Living for the Other...

That last post contained a lot of garbage and I cannot leave it as it stands. Reality, but filthy nonetheless. It's not the complete picture.

The truth is I can see grace and redemption in the midst of all those shards of life, I'm just having a hard time keeping my eyes on it. I really do need a break.

But allow me to share what He has allowed me to see:
-An administrator who opens his home and family to us after a whole year of distant awkwardness. Over bowls of homemade noodles and jokes about wearing slippers to the classroom the bolted doors come flying open.

-A chance to have a revealing conversation with some colleagues about the feelings of hopelessness and lack of purpose that overwhelm their lives. Sometimes just listening speaks more than anything audible ever could.

-A classroom full of students who couldn't have seemed less interested in me last semester suddenly requesting that I carve out time to teach them to cook pizza, go for walks, visit their homes, eat meals of dumplings and fish with. I haven't changed but their hearts obviously have.

-Sitting in an obscure tea house which has a high probability of never before serving a foreigner with a local friend who claims that it's her favorite. Sipping tea in the dank cool of an old Tibetan house as all manner of humanity shuffles through the doors to eat noodles is the best way to learn about someones life.

-Feeling the squeeze of my dear nun friend's hand who literally has to beg past official barriers to come visit me as she tells me that I am her best friend. May she find security in the only One who is able to offer it.

-The near instantaneous friendship of myself and the receptionist at the airline ticket office who within an hour of our meeting had invited me to a picnic with her friends. In those moments I marvel at the speed with which He occasionally chooses to work.

So exhausted, defeated, pitifully inadequate I indeed am... but hopeless I am not.

Much unlike Fraulein Maria's raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens... far from it in fact:

For the past few days I have been physically resisting the urge to scream, scream at this place, at this culture, at my students, at my computer, at random people in the street.

Some things are trivial, some things are heartbreaking, some things are rude. I want to scream at them all for exhausting me, defeating me, and making me feel farther and farther from the One whom I know of nothing that can separate me from His love.

For example:
-Text messages that say "are you free now?" (no being the near constant responding message, is anyone ever really free right now?) followed by text messages that clearly demonstrate frustration with me. How am I supposed meet those demands?

-The girl wearing jeans and a matted t-shirt using wooden flip flops to prostrate herself across the grimy intersection through traffic in hopes to gain a surplus of merit. Will she ever know freedom?

-The fact that I cannot buy an international airline ticket online myself (though I've spent days trying), nor can I go to the local ticket office (for two hours) and buy it because they only issue tickets to Chongching. Why does it look possible when it's really not?

-Offering to cook a big American dinner for some colleagues only to have half of them show up late or not at all as I stare in dismay at what will amount to more leftovers than I can eat and too many dishes to wash in the sink. What is the point of working so hard?

-Getting dragged to nearly outside of town to go meet some friend of a friend only to be basically ignored and then told I can take my own taxi back. Is my time not valuable to anyone but me?

-The thirty minutes to an hour that it takes for my email page to open. What am I supposed to be learning through this?

-The girl who never comes to class showing up late (interrupting my class) and then bursting into tears halfway through proclaiming that she's sick and needs to leave (again interrupting my class). How can I match such insolence with grace?

-The fact that the only English phrase that I hear that is grammatically correct all semester is a shouted "I want to f*** you" and all the other like attention (totally unprovoked) that I get while trying to be a normal person and simply live in this city. Will they ever realize the total devaluation of a human being that such attention produces?

-That the fish (and basically any other meat that people cook in this place) is full of bones, one of which I think I swallowed a few hours ago. Is it possible for a person to live having swallowed a fish bone?

-That smell. What on earth is it?

It is hard for me to adequately describe the feeling that the combination of these things produces. Unease, tension, anger, worthlessness, truly woeful inadequacy, a horrid mixture of all of the afore mentioned.

Grace is a certainty, redemption is reality... but all I'm asking for is a break.

Last night I had the truly illuminating experience of going to see the "Tibetan Opera" with two Chinese friends.

