ROAD BLOG AHEAD

I’m writing this offline and will post when I am able. It’s Friday, March 30. We’re here in Delhi - specifically the Tibetan “ghetto” of Majnukatilla - having survived the 12 hour ride down the mountain and into the plains of India without undue mishap. The journey itself was pretty exhausting, from the sheer standpoint of being shut up in a wheeled box in traffic for half a day on Indian roads. A lot of dust, a lot of fumes, and a whole lot of twisty mountain tracks barely wide enough to permit two vehicles to pass without one of them falling off a sheer cliff and onto the rocks several hundred meters below. Actually, in a lot of places, the roads *aren’t* quite wide enough, so there’s backing up, maneuvering around and a whole lot of honking at every curve.

Lena and I do have advantages over the Tibetan sanjor (newly arrived from Tibet refugees) in that we are much less prone to get motion sick in moving vehicles. I’ve never been car, air or seasick in my life and Lena so only rarely. Many of the sanjor of our acquaintance have a huge problem in this regard, becoming car sick or air sick when a vehicle goes more than a few kilometres and hour or makes a simple turn. We know one elderly Tibetan woman who is literally trapped in Nepal by this problem. She walked out of Tibet (as many refugees do) and as far as Bouddha. However, to get out of Nepal and into India you MUST either fly or drive - here’s no way through on foot. Flying is not only expensive, but it requires a much better passport/visa situation than she is likely to obtain, so that leaves the buses or a jeep. And Deylama is so horribly, uncontrollably car sick that the risk on her already-fragile system of several days in a constantly moving vehicle is just too high for her to risk. It literally could kill her. She’s tried a variety of sedatives and even those haven’t worked. I suspect we might find something in the west (compazine for instance, which works really well for nausea) but Deylama is not willing to even try again after her last few disastrous attempts at riding.

We suspect, from a combination of observation and deduction, that this tendency towards motion sickness is at least in part genetic among certain Tibetan genotypes and tends to run in families. Unlike people of European descent (and probably a lot of other  cultures as well, such as India) the Tibetans have absolutely no history in their own culture of wheeled conveyances. I mean this is the freakin’ Himalayas! You have stretches of highland plateaus, but they are surrounded by huge mountains and uneven ground. There’s no place to drive TO! So the invention of the wheel in that culture was limited to mill wheels and prayer wheels, not wagon or chariot wheels. You need to go somewhere, you walk. You might, if you’re in the right place (our Eastern Khampa nomads for instance) ride a horse. If you need to move a bunch of stuff, you use the equivalent of a travois which allows tent poles, carpets,etc. to be dragged by horses. Then, when you’ve reached the point where the horses can’t go, you carry it. Tibetans are great walkers. Even the most feeble of them can usually out pace the average western walker in both speed and endurance. So the ability to tolerate speed and go around twisty bends at any sort of velocity has never been particularly a survival trait. It’s not been bred in genetically, the way the ability to adapt to low oxygen environments is bred in or the reduced (not eliminated, just reduced) need for fresh fruits and vegetables in a healthy diet. Many of the traits that suit the (and Nepali Sherpas) for life in the high Himalayas become liabilities when those same people are transplanted as refugees into the heat of India or the modern world of autos, buses and refined sugar (imagine sweet things not tasting good!) The tendency towards motion sickness seems to be one of those things.

So back to the journey from my anthropological digression… We left Rewalsar yesterday (Thursday) morning at 5 a.m.amid much hurrah and fanfare. A car picked us and our luggage up at the house and drove us down to the courtyard of Zigar monastery where much of the town’s Tibetan population had turned out to see us off. If we’d had any hope of sneaking off quietly in the wee hours, well, that didn’t happen. First of all, there were more than just Rimpoche, Lena and I going to Delhi. This is pretty standard as, the minute word gets out that someone is going somewhere, a zillion people try to hitch a ride. I suspect that if we rented a bus, it would be full before nightfall. I can never figure out if all these people actually NEED to go somewhere and have just been waiting for a chance to get a lift, or if they think it will be entertaining to go along for the ride. At any rate, there were two cars hired for this journey. When I first heard this, I thought that seemed excessive. It wasn’t. By the time all was said and done, we had accumulated a rathesizablele entourage. First there was Rinchen Wangmo (known also as Ma-Yum) the mother of young Palga Tulku and chief wife of our very dear friend Minchung Dorje (Yab) who was going to Delhi anyway to visit their daughter, Dawa (a most amazing young woman, but that’s another digression.) We’d further accumulated 4 or5 sanjor nuns from the caves - purpose in going to Delhi unknown - our monk friend Tsultrim Dorje (one of the competents at the monastery) Lodro Taye (his mum is doing much better) who needed to be dropped off in Chandigarrh, and a sanjor layman whom I don’t know at all named, I think, Kunchok. Plus a couple of drivers. That was a total of 13 or 14 people in all, so yes, we did need the 2 cars and they were both full. The courtyard was full, even at that ridiculous hour. It was heart-warming to look around and realized how many people there I consider friends now that I scarcely knew a year ago. We got buried in kataks of course - the tradition being to put one (a white scarf) around the neck of the person departing as a blessing and a well wish for safe journey. They are also used for greeting and many other purposes, not unlike the Hawaiian leis. So one can end up with a huge pile of kataks around ones neck if you have many friends and they all come to say goodbye. One of these days I have to do a blog post about the ubiquitous kataks. They are very handy.

