The mountains ........ Finally!

 






While most of you are slogging through an historic hurricane (or is it a non-hurricane?), we are enjoying spectacular, if not a little chilly, weather.  And here is the proof:  the mountains are out!  I can understand now why they are considered gods, living beings.  They have been in hiding for so long that when they show themselves we are drawn to them; we want to look at them all the time, get closer to them, feel their presence.  The photos just don't do them justice.

Vacationing with the Hostel Kids

    We are about to head back to school after a week long relax-fest. Corrina prides herself on the fact that she left the house only once during the whole week.  Grace took her first exam on Thursday and felt that she did fine on it; we won't get the results until January.  I got a massage yesterday at the Mayfair Hotel, one of the fanciest hotels in Sikkim.
     While we were on vacation some of the students living in the hostel came to stay with us.  After the last set of exams we went out to celebrate at "Flamboyance," the local brick oven pizzeria.  Here are some photos of the trip:

Ingsa, 10th grader, and Sherab, 9th grader.

Grace with Sagun and Simrin, gearing up
for karaoke.

Margharita pizza

Corrina and Pomme Pomme, an 8th grader from
Thailand

 Corrina and Pomme Pomme, with the help of Pintso's cousin Rebecca, made apple pie one night as well.

Corrina and Pomme Pomme with
our new cook, Ms. Neema.

     

Religion at the Beef Shop

"The Christians are good employees. They work hard and they don't steal."

"The Buddhists will lie right to your face, but they wouldn't hurt a fly."

      Last Saturday Mr. Karma drove the Spaceo and picked up all the admin staff to take them to work.  Chanbari House was the last stop.  On the way up, the person who oversees the food orders reminded Mr. Karma that we needed to pick up the beef for the hostel kids that was ordered the day before.  So we all went along for the ride to the meat shop.
      Mr. Karma, the estate manager and most likely a buddhist by upbringing, pulled up to the roadside shop where sides and cuts of beef hung from meat hooks both in and outside the shop.  There were cars parked in front of the building, but that did not deter Mr. Karma.  He pulled in close, in between the cars and the shop, as if he were parking on the sidewalk.  He was so close to the building, in fact, that the roof rack collided with the tin awning coming out of the beef shop roof.  Undeterred by the scraping sound above, he backed up and pulled in even closer to the shop, stopped the car and got out to pick up the beef.
     Ms. Rekha, the business manager and a devout Hindu, was sitting in the back seat by the car door closest to the shop.  With the windows open from a lovely morning's crive along the upper road, the faint and acrid smell of beef curing in the sun filled the cab of the car.  We were waiting silently in the car (there was an unusual mix of high level admin and low level drivers that led to a somewhat uncomfortable silence) when Rekha let out a "Peuw!" under her breath.  Then she said, "He knows I can't look at it, why did he park here?"  Then silence for her to build her argument and the declaration, "He could have parked further down the road a bit.  There are spots I can see form here!" Making her case, she finally said, "He did this on purpose."
      A quick stop at the beef shop had turned into a religious affront.  This is Sikkim.

Facebook

     I find myself trawling Facebook these days more often than when we first arrived in Gangtok and certainly more than I ever did when I lived in Beverly.  On Facebook I find an entertaining mix of the personal (I have friends who jog and while they jog can get words of encouragement from me if I post the comment on Facebook!),

I just started a run with Nike+ GPS

Let me hear it!

Cheer me on with comments or likes and I’ll hear it along the way.

general knowledge (did you know there is a potential hurricane brewing off of the coast of Jamaica?)

The Perfect Storm: Possible Next Week… But Is It Likely? - CBS Bostonboston.cbslocal.comSo you may have heard… meteorologists up and down the East 

and the political. In fact, I came to the realization that Facebook has become a tether line for me after reading the following post:

As President, Romney will tackle the bayonet shortage head-on.