Now I love performances of any kind, particularly musicals, the love of which harkens back to high school where I played three instruments in the pit band. This, however, was unlike anything I have ever seen. It was neither Tibetan nor an opera, and after much thought I have only come up with one way to describe it: If a circus, the Nutcracker suite, and a Tibetan Buddhist monastery had a collision and a Chinese man, with access to LCD screens and fog machines, caught it on tape it would have been as close to the same effect as what I saw last night as anything I can imagine.

And it was illuminating, not because of the green lasers or the shimmering representations of balletic gods, not because of the prayer wheel wielding tap dancers or the candle stick bearing contortionists, but because of the conversation that I had with my Chinese friends after the drummers, dancing yaks, acrobatic lotus', and array of Tibetan garb clad actors had all taken their bows.

To me, everything about the performance was Chinese. I've never seen a Tibetan twist their body into the pretzels that those Chinese performers were capable of. I've never known any Tibetan to dance around to a remix of their traditional songs with a butter churn. I've heard plenty of mumbled incantations and chilling monastery horns but I've never seen them accompanied by absurdly ornamented women and children mouthing words that they no doubt can't actually speak. I've seen many Tibetan minorities but never come in contact with so many Chinese dancers in braided wigs.

To my Chinese friends, this performance was the height of Tibetan culture. Didn't I notice the yaks? Had I never seen the drums or butter lamps at the temples? How do I explain all of the strange clothes... if it wasn't, in fact, Tibetan?

The truth is this: what I saw last night was Tibetan culture Chineseified to the max. For the first time I was watching what the best assumptions from the Chinese are for their Tibetan neighbors. It was illuminating... it was strange. No wonder things are complicated here.

Needless to say, I'll never be able to watch another performance sans dancing yaks and be satisfied ever again.

My earliest memories of Ganden will forever be marked by the tangka painter's muppetesque hello's, time spent in the kitchen watching one man shovel enough potatoes for three hundred monks into a pot while slurping fresh butter tea, and my monk friend's very tangible frustration over the fact that I couldn't escape the cold chills and looming atmosphere of evil residue from the first temple we had been in.

During that trip it was butter tea spilled from a shaky hand which stained my clothes.

This time accompanied by five sweet students (one of whom was severely car sick during the hour of switchbacks up the mountain to the monastery) different sensations come to mind. The sweaty buttery smell of the pilgrim bus as the sun rose that morning, the meanderings through rooms and temples that I remain unconvinced of their public access, the snack of squishy meat product and dried instant noodles during our hike on the kora and easily the most impressive view of Tibet to be found with such relative ease, the embarrassment caused by being the only foreigner in a tea house full of rowdy men, the sting of incense smoke, and the absurd inclination to lift my students from their prostrate posture before an endless army of golden statues.

And there was this scene: After a whole day of watching my students giving money and offering kadas and bowing and mumbling through some memorized spell before literally thousands of statues, pictures, chortens, books, and anything else that was in a case... we enter into yet another tiny stinky room totally consumed by a two story statue of someone/thing. I offer to hold their bags as my students throw their bodies to the floor and one girl looks at me and says, "Ms. Kelly, you should pray." My gentle response was, "Oh, I do pray, but not to this one (gesturing to the gold monstrosity before us) I do not believe in this..." Before I had a chance to offer any further explanation another student pulled herself up from the floor to nudge the first girl, "oh yes Ms. Kelly, we know that you believe in Yesu."

Because the truth is, if these girls know even that much then they know more truth about what I believe than anything of what we did that day. Of the thousands of things that they bowed before and offered money to these girls knew the names and meaning of maybe half a dozen, in every temple the only thing that they knew was what they were told by some monk trimming butter lamps or cleaning his ears, they followed obediently all of the rituals that they have no doubt been drilled in from birth but not a single one of them conveyed any knowledge of meaning, if there had been any meaning to begin with.

Picture a loaded bus stopping at some minuscule monastery in the middle of nowhere on the way back from Ganden. Picture the entirety of its passengers looking in confusion at the sign on the door. Picture them shrugging their shoulders and dutifully getting in line to march clockwise through a few rooms of the same gold statues and stinky butter lamps as they had just left, bowing and offering any remaining mao to something that ten seconds before they had not even known existed. Picture my students joining in. Picture me wanting to vomit from the sheer meaninglessness of it all.

During this trip it was sha momo juice squirting in unpredictable directions which stained my clothes.