Ma-Yum, Lodro and Kunchok rode in the car with us while the monk and the nuns rode in the other with Rimpoche (who is also a monk if anyone doesn’t know that.) Ma-Yum is not sanjor, but she is from Ladakh (actually she’s the Ladakhi princess who fell in love with the sanjor coolie and ran off to marry him - I have to tell that story some time) and she does get motion sick. Lena had given her some medicine to mitigate that so she wasn’t too badly off and mostly dozed the first half of the ride. Lena was a tad queasy on the worst stretch of mountain. Lodro and I were unfazed. Poor Kunchok, however, was sick within twenty minutes of leaving Rewalsar, as were all of the nuns. We stopped a few times by the side of the road taccommodatete them. Poor things. When we broke for lunch, they were all distinctly green and the nuns stuck to plain roti (bread) and curd and not much of that. Kunchok did okay once we were out of the mountains and on the flat places.

Ohhhh the flat places. Man, it is an OVEN on the plains of India at this time of year. And it’s only the end of March! It’s been slowly warming up in Rewalsar over the past week or so, but by “warming up” I mean in the mid to high twenties. On Weds. it was 36 degrees in Delhi! That’s about 97 Fahrenheit if you’re American. That’s hot, no matter where you are! By Chandigarrh the heat and dry dust of India was almost overwhelming to all of us who were freezing our tuchuses off in the mountains a week ago. I’m sure
that contributed to the nuns’ distress. They were pretty good sports about the whole thing, even though their green-tinged complexions clashed horribly with their red and maroon robes. We got back on the road after lunch and had the driver turn on the air conditioning rather than continuing to be stoic about the escalating heat. Traveling with people who were born and raised in Tibet (no matter how long they’ve been here) is different than with those who are born in India and never knew another climate. Like me, most Sanjor are miserable at temperatures above about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The Indian-born generation of Tibetans shiver in the Himalayan winter and are acclimated to the summer heat - at least those who survived childhood are the ones who best acclimated. When the Tibetans first came to India as refugees, they died by the hundreds due to a variety of heat-related problems - not just heat stroke and dehydration, but differences in things like sanitation and food habits killed many who could not or would not adapt to a place where meat doesn’t freeze overnight in June. There was a certain Darwinian action that happened, where the strongest and most able to think outside the box and come up with solutions, were the ones who survived and had families, establishing Tibetan communities all over India.

Unfortunately (?) that has changed over the past decade or so. The smart ones survived and thrived. They figured out how to adapt to the Indian climate (for the most part anyway.) They eat the foods that are available here, well adapted to life in a hot, crowded place. Their children are bilingual and can work within the system here. Those who escaped in the sixties and seventies during the first invasions of Tibet have established their culture here and abroad, trying to ensure that the key parts of that culture won’t be easily lost. They’ve built businesses and whole communities. And, being a culture that puts the ties of kinship and clanship above all others, they have all helped members of their families and extended families escape across the mountains to relative freedom in India and Nepal. The new escapees have a support system that the first refugees lacked; they have the advantage of a generation of trial and error, of struggle and attrition. There are still huge gaps in available opportunities and services. There are still many many who come without any family at all, without any way of living except for the compassion and help of others.

