Well, we've arrived in Varanasi! It was a looooong trip but it was definitely worth it. After multiple hours of flying, driving and rolling (train?) we’ve finally come “home”. We had been spending most of our time at the Dragons home base in the Varanasi guest house before yesterday which is when we were set loose on the city.

We were split into four groups of three for a city wide scavenger hunt. The list consisted of things as simple as finding out how much a bottle of toothpaste cost to trying to locate items which we couldn’t for the lives of us pronounce let alone read. With lists in hand we all set out. My team consisted of Brit, Lyndsey and myself and we were not about to loose this thing. Right out of the gate we got an item checked off the list, asking some children to count to 10 in Hindi. With little time to shout a thank you back at them we were off down the street.

We quickly got surrounded by rickshaws because looking lost in Varanasi is the equivalent of bleeding near sharks. Sharks that would do anything to help you. Eventually we settled, or rather the matter was settled for us, that we would take our rickshaw drive to the café (another item on the list) with the mustachioed young man who was sure he could fit the three of us. At first the ride was alright despite having only one cheek on the seat and clinging to the carriage like kid who doesn’t want to get dragged to bed. We were winding down small dirt roads for a little while before we pulled onto a highway. At this point I was doing a mixture of things profusely, namely sweating on Lyndsey and apologizing for sweating on Lyndsey. This was all between muffled whimpers as I closed my eyes and tried to continue to hang on.

Finally arriving at the restaurant we thought we could relax but upon stepping foot in the restaurant I was hit with a number of realizations. One being that we hadn’t just stepped into some Indian restaurant on the corner of a street in America. We awkwardly tried to get a seat and even more awkwardly ordered (just pointing to the list and then holding up three fingers). At first it seemed like we noticed one or two people looking at us while we ate. We would look up and see someone turn their head right before we made eye contact, an easy thing to pass off as paranoia. But by the end of lunch it was clear that we were the center of attention as everyone watched us leave.

We spent the rest of the day walking through the heart of the city and along the Ghats looking for various other items that we could check off the list. In the beginning we started by looking for the things we knew but it wasn’t long until we were forced to start asking locals questions and for help, something that is incredibly rare in America. But any apprehension of stepping out your comfort zone to ask a question was quickly dissolved by how nicely and warmly your questions were answered. Several times we were not only told where to go but led there, even despite the location being several blocks away.

About halfway through the day we met a man named Calu who was so excited to help us that he led us for nearly two and a half hours. Taking us first by the river, and then to several temples and back. He was able to answer all of our questions and genuinely seemed to enjoy walking with us (despite our slow pace). In fact at one point in our journey with Calu, when he and I were a bit ahead of Lyndsey and Brit he turned to me and said, “Sam, you and I are friends now. You can ask me anything and I will help you”. I was so taken aback and moved by how quickly this friendship had formed and how I truly felt I had made a friend.

With Calu’s help we were able to get every item on the scavenger hunt list and get back to the program house almost a full hour early of our expected arrival. Actually Calu not only led us around the city, he led our team, team one, to victory! It had been an exciting day, getting to know the city and seeing the different sites. An experience that left me both fulfilled and anxious to see what else the city has to offer. I am absolutely ecstatic to be able to say that I will be calling Varanasi my home for the next two months.

Thank you Calu.

The smell of Africa- what hit me first as we stepped off the plane into the cool pre-dawn humidity.  Ocean, heat, garbage, dust; all odors lay thick in the air, fused with other scents that are famililar yet  as of yet unrecognizable... Sunrise seeped over us as we waited on the airport tarmac- 12 of us students, and our 3 instructors sharing name games and fruit and adrenaline. 

   We drove to our current residence in Ngaparou via derilect white van, through the chaos of Dakar and later scrubby plains of brush and baobabs.  We passed throngs of people on foot, in donkey carts, on bicycles and motorcycles and cars and various modes of public transportation- notably the colorful car rapide.   The brilliance of the clothing and the brightly-painted roadside stores and stands mixed with the dust and dry heat, creating a general feeling of worn exuberance.

    I am writing this now from a cybercafé in Ngaparou, after a few hours of settling in, group activities/prep, food, and sleep.  I am tired and hot, a bit jetlagged but my strongest overall sense is one of radical displacement- at this point I am trying to simply drink everything in, allow myself time to adjust and be fully present in the here and now of this adventure.  

    Soon it will be back to our breezy beachside residence, where we'll be for the next few days getting to know one another, getting prepped for the rest of the trip, and learning about Senegalese culture.  I look forward to diving deeper into all aspects of this trip!     

I started this yak a few days before we left China. That version is probably still on the desktop of our occasionally beloved laptop Bruce who travelled with us from Kunming to Xinjiang, through Gansu to Qinghai, and from there to Beijing. Bruce, like the rest of us, had a few meltdowns along the way, and even though I had some massive fights with him over assessments, he did sometimes let us check our email.