A text message at 7pm one evening and about ten minutes later a student shows up at my door. Apparently all she wanted to do was chat, about our families, about the weather, about food, about hobbies. Something more urgent never came up. She left as quickly as she came in order not to be late for the evening study hall the students are required to attend.

A canceled lunch appointment makes for a potentially very low key tomorrow, until the realization strikes several hours later that my lunch appointment was wrong to begin with when my dear nun friend sends a message proclaiming that tomorrow is her only day off kitchen duty, and thus our only chance to get together.

A knock at my classroom door by my Chinese supervisor leaves me with another camera man taking more pictures of me teaching. Perhaps it was my willingness to be the school mascot yet again that made the following conversation with him possible: “Kelly I hope that you have no travel plans for the dragon boat holiday because then your dream can come true, and I will cook noodles for you and Jenn.”

One afternoon spent helping a middle school daughter of a colleague practice English by basically just meeting and having a conversation with her, sharing one of my coveted Snickers Nutcrackers, and lending the book “My Teacher is an Alien” (I knew there was a reason I brought that bad boy all the way from America) gets me an invitation to join her and her family for some Tibetan Opera, whatever that is.

Why do these things happen and what is their purpose? I have long stopped asking because I know that the answer rests safe with Him.

I woke to two happy birthday text messages… there were four more before the knock at my door and two brightly wrapped boxes containing another yak and a donkey with detachable saddle bags of beans appeared. A note attached saying “Happy Birthday Ms. Kelly! I love you so much!” All this before my nine am class. Which I didn’t get to until about nine o’ six because three students had been sent to stall me with “what did you have for breakfast Ms. Kelly?” and “oh my stomach is so sick” and “there’s nobody in class!” I walked up to the building with these three students begging me to walk slower only to look up at their classroom and see that all the curtains are drawn. I stopped, pointed at the curtains and demanded “what is happening in the classroom?” The only response from these three was “there is nobody there!” Yeah right, and it’s the first time I’ve been late all year.

I pushed the door open only to be literally blown away by party noise makers, shootable streamers, and masses of silly string… on the desk is a ridiculously huge cake that reads, in perfect English, Happy Birthday Ms Kelly! Best wishes for you! After the silly string settled to the floor, or ceiling, or anywhere it happened to land, one student jumped up and lit the biggest candle/possible blowtorch I’ve ever seen which is also playing a tinny rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’. At the end of the chorus the candle half melted half exploded into a plastic flower and continued to play ‘Happy Birthday’ until some student smashed it. We ate cake, smeared it all over our faces, then had English class.

I walked into my eleven am class expecting nothing, haven’t I already had a birthday party? However, as soon as I opened my book to begin teaching it was like a time warp as the silly string and rousing singing filled the classroom… from out of nowhere came an identical massive cake complete with musical candle/blowtorch flower. The first class blew me away, this one stole my heart. The first to the front of the room was one of the boys, he handed me a box and began a speech which you know he had been practicing all night: “Ms. Kelly we know this is your first birthday in Tibet, we want it to be happy day for you, we very love you, this is for you, Happy Birthday.” A box and a kada… then forty kadas, a heap of shy birthday wishes, and a pile of boxes later… me almost in tears. We cut the cake, pour the sweet milk tea, and start passing out handfuls of sunflower seeds… class, if there was to be any class at all today, would have to start later.

Some students helped me carry all the gifts home. I have no capacity to describe what it felt like to open box after box of random trinket, after bracelet, after musical something all with accompanying notes of “Happy Birthday, I love you” or some variation. Here were all the things that they couldn’t say to me, all the things that they wanted me to know in the riddle of necklace or bottle of perfume or miniature piano which played random melodies. Some of the most notable gifts: the boys had gotten together to get me four identical pairs of plastic slippers in different colors (the explanation: there are eight boys in the class, one shoe for each boy), the right size too. One girl gave me a wind up musical pencil holder with the note: this small gift is my heart. Another gave me a lanyard with the note: now I am a student so I have no money, this gift is so small but I want you will like it. Another gave me a bracelet and wrote that it wasn’t very valuable but that it would delegate forever her love for me and hopes that I would never feel alone in Tibet. A few hours later a whole dorm room of students from the same class dropped by with more gifts, the most frightening of which was a mask of the Lord of Death with their names written on the back, the most endearing of which was the following note:

Dear Ms Kelly, Happy birthday to you, we all wish for you have a good time and good luck every day. Our class all the student forever love you. We never change our heart to your love. You must remember. Ok! Happy Birthday to you!

