Chaos and Colors: An Orphan Diet

The chaos and colors, the poverty and piety I witnessed during the month I spent in Nepal and Tibet seems far away as I sit here in my Providence, RI studio, lethargic from the summer heat. Just a few months ago, I’d wake up and walk a mile to a school on dusty trails passing lazy goats and mangy dogs named “Lucky” with my hands pulled down by tiny fingers.

For Market2Market Jewelry I find objects in bazaars and flea markets around the world to inspire and develop jewelry. This trip fused my other interests with the treasure hunting.

I had always wanted to work in an orphanage in Nepal. I really don’t know why since I didn’t even know where it was before I signed up online with an organization called Hands for Help Nepal. I assumed that because it was on Idealist.org and the orphanage website looked professional with pictures of British looking people playing with laughing Nepali children, that it was legit.

I looked at a map, bought my tickets, got my shots and purchased some high- absorbency towels.

I knew a few things before I left JFK: the organization stationed me in Kathmandu, someone would pick me up at the airport, there was a good chance I would get lice.

The lice part bothered me. My sister (who watches way too much Dateline) kept warning me of “super lice” that were tenacious and resisted all forms of pesticide. I quickly googled, “super lice, orphanage, Kathmandu” and already felt itchy. I packed some RID and planned to wear a kerchief.

I had a nine-hour layover in Qatar and, in an ironic gesture, bought cards adorned with sheiks in white headdresses and women in burkas to kill some time. I drank two of the airport’s surprisingly good lattes.

This was the beginning of the Swine Flu scare and Qatar Airways handed out masks to wear on the flight. The Swine Flu would rear its viral head later in the trip.

I boarded the flight, took an Ambien, slept with my mouth open and arrived in Kathmandu 10 hours later.

I got off the airplane and I honestly started to laugh. I realized that I had not planned the voyage at all. I grinned with disbelief.

Not that Nepal is all that exotic. Hippies have been looking for enlightenment in the Hindu and Buddhist country since the 60s and Mt. Everest entices hikers from around the world. Still, despite the tourism, Nepal remains one of the poorest countries with half of its population under the poverty level.

Relieved, I spot my name on a piece of paper in the crowd and a man ushers me into what you would imagine to be a taxi in a developing country. (A friend recently told me that it’s not “Third World” anymore, it’s “Developing Country.” I am wondering what else I don’t know…)

The man who walked me to the taxi asked for a tip. I opened my wallet and he took what he thought was sufficient compensation for the ten-foot jaunt. Exhausted, confused and afraid that I was part of an elaborate kidnapping, I didn’t object.

An aside: I would be the worst kidnapped person in the history of abductions. Stockholm syndrome would set in after about two hours and I would quickly find myself cooking my mom’s tomato sauce for them, encouraging them to eat more pasta. I’d fall in love with one of them -- the educated one who looks like Che Guevara.

I would be terribly surprised when he decides to cut off my fingers.

Anyway…

The taxi brings me to a place in the center called The Millennium hotel that costs $4 a night. I walk into what would be a decent introduction to Nepal: shoeless children and women siphoning gasoline from a scooter into plastic jars in the entryway. I haul my duffel bag up four flights to a room that looks like a crime scene.

I opened the door to a slim balcony and think again to myself, “what did I do?” as I look out onto crumbling stucco buildings with terraces mottled with hanging laundry barely visible through the pollution haze. Later that night I experience the howling dog gangs that are terrifying when you are walking home alone on the dark roads.

I quickly realize that Kathmandu enjoys a mere eight hours of electricity a day. The lights and a tired fan wake me when they kick in, adding to the disorientation.

After two days in Kathmandu, lost in the tourist section called Thamel that looks like a Grateful Dead concert, the organization’s head comes to retrieve me and we take a bumpy half-hour ride into the countryside.

As we near Funtung village I can see a pinkish structure in the distance. He tells me that this is my orphan home. The car can’t go any further so we hike up a kind of switch back trail passing cows and an avalanche of trash.

If the trash isn’t blustering in the dry breeze, than a Nepali set it ablaze since there’s no waste management. Tiny piles of toxic cinder can been seen throughout the village, like an offering to Shiva the destroyer, their most adored god.

The Self –Sustaining Orphan Home is almost that. To feed and support the 24 children ages four to 14. A married couple, Surella and Remesh, run the orphanage and grow potatoes, zucchini, spices and corn, if there isn’t a drought. All of the children call Surella, 33, and Remesh, 35, mom and dad.