This comment was posted by a beloved student from Meridian Academy, Sam Miller, who was referring to a point made in the most recent presidential debate.  I of course had no idea that the debate was going on!  Thanks to his post (and many others in the end) I went in search of information about and follow-up to the debate.
      An endorsement for Scott Brown by a Facebook contact spurred me to check on my absentee ballot status.  Come to find out, the US government never sent my request to vote by email to the Beverly Town Clerk, so now she is going to help me do it.  That same endorsement led me to figure out exactly who that person was and contemplate blocking her from my friends list (I didn't go that far though).
     I think Facebook has become a reverse blog for me.  I am very out of touch with America -- no one in Gangtok ever talks about anything related to the US -- and we are wrapped up in coping with the environment in which we currently live.  When I have visited Europe, people would ask me to justify some economic policy or explain an American cultural phenomenon, but here no one thinks about the US; The girls and I have spent most of our brain power figuring out how to adjust to the culture here.
     Still, I/we have a growing desire to connect with the world back home (Corrina has started having chat sessions with a couple of friends that last for hours, after weeks of not even wanting to contact her friends in Beverly), an enormous desire to be home (and especially be with Glenn), and a strengthening understanding that New England is where we belong.  We are counting the days until we come back home, not out of a dislike for our current situation (in fact I think we are very content here at Chanbari House right now!), but out of a desire to touch the life we had before we came to Sikkim.  Imagine what it will be like when we come home only to realize that we have changed, and home has changed, in such ways that we will never go back to our old life.  I am very curious to see what the new life will hold.

First Photos from Autumn Collage

Last night Taktse International School preformed a concert at the Secretariat Hall in Gangtok.  Both girls sang in the performance and I managed the backstage.  Here are some photos I took, there will be more to come!

Prashanti -- one of the girls
in my math class.

More students from my
math class!

Grace and Tenchung before
the performance.

Mrinaala, also in the 4th grade, in her "K-Pop" costume.

11th graders performing
their song.

Vacation is coming

     Today is the last day before a week long puja holiday.  Tomorrow night the whole school, including Grace and Corrina, will be performing a concert in a spectacular auditorium downtown.  After that, we have few plans for the upcoming week.  Grace will be studying for and then taking a Cambridge English exam and Corrina and I are planning to watch a lot of movies.  We are open for any suggestions that can be downloaded from iTunes.  There is an amusement park here that me may try out after the exam is over.

     Grace and Corrina each got outfits for the concert, I will make sure to post photos of them in their traditional garb.

What are we doing here?

     Since the day we arrived in Sikkim I have been haunted by this question: what the heck are we doing here?  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find myself thinking about it. When I sit and write emails to Laila I find myself asking myself (and her) the same question.  Sometimes I have an answer, but more often than not it is a rhetorical question, meant to represent my inability to see to the other side of this experiment, nor to see what we will have taken away from the experience. Last night I found myself asking it again as we were coming home from a lovely dinner out.
     This time I believe I was asking it for a different reason. As we were climbing the steps to the taxi stand, life felt no different than it would have if we had been at home.  I think maybe we have truly arrived.  "What are we doing here?" I asked it then because I could feel us being ourselves -- happy, grumpy, bored, at peace, safe -- at that point in time and in general for longer and longer periods of time every day.  Partly, we have adjusted to our new surroundings so that less and less often we are surprised or upset by what we see. Partly I think all three of us has come to have a level of acceptance for what life can be here in Sikkim for us.

The End of the Karma

     Our cook left for good on Tuesday.  She asked for the day off and never came back.  Maria said we may never find out exactly why she left, nor should we have expected any warning signs.  People here get upset about something, never say anything and instead retreat until they are completely gone. I asked Maria if there was ever a chance for reconciliation and she said, "it depends if the karma has ended." Well, I think the karma has ended for Buddhamaya and us.  It's hard to carry the knowledge that she has left upset and without really knowing the reasons why she was upset.  On the other hand, we struggled to get her to do chores and other things around the house, so maybe a new cook will be better able to run the household.  In the meantime, the school has been ordering some delicious take-out food in the evenings and we fend for ourselves in the morning.  I just wish I knew how to make Dal!

As Washers go....

  So, we finally have a working clothes washer!  I thought you might like to know that we are now able to wash AND dry our clothes.  Of course, there is only one viable electrical outlet in the room with the washer and dryer, which means we can't put the wet load in the dryer at the same time a new load is being washed. To add to the complication, it is also the electrical outlet for the hot water heater in that bathroom, so there are 3 appliances for one plug-in!
    Also, the washer currently empties it's wastewater onto the bathroom floor where it then makes its way to the drain in the floor. I have a feeling that will be fixed sometime soon, maybe in March.
      Either way, we are very happy to wash our clothes here at home, and dry them too!