Could it be anything else?

meanwhile, Sally Sunbeam is burning my cheeks.

I know that people the world over, particularly in countries like England where the weather is a pretty much standard drizzly gray all year, love to discuss the weather. I really think the question "Can you believe the weather today?" is what separates people from animals, among other things.

So I say with zeal, part in order to distance myself from the mangey looking dog hanging out around our building, part in plain alarm, "Can you believe the weather today?" No people. You can't. This past week has been warm, even hot. This morning I woke up to brilliant sunshine, a warm breeze, and fog covered mountains. By mid-afternoon the sky was black and it was snowing. I felt like an idiot, but I actually wore my big jacket to my afternoon class even though all I had been wearing to the morning class was a cardigan. That goes against everything I know about normalcy.

Needless to say, my latest discovery about Lhasa: the weather here will turn on you in a minute... literally. So carry your entire wardobe with you everywhere you go, chances are, you'll probably need every bit of it in the span of a few hours.

Now follow me, if you will, down a rabbit trail of reflection. Everything about this place is extreme: The mountains are extremely high, the sky is extremely blue, the air is extremely dry, the streets smell extremely like urine, the food is either extremely bland or extremely spicey, the bus drivers are extremely unpredictable, the social atmosphere here is extremely complicated.

And to top it all off, the whole place, everything about this city and the lives of the people here, is extremely saturated in idol worship.

Dare I wonder if the extreme displays in the heavenlies, particularly in regard to the weather, are anything less than an extremely merciful creator sending extremely clear messages about his extreme power and redeptive love for the people here along with his extreme displeasure in the abominations that assualt every single one of the senses and veil the hearts and minds of the residents?

Dare I?

Did I really hear a whispher of have you seen the storehouses of hail which I reserve for times of trouble, for the day of wafare and battle? Or did I just feel the hail pelt against my face on my way back from lunch?

Maybe the weather is just an idle topic of conversation that you'll never hear being discussed among the birds that gather on the powerline outside my window...
Or maybe, just maybe, it's the voice of one who says with horrifying authority get ready to answer me like a man when I question you and with captivating gentleness my compassion is stirred.

Blistering cold and blazing sun. Oh Lhasa, when will you get it?

In the wildly unpredictable weather of a Lhasa spring evening I pushed my bike through some bushes to join a picnic with some like minded friends. These girls are the antithesis of brash worldliness. They are beautiful, they do everything shyly. As I help them unfold the mat to sit on we begin to pool our pittance of snacks for the picnic: pickled chicken feet, some sweet biscuits, some sunflower seeds, orange juice, and, my contribution, m&m cookies (aka. American Momo's). In case you haven't noticed, picnics in Tibet are not really about eating.

Picnics in Tibet, to the chagrin of Yogi bear or the hungry guest, are really about just being together. For about two hours I sat with these girls learning Tibetan praise songs, chatting about the weather and my Tibetan language progress, mulling over the crazy guards (who one minute told us we couldn't sit on the tree, the next minute told us we must sit on the tree), discussing why my thighs are so fat and why I don't have a boyfriend (I told them it was because my thighs were so fat... they didn't see the correlation), spitting sunflower seed shells everywhere, passing out cookies to random passersby who wanted to have a closer look at the strange foreigner, shivering in the clouds and sweating in the sun.

Picnic: noun: a meal eaten outdoors.

Allow me to offer this definition Webster's:
Picnic: noun: a chance to love the mess out of some sisters in desperate need of love.

The name of the tiny monastery nestled amongst the caves at the peak of a mountain that my students took me to is Drja Yehba.

I know this because in the pitch black of 6.15 this morning I woke up the old gate man with as cheery a "shopea deleg" (good morning!) as I could muster (the effort was not reciprocated) so that he could unlock the school gate for me and my bike so that I wouldn't be late to catch bus out there with two of my friends.

