Thursday, December 31, 2009

Feliz Navidad and Bonne Fete!

Between trying to understand Nepali, tutoring Kalpana in Spanish, and arriving in France yesterday, my poor brain is reeling and I'm a bit tongue-tied! But I'll try to get my English together well enough to catch our friends up on our holiday events.

Christmas Eve day was cookie decorating day at Ama Ghar! Although the kids are mostly Hindus and Buddhists, they're extremely creative, especially when it comes to making something beautiful to eat... Bonnie gave cookie cutters to a German bakery in Kathmandu, as there is no oven at Ama Ghar - then we mixed up frosting and went at it - with the results you can see at left. The cookies could have been more colorful, but we made the mistake of giving them some Betty Crocker chocolate fudge frosting, and suddenly everything was chocolate-colored! Some things are just universal, eh?

On Christmas morning, Santa arrived in the shape of a grey-haired Jewish guy (see photos at left). The crowd went wild! Santa passed out small toys that Bonnie and I had bought in Bangkok (English poppers, yoyos, light-up pens) and a bag of nuts, fruit and chocolate for each child.

And the Grand Finale of the day was a performance of "A Christmas Carol", which played to an appreciative audience of visiting Ama Ghar board members, some visiting Nepali college kids, and all the staff and children who weren't in the cast. Scrooge, played by Maju (a 13 year old girl), sported a fake mustache and a grouchy attitude - she even said "Bah Humbug" and called Bob Cratchit a "nincompoop"! The dancing scene from Christmas Past was done to a Bollywood tune, and we ended with Tiny Tim and Sano Santosh (Little Santosh)singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas"!

We left Ama Ghar on December 29 and are spending the New Year holiday with John & Margaret in France - then on to the US and what we hope will be a great 2010. We'll try to carry the love of those 38 children, and the inspiration they give us, into an uncertain future. And to paraphrase Tiny Tim - "God bless you every one!"

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

A Thousand Joys, A Thousand Sorrows

Buddha said that life consists of “a thousand joys, a thousand sorrows”, and this week we have experienced both.

We received news last week that our dear friend Peter Mock died, which has saddened us both. We spent such wonderful times in Coarsegold with Peter and Gabriele during our cross-country tour; and we had a farewell dinner with them (little did we know) at the R&G Lounge, site of many Chinese New Year celebrations with Peter and his family, before we left for Nepal. Our hearts go out to Gabriele and we wish we could be with her during this impossible time.

Peter was in the midst of writing a memoir – when we had him over for dinner this summer, Dick said, “You’d better get on it, Peter – you don’t have much time left!” Unfortunately, that was a prophetic statement (and typically Dick, don’t you think?) but luckily we arranged for Peter to work with our friend Pam Feinsilber, an excellent editor, and they had completed several chapters before his death… he had just sent us a draft to read two days before he died. His sisters have told us that they plan to finish it, which is a wonderful tribute to Peter – and the memoir will be a priceless chapter in the history of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

As far as a thousand joys, we are working with the children on their Christmas program – an Ama Ghar version of “A Christmas Carol”, complete with Bollywood dancing and a Sanu Santos (small Santos) instead of Tiny Tim. Our message is that for all of us who live in this house - Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews – Christmas is a time of joy and giving, where we can forget our sorrows and raise our voices in song… whether it’s “Joy To The World” or “Jai Ho”! Peter and Gabriele were such generous contributors to Ama Ghar - we will think of them as we sing.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Strangers in a Strange Land - and we love it!

The reason I have loved traveling in Asia since the very first time is that it is so completely foreign. In Europe, there's always a sense of deja vu - sometimes it's only a memory from a Western Civilization text or art history class, but sometimes it's a feeling deep in my bones that this is where my DNA originated.

In Asia? Everything is exotic, fresh and exciting - sometimes baffling and annoying as well. Slender, golden people as opposed to pale hairy ones; lush, luxuriant blooms growing out of unfathomable filth; and languages that click and hiss in my normally receptive ears.

When in Bangkok, we saw glittering shrines covered with lotuses and marigolds, wreathed in incense smoke in front of department store windows touting Christmas sales and sporting gigantic Christmas trees and Nutcracker statues. The enormous department stores in Bangkok are shrines to consumerism and conspicuous consumption -fascinating, beautiful and a strange contrast to the country's Buddhist traditions.

On Saturday we went to a Holiday program by the Kathmandu Chroale at The British School - incredible! The Chorale is made up of talented people of every nationality, and they sang beautiful holiday music in English, Nepali, Latin, French, Italian, German and Spanish. The children loved it - primarily for the brownies and hot chocolate served at intermission - but as for me, when the Chorale sang, "I'll Be Home For Christmas", little Assim tapped me on the shoulder and whispered "Auntie, why are you crying?"

Thursday, December 3, 2009

We are their dream, and they are ours...

I overheard a conversation between Dick and Jana, a Russian woman who is volunteering at Ama Ghar this week and who now lives - where else - in San Francisco. She was talking about something that happened to her in Russia in 1964, when Dick said, "Wait a second! In 1964 I was sitting on a ship in the Bay of Pigs hoping the Russians wouldn't blow me to bits!" And yet here they were, the Russian and the American, sitting on a porch in Nepal, with a shared love for 38 children.

Similarly, we were on a small boat (12 people) in Doubtful Sound in New Zealand a few years back, and our favorite couple among the other passengers were Japanese. We learned, after getting to know them a bit, that he was ill with leukemia - because he is from Hiroshima, and his mother had been pregnant with him at the time the bomb was dropped. We were horrified, but he just smiled and said, "It isn't your fault - you weren't there." And there we were, Japanese and Americans, watching dolphins, drinking wine and enjoying each other's company.

Each person on this planet has so much in common with the others - and yet we continue to create conflicts. What a mystery - why do we have so much trouble understanding each other? This reminds me of what Salman Rushdie's Mogul Queen says about visiting foreigners in the court (from his novel, The Enchantress of Florence):

"The world is not all one thing. We are their dream," she told the King, "and they are ours."

"But imagine," said the King, "if we could awake in other men's dreams and change them, and if we had the courage to invite them into ours. What if the whole world became a single waking dream?"

Today I'm in Bangkok with my friend Bonnie, who's having some minor surgery, and Dick is in Nepal. He had a wonderful expedition on Sunday (photos at left), traveling to a temple in a remote mountain village with Uma, one of the Ama Ghar staff who is a very devout Hindu. I spent today exploring the streets of Bangkok, hearing sounds of temple bells, smelling fragrant flowers and the charcoal smoke of food stalls.

The world is not all one thing. We are their dream, and they are ours.