Fun, fire and frustration

This week has been interesting, and sometimes surreal. It has reminded me of why I’m here: to experience new, sometimes challenging, things.

On Saturday, I asked my house mother (the mother of the teenagers who live on the first floor) to help me wrap my sari for the wedding. It ended up being quite an affair, assisted by her daughter, her sister, the cleaning lady and the woman who lives on the ground floor. Unfortunately, I know enough Nepali to know that they kept going on about my big hips, but I’ve kinda come to terms with it now- to Nepali people I’m a giant, both height and weight wise, and I have a totally different body shape. But it didn’t bother me too much on Saturday- my small hip to waist ratio actually looked quite good with the way a sari sits.  I wasn’t even too self conscious about people seeing my shockingly white stomach!

With Mukunda-ji's (NEWAH colleague) wife

Check it out: My Aussie nail polish and thongs matched my sari!

The wedding was about 2 hours from Bharatpur, and I went with three work colleagues and two of their children (plus a driver, that makes seven people in a hatchback…). Luckily, I thought to begin with, I got the front seat, so wasn’t forced to squish up with four other people on the backseat… then I remembered how horrifying driving in Nepal is, especially in a car that can go 80 km/h when the trucks and buses are doing 40 km/h… I was scared out of my mind with all the overtaking and staring head-on at trucks- even when I dozed off a couple of times on the way home I was woken up by the swerving to avoid a head on… so my new resolution is no more private cars on highways!!! (taxis in Kathmandu aren’t so bad because it’s so congested you can’t speed anyway). In good news at least, because the car was relatively new, I did have a seat belt…

The wedding was amazing and beautiful- everything was so colourful. Although my Nepali is shocking, it wasn’t too hard to follow the ceremony- they even threw rice at the groom! Except he got to hold an umbrella, and the rice was covered in red tikka…

The bride receiving tikka from her groom

After the main ceremony I met some children (I can’t say kids anymore because there are too many cute baby goats around and it gets confusing!) who wanted to show me around the park. I am thoroughly confused by the place; apparently it is meant to honour communist martyrs, but as well as statues of the deceased it also included a ‘photo fun park’, children’s playground, ferris wheel, swimming pool and half a zoo. The children I was with were incredibly cute and teaching me the Nepali names of the animals, and as we walked around we gradually picked up more and more children until I was feeling like Maria from The Sound of Music. At one stage they all decided we needed to go up the tower, which was a steep spiral staircase- I challenge all of you to try that with 8 metres of fabric wrapped around you!

with a few of my new friends, looking dishevelled! (Don't worry, they're happy, it just seems that it isn't a big thing in Nepal to smile in photos...)

On returning to the wedding, one of the girls I’d been with asked her Mum to help me fix my sari (none of the children had saris on, so I was the only one looking a bit dishevelled from the tower climb). We went into the change room, and the next thing I knew there were five Nepali women fussing over me (four of them were sisters) as well as three teenage girls: it was great! I loved that even with pretty much no common language, girls in dressing rooms are the same the world over (they did go on about my hips again though, *sigh*). Afterwards, they insisted on photos, introduced me to their mother/grandmother, then took me over to have lunch, which was kind of like a picnic in the park. They helped me out and I sat and ate with them, using my awesome conversational Nepali: ‘this is delicious’, ‘I have had enough’, ‘I am finished’. At this point my NEWAH colleagues found me; I think they were quite amused that I’d been adopted by random children and mothers and had been entertaining myself all day.

With my new gal-pals in the changing room!

I got home and really didn’t want to take my sari off- I felt like a princess! But exhaustion got the better of me, and I didn’t want to fall asleep in the beautiful fabric and risk losing too many sparkles- so I changed into my genie pants and woke up at dinner time.

On Monday as I was about to leave work I got some bad news- Bal Kumari, who is our office cleaner, was in hospital because her sari had caught fire whilst making tea and she was badly burnt. And, as of the weekend, I have a new found understanding for how impossible it must be to get off a burning sari. So I went to visit her in the hospital with Kopila, Ambika and Ganesh. On the way, the girls insisted that I buy Bal Kumari juice and Red Bull… apparently that is what you take to people in hospital here. Passing no judgement, I tried to explain that in Australia we take flowers to people in hospital- I got some very weird looks for that one.

Because the burns were all up the front of her body, Bal Kumari was lying underneath a big metal contraption onto which the nurses had piled blankets and quilts (so as to not touch the burns). I was shown the burns, and just about cried. Apart from dealing with this she was stuck in a hospital with no heating, in a room of 77 beds. In some ways it is better than the hospital I went to for my electrocution, in that it is brand new and clean, but it is also only half finished, so is a concrete shell that doesn’t even have elevators yet (which you would expect to be an early installation in a hospital!). It was a reminder of how good the Australian health system is, as well as to continue turning off the electricity before I plug things in, because I’m hoping that was my last trip to a hospital during this placement!

On Tuesday afternoon I was enjoying (*cough* dying *cough*) my afternoon run, when suddenly a woman rode up to me on a moped. She asked if I know the Ashram I just ran past (for the uninitiated, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashram) and said that as she saw me go past, something (god or otherwise) had told her she needed to go get me and bring me back. With my new mantra of ‘try anything once’ (except bungee jumping, I happen to know Erin (whose cord broke) and I don’t intend on testing my luck!), I hopped on the woman’s moped and went back to the Ashram, of course slightly wary that I may have been being lured into a tourist scam… I figured that in the back streets of Bharatpur though, it was unlikely to be that, as they wouldn’t be getting much business. I could tell straight away that it was genuinely an Ashram, so I let myself be led in to meet with the sister there.

It was really interesting, and for anyone who is thinking ‘oh god, Dani has joined a cult’, you can check out the Brahm Kumaris website (www.bkwsu.org). The people there were genuine and lovely, and are going to teach me about their spirituality and meditation. Of course, I am taking everything with a grain of salt, but I couldn’t resist giving it a try- if nothing else, meditation is something I can do whilst the electricity is out!!  

Yesterday I decided to go to the Buddha Air office to buy Sissy and my plane tickets for when she visits in March. I had already emailed the office to check that they would accept credit cards, and they replied that of course they have a credit card machine; they have all the mod-cons. Not true. When the woman asked how I wanted to pay and I said by card, there was mass confusion. She called someone up, and 20 minutes later a guy rocked up with a credit card machine. Which he then had to teach the woman to use. And then, because the foreign prices are fixed in USD (and are exorbitant to boot- locals pay alot less), they had to find somebody with a newspaper to find out yesterday’s exchange rate so they could enter to the Nepali price into the credit card machine.

It has just been one of those weeks where I’ve had to take a deep breath and remember that nothing here is quite as simple as it seems it should be- but that in a lot of ways, that’s what makes it exciting!