That makes two trips to this place in less than a week. Coincidence? Is there any such thing?

So: The REMIX: Drja Yehba in monks, not students.
A man feeble of stature, not even reaching to my armpit. Adorned in the standard maroon robes that reek of rancid butter and body, his expression and chatter was amiable. His abode, however, was terrifying. A tiny, dingy half cave half cell with a bed wedged underneath a series of pictures of gods and carvings of other gods, surrounded by small metal bowls of water and an accompanying massive lamp of butter offered by all manner of hopeful pilgrims to the crowds of gods in the room. He insistently pointed out a place on the rock which was worn dark and smooth where people had rubbed it for luck.


Young, shaven head, yawning in sun finally making its way over the mountain ridge. One hand holding a cell phone to his ear, the other adjusting his robes. He pays zero attention to the dusty pilgrims trudging in a weary line with spoons of butter outstretched. Seemingly content to stare out at the deep valley and surrounding mountain tops below he placidly ignores shelves of gods and the mao notes squished into butter all over the cave behind the door at which he stands.


Crouched on a wooden stool more bent than he is, he sways to the rhythm of his own mumblings. Crowded in the dank cave, smelly home of gods, by even a single visitor, the heat and motion of five persistent pilgrims and one foreigner interrupt his trance as he begins to pour water over their heads and into their hands. A startled glance at a white face leaves him gesturing wildly with his ladle and free hand, "come and have a drink". A swift "no, no, I don't want it" gives him a pause long enough for the refuser to remember another offer: he who drinks the water I give him will never thirst again.


Hidden in a room underneath a much worshipped rock, hidden beneath heavy folds of maroon fabric to fight the damp cold of the room, hidden in the shadow of the flickering butter lamps lining the edge of the room where a row of gods sits growing dusty. He pours over a thin, rectangular, horizontal book of scripture mumbling and turning the pages in time. His watery eyes see nothing clearly, they do not make out the pills spilled out of their containers on a shelf nearby, or the bottles of dish washing soap covered with grease piled in a corner. Those eyes of his are too familiar with the unblinking eyes of the statues which stare out of their holes at him day and night.


Young enough to look more at home on a busted basketball court than in the presence of the budda statue that sits two stories tall. He keeps himself busy trimming butter lamp wicks, straightening kadas, and making change for pilgrims that need an excess of mao notes to offer to the various statues. His rushing about does not disguse the fact that he is most likely bored, and daydreaming about all manner of things besides the looming fascade of the gods he serves.

You people are in for a treat, because when a case of the randoms happens in Lhasa it is always severe:

• A pudgy old man on the bus complete with cowboy hat (sans feather sadly) and orange plastic bag full of boiled chicken feet to munch on spitting the nails out onto the bus floor.
• Ladling out gallons of fresh butter tea to the local nuns to drink with lunch is harder work than it looks.
• "Sangeh la gah kah lab" It's like teaching Buddha the alphabet.
  
• Passing by an electronics shop front only to glance inside and see the lone employee using an ab hula hoop.
  
• The utter shock on my student's face when I admit to her that I don't have any MSG.
  
• The pleasure of the smell of freshly popped popcorn in contrast to the near constant smell of urine.
  
• A student who opens up the umbrella to use while sitting in the bus explaining, "umbrellas are for rainy, sunny, and slowly".
  
• Using a precarious squatty potty with a fantastic view of the entire city of Lhasa with a nun friend. Three holes available and she chose the one directly next to mine, that's a thigh touching bonding experience.
• The horrid low drum beats and distorted moanings of a group of monks chanting scriptures.
  
• The song "Dearly loved" by Jimmy Needham blessedly replacing the continuous soundtrack of "Take me to your heart" by Michael Learns to Rock.
  
• Seeing a Chinese colleague of mine swing a bag of sheets around his head while imitating another colleague's style of dance in the middle of the street.
  
• Da pan ji (big bowl of chicken) = delicious. Boiled rice, raisins, and yak butter = not so much.
• Changing "rooms" in clothing shops more accurately described as openings under the stairs with a shielding curtain and no light or mirror. If you look ridiculous you've got to come out into the open to find out.
  
