty much jog
everywhere like a ninny. 3. when in doubt, put a donk on it (we will
explain later). 4. missed trains are an opportunity for clean sheets.
5. resist all temptation to bum-rush doors when you are laden like a
camel (jmel) with a backpack heavier than you, a small backpack on the
front (though helpful as a bumper), and a duffle on the side,
especially if your backpack has a number of pendent, heavy, and
ungainly items (water bottles, shoes, smelly socks…). You'll probably
trip on the uneven, tiled, and wet landing, and nearly have to patron
the man in the square selling teeth, because you'll have knocked yours
out. Dr. Styrt would have been very unhappy. 6. climb things, but if
it's a sand dune, hold a touareg man's hand. 7. if a young, loose,
western woman ends up in a kitchen with a bevy of touareg men, don't
assume that she wants to be there, or that she's able to leave when
she wants. She'll give you grief for it later. 8. Muslims don't
drink alcohol (at least not in front of other muslims), but their tea
is filled with enough sugar to get you drunk. 9. give snake charmers
and monkey owners a wide berth when walking through squares, because
you never know when one of their keep might be flung in your direction. 10. eat
jamon. 11. you don't need a reason to drink, but free tapas is a good
one. 12. tailless monkeys love pasta, and have soft hands. The cable
car operators that feed them have large nose growths. 13. don't EVER
order a tuna burger from a snack stand, unless you are Russian and
"its for someone else." Harty says these are too many themes, and
they're not really themes, so here is some elaboration, but the rest
can be left to your imagination, or maybe we'll satisfy your remaining
curiosities at a later date.

1. We trained basically the entire length of Morocco, only to get on
a ferry and two buses, for a total of, I don't know, about a million
hours on the road. Finally ending in Gbralt via walking across the
main runway in the shadow of "the ROCK", which was dramatically up-lit
at night. Directly related to theme 4. It became necessary to train
all day when we went to the Mkesh train station only to find out that
the last train left 15min prior to our arrival. Our grand
Gibraltarian arrival (10:30 at night into an abandoned town) is
related to the tuna burger fiasco, theme 13, and the disgruntled
Russian. In case you are curious, a tuna burger of Gbralt is a burger
with a can of tuna upended atop the patty, including oil and tuna
juices. We couldn't help but laugh---and we learned another valuable
lesson, don't laugh at a Russian or his food.

3. Put a donk on it; handy in more ways than you would think! The
Berber people use donks to transport their food/supplies/wares great
distances. The surprising det is that the donks are unaccompanied,
giving them the freedom and the opportunity to peddle the goods
elsewhere for a larger profit margin. Silly old donks, those saggy
old baggies (we met a crazed brit who favored all of these "desert"
expressions, ie "saggy old baggy", and have adopted them into our common
parlance).

6. if there is a dune to climb, a car to climb on top of, anything
really at a higher elevation----CLIMB it, the view is better and the
journey will be worth the hassle.

7. As a loose western woman, I feel it is necessary to interject my
own voice in the retelling, seeing as how I had limited agency in the
actual event. The camp was very clearly rigged with trip wires that
would alert men from all corners of the camp whenever I walked out of
the tent/hut alone. Thring! A bell would go off, and they'd come
running, would zharah (my Arabic name, meaning flower, enormously
popular) like to look at the stars, make some tea---you name it,
anything to get you alone. As an aspiring journalist it was easy to
agree to long talks with nomadic Toureg people, they just happened to
be men about my age with other ideas. Oh well what can you expect from
a loose western woman?

8. They call their green/mint tea "Tuareg whiskey," and they drink it
as if it were whiskey. After seeing the iceberg-size chunks of sugar
go into those tiny teapots, we were understandably sugar-rushed when
forced to drink 12 cups in one day. So, it turns out they don't need
real whiskey to get crazy. The British version of the hokie-pokie is
called the oakie-kokie, and somehow, us, 2 brits, and about 6 touareg
men ended up doing the pumped up British version around a desert
campfire. It was probably the tea. It seemed more like a nature ritual
than a nursery song…or maybe just desert magic. In other tea news, we
drank some at a 100 year old man's home, with his granddaughter
sitting in the corner, in the bowels of the ancient Kasbah, a
labyrinth of houses and apartments and mosques and stores so dense
that light barely filtered in through tiny light wells above. Then
Sarah got henna, and I sat and chatted with our guide's "big mom" and
aunts and tried to ignore the aljazeera propaganda playing on tv. They
were lovely.

Enough for now. In a few hours we catch the bus to my dinky little
town, as always with our themes and lessons in mind. It will be nice
to have 3 days in the same place, which we haven't had since last year
(in Madrid), then we soldier on, to Sevilla and beyond.

Love love love

Sarah and Eric

Happy New Year
If I had to guess how new years would go, I would never have guessed that it would have been anything like this. Not twenty steps out of our front door we found ourselves being overtaken by a funeral procession. Just as Eric was going to be clocked by the corpse we figured out that we were being waved aside, and we stood by and let it pass before moving on to the main square. The center of the city-- the whine of the snake charmers, and the strange hazy dust made the mammoth space seem even larger. There is no simple way to walk the stalls and avoid monkeys on chains and projectile snakes. Oranges are stacked and squeezed; the juice matches the color of the buildings. An old man dressed in white, with a table, and an umbrella has roughly 15 pairs of dentures on one crate, on the other, nearly 500 teeth an inch thick spread out for shoppers to peruse. A tooth shop, I wonder what type of molar I will choose? Do I pick one that already has a flashy filling, or a simple one that may blend into my other assorted dentures? How to choose teeth? I don’t know, maybe I will make my choice tomorrow? Within three hours there we bore wittiness to a fast paced funeral procession, an aggressive snake throw, a tooth vendor, and were nearly crushed by a two horses that stutter stepped into us and pushed us against the wall. The first day of the new year and it is not business as usual.