A perpetual moan emanates from the chicken coop as the fowl lay eggs for the orphanage to sell at the market. They own a buffalo for milk and two goats that I find out will be slaughtered at the biggest festival of the year. I tried not to get too attached.

They use one chair-less room for homework, prayer, and yoga and to store clothing. The 19 boys, the “parents” and I sleep in the room upstairs in the stone structure. The five girls sleep downstairs. All of the children sleep two to a single bed, head to feet.

The property recently installed running water, which helped enormously, but the cloud of flies blindsided me. The little black dots covered every inch of food, countertop and bag of spices. The annoyance didn’t subside until the rats and mosquitoes emerged in the evening.

Do I need to describe the toilet? I must confess that I preemptively took Cipro. The sanitary conditions were National Geographic league and it only took one meal of Dhal Bhat -- the rice, lentils and vegetables they eat twice a day—to cause a GI emergency. I stuck to boiled potatoes and eggs. It turned out to be better than a booty boot camp. I recommend volunteering in a Nepali orphanage if you want to drop 10 pounds.

The shock of the place almost unraveled my ambitious intentions until I met Susma, a mousey adorable ten –year-old girl who spoke more English than anyone I had met in Nepal, or would meet. She immediately ran to me and gave me the low-down and I would rely on her for most translations. In the US she would be hall monitor or class president. Here she is a master diaper changer and tea-maker.

When the other children arrived they greeted me like a liberator who also happened to be Brittney Spears. We quickly played hide-and-go-seek around the tiny property. One of the little boys tried to coax me into the wooden box where the goats sleep. I refused, but he curled up right inside.

Everyday unrolled exactly as the day before. I woke up at six and crawled off the board I slept on and ducked under the mosquito net and opened the door to the boys’ room. As they made their beds they greeted me with a ridiculously bright, “good morning miss.” The children would busily gather twigs and other objects to feed the kettle fire. I peeled potatoes with a blunt knife while swatting flies that no one else seemed to notice.

The children drink their tea with buffalo milk and spices, finish their homework and get ready for school. They fastidiously wash their faces, brush their teeth, polish their shoes and dress in their uniforms. The girls drench their hair with oil and wear pigtails or braids with a bow at the bottom.

The older ones help the younger ones, especially Neruta, the four year old. Chubby cheeked, capricious and full of lice, Neruta was the youngest in what at times seemed like a chapter from Lord of the Flies. A child-run society was inevitable; two people simply can’t manage 24 kids. In some ways the situation may have been a child fantasy, as they are not nagged to wash their hands, stop punching each other or to tuck in their shirts. They experience a level of autonomy most kids in America think they want. They are able to make a game out of a rock and a stick, never bored as they play in the buffalo’s feed bucket.

After the kid stuff, though, their reality is startling. At night they line up, yawning and hungry, and patiently wait for the dhal bhat that they greedily eat with their hands.

During the day they don torn uniforms and broken soled shoes and sandals. They usually can’t buy books and the mass loss of parents lingers profoundly.

I never fully understood what happened to all of their moms and dads. Illness, like cholera, seemed to be the culprit in many cases. Some of them committed suicide, which happens a lot in Nepal. The kids came from various areas and their faces reflected whether they had parents in regions closer to China or India.

They may be the most beautiful children I have ever seen with a striking mix of Asian and Caucasian features. Although the children look diverse, they behaved in most ways just like any other large family.

Unbelievable tattletales, they constantly hollered at me. “Miss, Miss, he beat me!”

“No, but Miss, she beat me first,” the other would rebut.

“Hit,” I tried to correct. “She hit you, she didn’t beat you.” A pinch isn’t a beating. This might be all they learned from my stay, but it was an important differentiation, I thought.

They freaked out if I forgot to take my shoes off in the playroom and the girls never let the boys play games until all their homework was completed and checked. The girls in general were very strict. I experienced their standards when Anju, 10, tried to teach me a traditional Nepali dance.

As I flailed about, trying to look graceful, she stood with her hands on her hips sporting a disapproving glare. “No! Miss, not like that,” she screamed at me, slapping her hands, exasperated. “Again!”

All of the children took school very seriously and had their books and uniforms in order to walk to school on time. They fought to hold my hands as we travelled a mile on hot, dusty roads passing Hindu temples where the children paused to place the red tika -- vermillion mixed with yogurt and rice – on their foreheads and to take pink flowers to place in my hair.

Everyday I taught five disorganized classes at their “English Language” school, but not before fighting my way through a mash pit of frenzied school children.

