With the Esperantists and Lyla in Thamel 8/11/07

The Saturday before last I went to the local Esperanto group in Thamel. Some of you may know about my Esperanto mania, some of you may not. For those who don't know anything about it, it's a language that was created over a hundred years ago to be a universal language for the world. It's extremely easy to learn, as all the rules are completely regular, no exceptions, and no idioms. You could fit the grammar of the language on the back of a postcard, and for Westerners the vocabulary is fairly recognizable. Here's a basic sentance: Mi estas tre felicha ke vi legas mian blogon, which means, I am very happy that you're reading my blog. There are a few million people around the world who speak the language, and people use it for travel, and to get to know people from other cultures and countries. There's quite a few people here who speak the language. I'm not exactly sure how many yet, as most of the people were away during my first visit. Some were in Japan attending the World Esperanto Conference, which usually has about four to five thousand people in attendance, and some were attending the World Youth Esperanto Conference in Vietnam, and they get about two to three thousand attendants. They have all come back, and just this last Saturday they all met and had slideshows and so on, but I wasn't able to come because Lyla and her friend Bruce came to Boudha and wanted me to show them around. I'll write more about that later. The Esperantists here have a large office in Thamel, which is a shopping district that a lot of westerners go to. They were very nice, and spoke pretty good Esperanto. I'm fluent in the language, although a bit rusty. The two Nepalis who spoke the most to me were Narendra and Poshraj, and there was another westerner there named Phillip. He's been living in Nepal for about twenty five years, and some kind of work cataloguing Nepali and Tibetan manuscripts, and is a translator. Mostly they were asking me questions about myself, although I unfortunately and unwittingly started a more controversial topic when I did a bit of Bush bashing. Phillip, admitting that he is a contrarian, said he liked Bush, and said he was a lot better than the Maoists. So then a long conversion about the Maoists and the King started, and on that topic I stayed totally silent. Apparently, it's quietly known amongst the people here that the present King, who just stepped down, was the one who killed his whole family, if any of you know about that bit of recent Nepali history. Then the meeting ended, and Poshraj said he'd accompany me around Thamel a little bit. He followed me into a few bookstores, which are numerous in Thamel, and then he suggested I come with him to his house. I told him I was waiting for a friend who was going to show up in Thamel in the late afternoon. He said he wasn't far from Thamel, so I agreed to go. He has a nice little house, and I met his wife and two daughters, as well as a number of his neighbors we met on the way who all seemed to know a bit of Esperanto. One neighbor named Nabin knew a fair amount, and accompanied us to Poshraj's house. Poshraj showed me pictures of some of the local functions they put on here. They host a yearly Pan-Asian Esperanto Conference, which gets a few hundred attendees, and also a Himalayan outing, where maybe thirty to sixty people go trekking in the mountains at the Tibetan border. Most of the other Asian participants seem to come from Japan and India, and there are a good amount of Europeans and Americans as well. Then Poshraj's wife fixed us a small dinner with coke, which was very good, a curry noodle soup. I found out that Nabin is a teacher of math at a private school in Kathmandu. Most families that can afford it send their kids to privates schools, as the public ones don't give a great education. Poshraj's eldest son had only days before gone to the U.S. for college in Oklahoma. Then Lyla called, and I had to bow out. Nabin gave me a totally frightening ride down the hill from Poshraj's place on his motorcycle. He's a good driver, but the roads are terrible, and with all the other cars, pedestrians, and animals, you have to do a lot of swerving. The bigger holes in the street had me bouncing up off the seat. Yikes! Then I caught a bus to Thamel, called Lyla, and both of us got very confused about how we were to meet, as neither of us really knew a landmark, or where we'd find it if we knew it. We ended up seeing each other on the street though, me on foot, her in a rickshaw. She took me to a bar called the Funky Buddha. We both ordered long island ice teas, and talked away. She told me about her experiences working at this orphanage in a small town. It's very sad. The conditions the kids live in aren't good, and they're very poor. They only have one pair of clothes, and often they're full of holes. I won't go on too much, as I don't want to depress you all. She and Bruce, the other volunteer, do what they can for the kids. She brought a whole suitcase full of pencils and inexpensive toys and so on to give to the kids. The guy who runs the place isn't a good guy. He hits the kids, and Lyla and Bruce suspect he's pocketing money from the government and the organization that set them up with the orphanage. They've talked to some local people who oversee other orphanages in Nepal, and they learned that the conditions at their orphanage shouldn't be that bad, so they may be looking into trying to shut it down and transfer the kids to place that has better conditions. Lyla says it's so hard for her to deal with her living conditions there. The insects are incredible, and her first night there she couldn't sleep. The last time I saw her, she had so many mosquito bites, she looked like she had smallpox. Once she saw a spider in the kitchen that was big as a saucer, black and furry. Can you imagine? It's like something out of a horror movie. A friend of hers got a pic of it, and I made her promise to send it to me, and when she does, I'll post it here. Eeeeuuw! Then we talked about Buddhist stuff, and she had a lot of questions. It came out that she's always had a lot of interest in it, and now that she's here and seeing it all around her, she wants to do something about it. I invited her to hear a talk with Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche on Saturday, who heads the monastery where I'll be going to school. During all this, we ended up having a couple other drinks, something creamy and mangoey with vodka and rum. She decided that she wanted to splurge and stay in Thamel that night for a treat, and have a real bed and a proper shower, so I chaperoned her to the place she decided on, as it was late and I wanted to be sure she'd be safe. Then I took a frightening cab ride home. What I didn't like about it was the driver took a lot of back roads on very run-down streets, and I kept imagining that he'd stop somewhere dark and some guys would come out an rob me. I was steeling myself up for it, and was drunk enough to feel some bravado rising up in me. But the trip was uneventful, thank goodness.