Crazy Idea

I e-mailed Kim a few weeks ago. I met Kim four years ago while studying abroad in Australia. He came from Korea and lived on the other side of my wall. We developed a knocking code through said wall, and quickly became best friends. We ate every meal together and spent weekends and breaks traveling throughout the country. On one of our final train rides, we were sitting with our other friend Scott, the three of us reflecting on how painful the upcoming separation would be, how awful the thought was of never seeing each other again, and how much we wanted to preserve these moments forever and never return to our regular lives. "I think there is a reason we were all meant to meet here," Scott said, all of us near tears, "And someday we will understand why." (We had each felt a particular closeness with God that semester).

Anyway.

"Crazy Idea" was the subject line of my e-mail to Kim. "I'm in India and you're in Korea so let's meet halfway in Thailand. I'm sorry, I should have suggested this before I left, but I wasn't thinking. Let's just do it though. Life is short."

A response didn't come for a couple days, so I figured the idea was too crazy. Until the day after that, when I got this response:

"Yes! I think this would be the perfect chance for us to re-meet! I like what you said about life is short! We have proverb in Korea" (Kim always had a Korean proverb for EVERYTHING)- "When you think that it is late to do something, that is the right moment to start."

So anyway... I'm flying to Bangkok tomorrow. Will be gone for about a week and then will return to India for a final two weeks of volunteering.

Happy 4th of July!

I've always refused to kill bugs and have judged people who have. It has always seemed so terrible and senseless to me. Didn't God make enough room on this great earth for all of His many and varied creatures?

I cannot emphasize enough how fast living in India has changed my tune. "Die suckers!" I shout nightly as I spray insect-killer at whole armies of ants on their way from my door to my bed. And nothing is more satisfying than smashing bugs between my book pages-- those who are attracted to the glow of my flashlight and make it through my mosquito net. This morning I used my trash can to violently slice a giant spider right in half. Such a victory. Does it even get any better than that?

A few of us rode bikes into town yesterday afternoon to have a meal that was not potatoes and rice. It took a while to dig through the bikes on camp to find the ones most suitable for riding-- most of them were missing breaks, or pedals, or other semi-important parts. I finally settled on the one with spiderwebs in the handlebars.

The bikes are heavy and don't have gears, which makes riding them very, very hard work. (Last time I rode one I fell off and bruised my face). But yesterday I just sweated so much that my contact lenses felt like they were going to burst into flames. So I'm improving.

But it was all worth it because at lunch I had STEAK, which is the single best thing that has happened in my life in a while.

The waiter was excited that a couple of us were American, and told us that there is an American song that he likes very much, though he said he didn't know the name.

"Can you sing it?" I asked.

He made a few short sounds, which reminded me of the opening to that dumb Christmas song, "Me and My Drum," but I doubted very much that that was it.

"Is the song new or old?" I asked.

"Medium."

"Who sings it?"

"I don't know," he said. "A man."

"Young man or old man?"

"I don't know, I've never seen the video."

"... Michael Jackson?" I asked.

"No," he said. "I don't like his songs--only his style."

"Well I don't know how else to identify it," I said.

"All the Russians like the song," he said.

"Yeah... that doesn't help."

He went back inside, I guess to look it up, because he came back and announced that the song was "Baby," by Justin Bieber, and he stood there singing it for a while as I ate my steak.

Today everyone in Goa was celebrating the anniversary of the baptism of St. John. On my way home from work, I rode through groups of men in the street who were celebrating by jumping into the river.

The staff organized a celebration on camp, too. They placed crowns made of flowers on our heads and handed us coconuts. We were supposed to stand across from someone and roll our coconut into our partner's coconut . When the coconuts broke open, everyone applauded- and got covered in coconut juice. And then it started to rain, and the cleaning woman went and tied sheets around her head and legs and tried to get us all dancing in the rain.

Then the camp manager (a woman) pulled me against her so close our stomachs collided and said we were going to slow dance. This lasted way longer than I thought it would, 20 minutes at least, long after everyone else had stopped dancing. "It's the most romantic dance in the world," she said to me, after instructing me to sway my hips more. I think this was the most intimate I have ever been with a woman.

In other news, in my shower today I noticed a parasidic-looking worm crawling on my foot. I brushed it off and guided water over it, expecting it to drown and slip down the drain. Instead, to my surprise, once it was fully submerged in water it started SWIMMING. Right back towards me.

I've been waiting for something super update-worthy to happen, but it's amazing how quickly life can start to seem routine again, even when you're literally 8,000 miles away from your comfort zone. (I Googled it).

I have been largely disappointed by the attitudes of the other volunteers here. They are mostly German, a few years younger than me, and they complain that the beaches here are dirtier than the ones in Florida. They all quit their volunteer work after the second day, complaining that the sites were "boring" or "smelled gross." Now they just spend all their time chain-smoking and sunbathing in their bikinis (which we were strictly advised not to do, due to the modesty of women in the Indian culture).

I've been trying to not let their attitudes bring me down, and to instead enjoy time by myself- reading and reflecting and living so closely with nature. Afterall, its only a few short weeks before I have to re-enter my American world of buildings and makeup and protein and seatbelts and professional clothing (or even clothing that is clean and dry, for that matter). I need time to myself anyway, after having been so intimately involved in the lives of so many people for the past two years-- both clients and classmates. (Just ask Dr. Elvis how much a sponge can hold- he'll tell you what's up).

When I start to feel guilt/awkwardness for socially outcasting myself, I just pretend that instead of living at a volunteer camp I'm living at a home-stay. A home-stay without a family. But then I can pretend that the staff members who live on camp are my home-stay family. Like the cook who I bribe for watermelon. And the stoic woman in beautiful sarees who I beg for toilet paper (one roll a week, if I'm lucky!)