            I digress. Since beginning the yak (I’ll admit, about a month ago) I’ve been to Korea (for too short a time), back home to London (again, for too short a time), to Miami, and then on a massive cruise ship with much of my extended family. I’m now home again, fighting the good fight against jetlag. I suppose I should add nostalgia and a vague sense of melancholy to the list of things I’m fighting against.

            I wanted to write this yak about our experiences doing service in Qinghai, but my perspective on that experience has changed some since I came home. My prayer originally was for the people of that village, especially the children, because I don’t know if I will ever see any of them again. I probably won’t find out if any of the ten boys that Chris and I taught will continue to learn English. I won’t know if Mike, our homestay brother, smart and plucky to the extreme, will get the headstart in life he so richly deserved. I said in Qinghai I didn’t know if my heart ached more for the kids who had the intelligence and the gumption to make it out of Qinghai and wouldn’t be able to, or the kids who didn’t have the necessary willpower to even think of making it out. One, at least from my western perspective, has a limited future; the other seems to have a future denied. Mike is one who deserves a chance, a series of chances, bigger than those he’s been dealt. Some of the other boys in the class- Fred, for instance- I could already tell didn’t have it, the spark, the ability, the something else. So I pray for both Mike and Fred, that circumstances change for them and their classmates. I pray that the poverty is alleviated, that they get to finish school and aspire to a life less difficult and draining than that of the parents’. I hope they get the opportunities they have earned with their diligence and discipline at home and at school. I hope they are happy.

            I had another prayer- that they could worship and practice their religion freely. Every house in the village that we went in to had a picture of the Dali Lama on the wall, draped with a white scarf like the ones we were given at the end of our too few days of teaching. Apparently the situation has improved dramatically for the people of Guo Er Cun, but not enough. They still are a minority group with limited rights, still allied by ethnicity and spirituality to a fraught separatist cause. They have to carve a living out of a piercingly beautiful, bone dry, cold cold cold region. Every child in our class looked small and thin, maybe because of malnutrition. I’m not a doctor- I couldn’t say. I only pray that they do get the real religious freedom that should accompany their deep-seated faith, that their children are healthy, and that they can survive and thrive in the midst of so much economic turmoil and ecological disaster. Their existence, as a Tibetan Buddhist community on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, seems tenuous. I want them to be safe.

            But I realized that my real prayer, coming out of this whole experience, was for honesty. I helped Lear and Ikia with a write-up for an internet page for the NGO who took us to the village. My first draft was classic Zoe and classically Western: I railed against the injustices I perceived had been wreaked upon the Tibetan people by the Chinese government, the force behind some of the ecological changes in the region, the strong arm of industrialization and urbanization, the promoter of Han-ization of rural ethnic communities, and the general figurehead who limits religious freedom for the cause of the “party.” I was harsh and critical. I think I scared Lear half to death.

            That was the truth the way I saw it. I was mad. I had been living with a Tibetan family with Chris and Tiff- they can attest, they were absolutely wonderful to us even when we were tired, grumpy teenagers- and teaching these incredibly little boys at school, and I was frustrated that I felt hopeless. I wanted to blame someone for my overwhelming feelings of grief and frustration that no matter how much time I invested in teaching English, I would never be able to remove this community from poverty. I didn’t say as much at the time, but I did listen as Lear pointed out that it would be impossible for us to put my message on a website. True though much of the information was- even in my frustration, I wasn’t wrong- I couldn’t say those things because they would hurt the community I was trying to support and help. In China, achieving the truth is a much larger balancing act. Traditionally criticism of the emperor occurred in poems that were carefully designed so as to seem innocuous. I’m not a poet, and the party is no emperor, so we were at an impasse there. You can’t say what you think so much as you can make clear what you mean. The truth is rarely pure and never simple, said Oscar Wilde. In China, I think that remark is closer to the mark than anywhere else I’ve been. My truth could have been an agent of destruction for the people of Guo Er Cun. We changed the position.

            I pray now for a new kind of wisdom, to know when I can tell my truth and when I should tell the China truth. Speaking and writing requires far more discipline in china than I am used to. I am too impetuous, too used to being able to speak my mind in all of its occasional absolutism. I need to learn how to play the delicate balancing game that living in China requires, and I need to learn how to deal with the fact that honesty is not always the best policy. I felt like I was lying when I cut short my tirade against the Chinese government. I wanted to speak the truth and take the consequences. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t have been my consequences to take.

            Some things have to end- the censorship of the internet (it was great fun trying to find NGO’s that we could link our own NGO up with as we only had access to Chinese google) and the suppression of dissent. I would argue that no healthy state can exist with only Chinese truth, with the little China truths that get told. But I also want to see the people of Guo Er cun prosper, and that wouldn’t necessarily have happened if I had told the truth the way I saw it. I pray for a new world for the people of that village in Qinghai, a time and a place where the children grow up with all the good health, education and opportunities they deserve and have earned, a place where the land doesn’t look like it’s parched and all given out, and a time when they can practice their religion freely. I hope for these things for them. Meantime I am still struggling with my ideas about truth, and what it should be. I just don’t know anymore. 