Trip to Namchee

A dog sleeping on the ledge
of the second floor of the restaurant 

   On Ghandhi's Birthday (last Tuesday, it was a school holiday) we spent the day visiting the largest Statue in Sikkim, a statue built with the help and oversight of Pintso's father, Sonam. It sits on the site of an old meditation hut in a town called Namchee.  To get there we drove about three hours, the first hour down into the valley of southern Sikkim and the next hours hours back up another mountain.  On the way there we drove through a lot of jungle and also drove through a couple of tea plantations.

The view from a rest stop.

Once at the statue site, a thick mist rolled in and we couldn't even see the statue from 30 feet below it.  After an hour or so, the mist lifted for about 15 minutes and we took all the photos we could.  Then the mist re-enclosed the statue.  There were many tourists there with us, mainly Bengalis (Maria told us) who like to travel to Sikkim after the monsoon season ends. They were very intrigued by all of us white people and asked Maria where we were from.

This is a snow lion holding up the
Buddha.  It is made out of fiberglass
and was drivin up from Siliguri.

Corrina, Christine, Maria and Laila take off
their shoes to enter the prayer room
at the base of the statue.

There was also a group of teenagers from Gangtok and one of them was brave enough to ask Grace would she let a guy in their group of friends take a photo with her?  She graciously said yes and much picture-taking ensued.  Laila took photos of Grace and the kids, I will upload them once she sends them to me.  Eventually just about everyone in our party had their photo taken with the students and they went on their way.

    The statue was in the process of being repainted, which Sonam was relieved to see.  After the people at his monastery built it (at the request of the government) they decided they should take it over and maintain it.  Of course, they didn't maintain it at all. While we were there men were climbing the scaffolding and scraping off paint.
      On the way home we stopped at a rest stop and ran into a group of white people, I think from Australia, who were taking a motorcycle tour of the mountains.  They looked pretty rough and tumble!

Our Current Status

I figure it is about time for an update on how each of us are doing.

At a rest stop on the way to see the largest
Statue in Sikkim -- another post to come...

Photos taken by my friend Laila, who is visiting
for the week.

Corrina first.  Corrina is the one of us most likely to count the days until we go home in December.  While she would clearly prefer to be back in her old life in Beverly, she is more easily living in the day-to-day of life here in Chanbari House.  She likes some of her classes, including science, and is slowly making friends with the kids at school.  She still prefers to eat lunch with me everyday, but I can see she is more and more comfortable on her own in the school space.  At home she likes to stay in, watching movies on her computer and lazing around the house.  She just finished reading The Hobbit and is now reading a tome that is all three Lord of the Rings books in one gigantic volume.  She speaks proudly of the fact that other students in her class have started reading The Hobbit since she finished it. Her engagement with the rest of the Sikkimese world revolves around going out to dinner, and she asks less frequently for American food.

Now Grace.  Grace is mired in studying for the preliminary Cambridge English Exam which she will be taking in early November.  She is writing short essays almost every night, trying to make the essays longer, her handwriting neater and her spelling more accurate.  She continues to gain friends in the school and even went to town last Friday with a bunch of friends after school. The basketball has waned a bit, there are few girls' teams at other schools, which disappoints her.  But she is still a star on the court and loves the positive reactions she gets from the students at the school when she plays.  Of the three of us, she finds it most difficult to share living space with so many different people.  Before we came here I didn't really think about how much of our living would be communal, and with people who are coming and going, but it is a big part of our life in Chanbari House.

Finally me.  Somewhere between the time Charna arrived in September and the time that Laila arrived last week, I morphed from being another guest at Chanbari to being the mistress of the house. It is not a position I actively sought, but perhaps a natural one for me to grow into.  I realized it just today as I was coming home early (I am not feeling well), when I spent most of the ride home thinking about who was going to take care of rounding up everyone for the Spaceo ride home and make sure that everyone who needed a ride would get one.  The dogs are mine (even though I was under the impression that we were ALL going to help take care of the dogs), the weekly dinner menu is mine -- something I am happy to own -- and people look to me to solve the minor issues that arise in the daily life of being in Gangtok. I lost my phone on Monday and only now that it is gone do I see how many small phone calls I get or initiate around the details of family and home life.
        At work I have hit a bit of a wall.  While I am doing many interesting projects and having great conversations with Pintso and his mom, I am also ready to offer some new ways to think about doing things.  But the pace of getting things done is very slow, especially in comparison to the overdrive pace of Gann Academy that I had grown accustomed to.  I am engaging my patience, but also trying to find ways to assert myself without offending or putting people off.  There are amazing people working at Taktse and I see the potential the school has to go to a new level; I hope I can help move it there while working within the way things happen at Taktse.