The staff is especially nice to me, probably because of my previous mental instability. One of the drivers said that when I cry, he cries. He also kept saying that I'm the "loosest" girl he's ever met. (His English is not good, and I finally figured out -I think, and hope- that what he meant to say is that I cry more than any girl he's ever met). Anyway. I think we became best friends, but he has since been fired for reasons I don't understand. Story of my life.

I still enjoy working with my class of adolescent girls in the slum. They are very sweet and I have gotten more creative with my teaching of English, which is fun. I'm also supposed to teach them math every other day, which I could do without, since of my students are better at it than I am. An hour before I go to work on the math days, I go to a web site called Math is Fun!, and hurriedly give myself crash refresher courses. (Later this week I hope to be able to do division with remainders!)

I decided to stop working at the beach hut school room for young children, because I found it too chaotic. So I switched my morning work to an old age home, where the residents have basically been abandoned by their families and mostly just want someone to sit with them and play cards. Today was my first day, and I was greeted by a woman who asked me to shave her beard.

Also, I rode an elephant:

My anxiety pills cost 25 American cents and taste like bananas and make me feel like a person again. I picked them up at the shadiest looking drugstore you can imagine, but I'm not seeing children surrounding my bed in the middle of the night anymore so I'm not asking questions.

So now I can leave you with a less worrisome update.

Everyone here flips out when they see white people and ask to get their picture taken with us. I am in countless photographs with other peoples' families.

The other day I was simply resting on a bench with three other volunteers, when an Indian man wearing a shirt that said "When I am rich, you will be my bitch" ran up to us to get his picture taken. Before we knew it, literally 30 other Indian men emerged from God knows where and were surrounding us, insisting to get their pictures taken one at a time. It makes me feel like a celebrity, or like Santa Clause at the mall.



Other than being a celebrity, I've been volunteering.

In the mornings I work at a "school" called Net Weavers. It's called that because it's on the beach and that's what people do there-- they weave nets. The room is tiny and has no electricity or furniture and is filled with flies. The walls are made of palm leaves. The beach surrounding it is covered with garbage and stray pigs, and everybody goes barefoot. We bring the kids food and toothbrushes each day. (There are no assigned toothbrushes-they just grab one at random and spit the toothpaste out wherever it may land, which is more often than not, on my shirt).

In the afternoons I teach English and math to a class of adolescent girls in the slums. (I asked a staff member what these girls will really do with English and math skills, and was told that some lucky ones might one day sell fish). The girls love me and run up to me whenever my car pulls up and pull me into the school room by hand, though honestly I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time and basically make things up on the spot. The first time I got there I thought I was going to be shadowing another teacher, but when I arrived the woman who i thought was the teacher said "Bye! I'm going to the village!" and I was left with 10 girls and no plan. They wanted me to teach them games, so I thought back to indoor recess at elementary school and taught them Heads up Seven up. Since then I have tried to teach them tenses and multiplication, but mostly they just like when I show them pictures of Doug because they are shocked and apalled by his yellow hair.

One of the girls is pregnant and another has a baby (both in arranged marriages). The one with the baby ties her baby to a red scarf that hangs from the middle of the ceiling and swings it around. At first I did not realize she kept her baby in there and walked into it accidentally and was like... whoa, that's a baby.

Yesterday a chicken wandered into my classroom.

When it is time to leave the children get into my car and hang off my car and I worry that we will run over them as we drive away, but luckily that has not happened yet.

An Indian Doctor named Elvis Teaches me the Importance of Self-Care

"It's not your pills," Dr. Elvis said, handing my malaria pills back to me. His office was filled with flies, like everything else in India. But it was also the first place I'd been with air conditioning.

"But what else could it be?" I asked, disappointed. I was hoping so much that it was the pills, and not a psychotic break (early to mid twenties!) "I just don't feel like myself," I told him. "All I do is cry all the time, and feel scared, and wake up every hour panicking and whispering over my roommate's bed that I need help." (A staff member had finally forced me out of bed and insisted on taking me to see Elvis).

"What do you do at home?" Elvis asked.

"I'm a therapist."

He slowly shook his head, for a very long time.

"I know," I sighed. "I get it. I'm a therapist and I need a therapist."

"Therapist is the worst job!" he said. "Therapist is hardest job! No wonder you go crazy!"

"But I haven't even been thinking about therapy!"

"It doesn't matter. I can see that it is in you. You took in all those other peoples' problems and they have stayed in you. You have not let them come out. You have not been taking care of yourself to let them come out, and now they are coming out here in India, in depression and anxiety."

I felt a bit defensive. I was pretty sure I HAD been taking care of myself, with Pizza Pros and dance parties and human pyramids and writing. But then again, the last two years are such a blur of crying clients and no-harm contracts and 12-hour work days that sometimes it's hard to tell what was what.

"How much can a sponge hold?" Elvis asked.

"Uh," I said. "Not that much?"

"That's right," he said. "It must come out."

I nodded.

"You have to take better care of yourself!" he said. "You have to take time to go away and do what YOU want to do!"

"I know," I said. "That's why I came to India!"

"No!" he said. "You can't do that in a foreign country! You have to be at home with the people you can talk to! You have to go sit at the mountains, or by the lake, and let it all out. Not in a foreign country with a different culture where you don't know anybody!"

Touche.

He started writing out a prescription for anti-anxiety medicaion and a letter saying its his professional opinion that I return home immediatley, in case I decide to change my flight.

"I also think I have a parasite living in my foot," I told him. "I feel it squirming around in there at night."

But he just shoved the letter and prescription at me. "Quit being so sensitive," he said.