• "Rangla goobeh yunden teh, nyima rela tsik rje sung, kangshe nin gya songwah na, tsik gya malu contu chu": Tibetan proverb meaning, "if you learn one word in one day, one hundred days will pass and you will know one hundred words".
  
• Chinese fashion, only in Asia is double pretty acceptable.
  

Oh people there's more... this is severe...

Today I had my first class outing. The experience, like most in this place, was totally surreal.

The journey:
It was about a forty-five minute drive outside of Lhasa, which means up into the mountains, along some extremely winding roads that our driver chose to traverse as if they were straight runways. Along the way there were sudden stops to pick up pilgrims and other passersby and the soundtrack was a really delightful medley of about 20 student voices and an assortment of Tibetan and Chinese pop songs. Chatting with students and spelling out really useful words for them like "barf" provided additional entertainment. Is there anything more unusual than a lone white girl on loaded bus sharing dried yak meat and brief Tibetan phrases with everyone else on board?

The destination:
Picture a few buildings nestled in amongst all manner of caves in the rocks near the peak of a mountain. More chortens and incense burners than buildings was the monatery we arrived at. This place made me nauseaus, and it had nothing to do with the wild bus ride up to that altitude.

My students spent all kinds of money buying butter and incense from the people at the bottom of the stairs which led up through the monastery. For luck. They even paid a random pilgrim some additional money to take some prayer flags which they had just bought up to the top of the mountain for them. For luck. We went into every little cave and every little room. Most tiny caves were pitch black and a monk sat at the back of them nestled amongst butter lamps and some budda statue. For luck. The monks beds that we passed by were notable being rotten smelly things usually exposed to the elements and you can be assured that no night of peaceful sleep ever happened there. Caves of rotting tangkas, butter smeared everywhere, mao notes squished into the butter all over the cave walls. For luck. Most caves had some special rock you were suposed to rub or sit on. For luck. Every statue we had to walk around clockwise. For luck. When I saw a budda wrapped up in cloth I commented that he must be cold and another sitting amidst bowls of candy offerings that he must be hungry, to the amusement of my students who have never dreamed to question why they do any of these things because it's all for luck.

The place that made me sick with rage to the point of real nausea was one particular cave. There was absolutely nothing special about it, in fact it looked like the monastery's dump because there was so much trash in the back. Yet, there sat an old monk who diligently pointed out to us all of the gods that had formed naturally in the cave which should be worshipped. For luck. So what did all of my students do once they had, finally, found what gods he was talking about? They worshipped. Do you want to see what they were worshipping? I bet you do.

That light spot near the upper center... that's their god. There were two others just like him in other parts of the cave.

There is so much that I can't write that I wish I could.

The lunch:
Between snow drifts, hail storms, and bursts of deceptive sunlight our group pushed our way into the only tea house at the tiny monastery. There was absolutely no room as everyone on the mountain had the same idea as we did. However, because I was a foreigner and easily the only one that they'd seen in perhaps months if not years, the staff made room for us in their kitchen/bedroom. So we crowded in amidst all manner of personal and kitchen items to rest in the musty, dark grunge of tea house life. The tea house was also out of food (I'm fluent enough in Tibetan to understand the word "mendu" (not have) repeated endlessly). So we lunched on some plastic baggies of cold noodles and potatoes and drank most of our body weights in butter tea (of which there is always an endless supply, I'm becoming convinced that that stuff springs out of the ground around here). Luckily I had made some cherry walnut biscuits for everyone to share.

The awkward:
I don't know how to describe this situation. So I and three other students thought it prudent to use the toilet at the same time. We made our way over to the concrete hut that serves as a WC, passing out paper and chatting. The concrete hut is really just that, four concrete walls and a concrete floor with three holes in it which drop over the side of the mountain. No stalls, no trashcans, no potpourri, just holes. My students graciously allowed me to go along with two of them while the third one waited... directly in front of us as we were squatting over holes doing our business. As I'm feeling the icy air rush through the hole to my exposed bum the fourth student, an adorable and shy girl, who was standing right in front of me asks, "Ms. Kelly, today are you happy?" Squatting in filth with mess spread all over the mountainside below me, I glance at the two other girls and look at this one and answer completely honestly, "I am so happy to be with you." Then I wiped myself and pulled up my pants.