I am not sure if these kids had never seen a Westerner, but they surrounded and swarmed me, offered me food from their pockets and tried to shake my hand, rejecting the customary Namaste bow.

On my first day I made my way up the stairs to the teachers’ lounge -- a booby-trap of broken chairs. The teachers gave me a list of rooms and told me to teach, without a lesson plan or any idea of their English level. I realized later that I was teaching English to whatever classes the teachers didn’t feel like teaching that day. And, although they were in an English school, neither the kids nor the teachers seemed to understand English unless spoken with a very heavy Nepali accent.

Most of the teachers were very cool, the women dressed in violet saris, the married ones with the mark of the tika pulled from their third eye into their hair. They asked me questions, fascinated by the life of a single America woman. “Hell, I’m boring, “ I thought, as I told them how I make dinner in my apartment and watch TV with my dog. “An episode of Sex in the City would blow their minds”.

The men didn’t take me quite as seriously. When the kids physically assaulted each other in one class, I asked the male teacher for help. He came in and they appeared to exchange some kind of Nepali joke. I am pretty sure a joke about me.

“See, we joke here in Nepal, it is our culture…I am joking now with them,” he said, with an indiscernible grin.

“Like hell,” I thought and looked down at his four –inch thumbnail. “Why is that nail so long,” I asked him.

“I grow it …as a hobby,” he told me. “Is that Nepal custom as well?” I asked.

It wasn’t.

Some of the classes listened and tried, repeated back to me the inane stories I told them about my dog, my family, American Idol and a fictional snake named Oliver from Chicago who drives a car and drinks milk. I learned that all dogs are named “Lucky” and cats don’t get names. They like Rihanna but know almost nothing about the United States.

The first question all of the classes asked me was, “how old are you?” When I told them my age, they ALL asked, “Are you married?” When I said no, a communal groan filled the room. I was stranger than Oliver, the snake who works in the Sears Tower.

But nothing compared to the disarray and anarchy that went down in the six-year- olds’ classroom.

At first glance, they appeared adorable in their little uniforms, their tiny voices chirping, “Good morning miss” when I entered the class.

But after five minutes, inevitably the shit would hit the fan.

Kids tumbled off their seats to barrage me with the question, “Can I go to the toilet?” Eventually I just let all of them go to the toilet at once, afraid of what they could do to me. There was no point trying to control them as they threw pens at me and pulled each other’s hair.

“He beat me,” one of them would yell.

Indeed he had, but they were fearless and didn’t capitulate to my threats. Then again, they didn’t know what I was saying.

Once in a while I would look over and see a toddler sitting there with a violently runny nose. “Who’s this?” I’d ask the kid sitting next to him or her. I never got an answer.

The class ended with me on the floor coaxing one of the kids out from under the bench or trying to find a parent for the errant toddler.

My orphans behaved the best out of all the children in the school, despite an adult deficiency. I took great pride in this, and, knowing my movie star status on the campus, I made a big fuss out of my kids when I saw them at the end of the day. The other kids would have given a month’s supply of beaten rice to hold my hand for a 30-minute walk back home.

Once home, the kids change into play clothes and sandals, if they have them. The boys run in the dust and tackle each other, further sullying their clothes that they wear to bed.

They settle down in the homework room and try to get as much done before the sun goes down and the lights of Kathmandu go off.

Every night was the same: they sit on the floor and I help with their homework, teach them card games like Black Jack and try to be a parent for a brief, brief time.

Neruta practices her Nepali and English letters. “Miss, Miss!!,” she yells, and shows me her pages. I am thinking that she should be in bed with stuffed animals under each arm awaiting a bedtime story. Her nails and heals should be cleaned. She should be in her pajamas with teeth brushed.

She goes to the wooden bed plank layered with blankets and wraps herself in like a cocoon, closes her bloodshot eyes with her cheeks upturned.

The homework is finished and dinner is almost ready. It’s 8 p.m. and the other children wake Neruta for a Hindu prayer.

They sit in a circle, cross-legged, with their hands poised in prayer position. They begin to chant. The only word I comprehend is Shiva. It is the most enchanting sound, but I am mesmerized by how tightly they close their eyes, as if they are keeping all of their words inside, afraid to let them go. I am stunned by the concentration, the repetition, the earnestness. My eyes are open. I can’t mimic what they do.

Tibet, Nepal, Quarantine, Jewelry and Orphans Galore

My last trip abroad offered a little bit of everything. The experience teetered between being detained by the Chinese, to working with shoeless orphans in a fog of flies and being stalked by a villager convinced I was his ticket out of Nepal.