To the place that has become another one of my homes,

Thank you.

In your streets I made the journey to places within myself that I knew existed, but could not touch. The program house at sunrise - my yoga salutations, giving thanks for being alive; the internet cafe where I struggled to deal with home issues, and the first hints of cultural backlash leapt from facebook into me, and where I also yak-ed about things worth writing about, spinning stories and telling people bits of my discoveries as I picked them out. The rickshaw rides - bargaining, sitting on top of the world, feeling white, feeling vulnerable, disgusted, sick, sad, sympathetic, independent or confused; seeing things that were sweet, funny, weird, gross or heart-breaking. In your rickshaws I wrestled with issues of humanity, allowing myself to be pulled by another, see-sawing between over-paying out of pity, and outrage at being overcharged - these issues led me to bigger ones: why am I this white privileged passenger, and not this barefoot, thin, desperate man? So I don't have an answer, but I'm thinking, which is even better. Sitting in the guru's room, feeling young and ambitious and motivated. Wanting to learn and seek out things and take in all the advice so graciously being given to me.

Becoming comfortable with silence.

Home. My kitchen table, my room, the front little porch- sitting in the evening, eating, reading, drinking tea... nowhere else to run to, nothing to divert my attention from just being there in my Indian house. No computers or parties or phone calls. These people, who, really, I don't know very much about, they are my family here. Last night, Nishi fed me with her hands, Dalli held my hands, Kumlauti's daughter painted my hands... I have touched so many people here, gotten gross stuff on them, used them as utensils and TP, written things with them... My connections with this city are undeniable, and it's HARD to let go and process that I'm leaving.

I love this city. I'm excited for my home city, but in you I have discovered things about myself- what I want to do, who I want to be, how I want to see the world - what could possibly be more valuable? I'm leaving things behind: my family, my fears about germs and awkward silences...

But mostly I'm just grateful. Grateful to have had such a life-changing (maybe I should say life-influencing) experience, to have gotten a better sense of who I am and what I believe in- all in you! A city that I never dreamed I'd actually make it to, or could have imagined.

So I'm sad to go, because separating from the people and places I now associate with these changes in me is painful. But I'm happy, too, because this has given me more than I had hoped, and I will always know that this holy city has impacted me on a truly divine level within myself. My life is my own. Om namah shivayah.

Love, Henna

It has been a long time since i wrote a yak. It isn't that i have forgotten to update you all at home but rather i couldn't. I have reached a point where i cant express to you this trip that i have been on. I have sat in front of this white screen many times and i couldn't grasp the right words. It was like the only words that would come to mind were that comparable to a lighting bug when what i really was trying to express what lighting looks like. I even thought that uploading a few pictures would work because even if i couldn't find the right words to convey the places and changes that have occurred the visual image might fill the void. But, i found that the pictures didn't convey the vivid pictures i had of those places in my head. So here i am trying to write to you not knowing how to approach this task. So i will try to start with the basics. I have traveled a great distance one that is comparable to that of the USA width-Tashgurgan to Beijing. On this journey east i have been in places that i swear if i didn't know any better i would say i was in central Asia or Luke's home planet (starewars). I was in places for the first time Christianity wasn't the primary religion but rather Muslim was. I was in a place where all my stereotypes of what china should look like was shattered.I took bus rides to see thousands year old ruins and i saw through my share of bus and train windows some scenery that at points looked fake because of how shockingly diverse and beautiful it was. I climbed mountains where at points i felt like i was gasping for breath while my chest acked to reach the top to see the sunset. i have slept on concrete slabs heated by slow burning fires to keep me warm throughout the night. I have taught English to a group that demonstrated a level of motivation, discipline, and courage that i wasn't sure children were capable of. I have sat out in the dark and was entranced by the beauty of the night sky. I have laughed so hard Ive cried. Not only have i seen alot but i have also learned so much. I have learned that elders eat first. I have learned that as a geust you take on the risk of dying from being over fed. I have learned that people will take you in as one of there own and help you. I have learned about modesty and how it appears in different ways in different cultures. I have learned how to tell if someone is married bu the color of the scarf they wear. I have learned how to notice the different forms hospitality can take. I have learned a new definition of what service can mean. I have learned how to push myself outside my comfort zone and do things i would have tryed to avoid. Ive seen alot and I've learned alot and i am still learning. I am learning how to treasure the experiences i have had on this program while at the same time learning how not to cling to these experiences so that i can venture forth to my next adventure. Thanks to all my fellow companions on this trip it has been an amazing experience.