However… And this is really big and can be really noticeable at times… the basic terms and conditions of “survival of the fittest” have changed. Those who do best are no longer necessarily the smartest, cleverest or strongest. Those who came before have done a lot of the groundwork. They have thought things through and figured out what works and what doesn’t and created an infrastructure with those things and actions and assumptions built in. Among the newer generations, the ability to fit in, to either imitate others or (best case scenario) learn the new ways of doing things, is a stronger survival skill than the ability to think a problem through and come up with a creative solution. In fact thinking is often not required and may not be the smoothest way to ingratiate yourself into a community as a newcomer. This is showing up in a lot of places as imitation or replication without actual understanding of situations. People are doing things because that’s how they saw it done so it must be the way it’s supposed to be done. Only, as many of you know, what is happening and what a person THINKS they saw happening (and the reasons behind the doing) are often very very different! And it’s frustrating. Wow, is that an understatement. It can be absolutely maddening to see people screwing up by rote and be able to see the disaster that will come from their actions and be totally powerless to convey that, no indeed, what they are doing, won’t work and, in fact, isn’t actually the point. Because, if someone was shown how to make a sandwich by Uncle Dorje then THAT is how sandwiches are made. ALL sandwiches ALL the time. Never mind that Uncle Dorje made a sandwich using stale white bread and canned cheese because those were the only things available to him at the time. Never mind that Uncle Dorje would much have preferred to make a nice roast beef sandwich on crusty homemade wheat roti. Uncle Dorje made something with stale white bread and canned cheese and called it a sandwich. Therefore, if you wish to make a sandwich, you must let your white bread go stale and wait until you have a can of cheese. If Uncle Dorje further put a slice of tomato on that concoction then, in future, everything served as a sandwich MUST have a slice of tomato - even if you have asked for it without. Even if you have told them to leave it out because you do not eat tomatoes and, indeed, will become deathly ill if tomatoes pass your lips. But you want a sandwich, therefore you will get a tomato. Uncle Dorje said so. Well, no, actually he didn’t, but one was not instructed to actually “think” about what one is doing - one just does it as it is “supposed” to be done. Pure auto-pilot. Maddening to watch - especially if you want a ham sandwich without tomato.
Okay, this is not a trait limited to Tibetans. Not in the least. My fellow Americans have their own unique version of playing Follow the Leader to avoid using logic and conscious thought. Pretty much every place I’ve ever been or heard of has people who don’t use sense the Goddess gave an inchworm to figure out the best way to do things. It’s just that I’ve spent rather a lot of time last few days dealing with the particularly Tibetan slant on this particular phenomenon. So I’m ranting a bit. Its a specific combination of not thinking (”nobody told me I had to think” “If I have an idea then I’d have to take responsibility for it and I’m scared to take responsibility.”) and rampant nepotism (Lama Dorje Woowoo is my mother’s cousin-twice-removed’s wife’s older brother’s second son and he got me this job and he didn’t say I actually had to do anything so you can’t make me and, if you try, I’ll screw it up so badly you’ll never ask me for anything again and will be sorry you were ever born and I’m gonna hold my breath ’til I turn blue…”) Here in most of Asia, nepotism is one of those things that goes without saying. Of *course* you hire kin and friends first - how else could you trust them if you weren’t related somehow? Add to that a certain frugality that makes people not only hire relatives first, but also pay them poorly AND the fact that the cheapest labour you can get is a combination of sanjor and kids from Bihar (who are usually uneducated, malnourished and frequently speak no language but their own dialect) neither group of which has a clue about hotel and restaurant management, sanitation or any other important issue, and you’ve got the makings for absolute travel HELL. Ask me how I know.

We arrived in Delhi to find it just as hot and dusty as expected, hot enough to boil our brains after the chill of the mountain morning when we left Tso Pema. Even though we had advance reservations at the hotel (Tara House - remember the name and be afraid, be very afraid) to find that they had screwed up and wanted to put us into rooms on the third floor. In Indian terms, that’s the fourth floor, the ground floor not being counted and anyway up a flight of stairs itself. Neither Rimpoche nor I have knees that will let us go up and down four flights of stairs several times a day so we’d specifically asked for first floor rooms so we would only have 2 flights to content with. Lena ranted, waved her arms, shouted, cursed and, eventually, Ma-Yum managed to, um… persuade… the management that it might behoove them to fix the glitch so we ended up with one first floor and one second floor room. Sigh. We got the first floor since my knees are the worst and the room had virtually no daylight, even at noon. Then we discovered that the bedding was still dirty. Took several tries to get that fixed (and they tried to replace dirty bedding with dirtier bedding. Um, no.) and to get at least vaguely clean towels. To it’s credit, the room was huge, the furniture better than average and the bathroom the best one I’ve seen in India. The good review stops there however because it was dirty and the staff was perhaps the most incompetent I’ve ever encountered. Since they were actually *trying* to be helpful, the sheer incompetence was startling. You expect that from indifferent staff at times, but not from eager-to-please ones. These kids were clueless. Between the Biharis and the Sanjor, nobody could communicate with anyone else, nobody had training in service and, as it turned out, nobody could cook or even understand cooking instructions. We tried ordering food from the restaurant several times. In each case, we had to send our orders back a minimum of 3 times before we received something edible (not what we wanted or had ordered, just vaguely edible!) It got pretty ridiculous, but we weren’t there for long so we dealt and simply vowed never to book into Tara house again if we can help it. The AC however worked okay and, as hot as it was outside, we simply stayed in a lot and didn’t eat and didnt get much accomplished.

By the time I got to the last paragraph above, I was using the past tense as it is now Monday and we’ve successfully landed in the States. I tried to post from Singapore without success - mostly because my brains had turned to mashed potatoes and I didn’t think it was worth paying $18 for a connection when I couldn’t think straight and might screw it up anyway. So I napped. Singapore’s Changi Airport is probably our favourite airport in the world. It is comfortable and extremely well designed for long layovers. They actually have quiet places with lounger chairs and massage chairs where people can lay down and sleep awhile. We weren’t able to sleep enough to overcome the inevitable jet lag, but it took the edge off our weariness and made the flights following (3 hours to Hong Kong where everyone de-planed just long enough to go through massive security AGAIN then a 12 hour flight to San Francisco, then a 2 hour drive to where we’re staying, but who’s counting?) bearable. Now we’re safely in Bolinas. It’s a great place
to make the transition after living in Tso Pema for the past months - quiet, small, isolated with the most remarkable view of the Pacific Ocean from our little guest room. I’ll try to write more about our adventures on the road - particularly the hilarious (could have been dangerous and not so funny) pileup on the moving sidewalk in Singapore where Rimpoche, Lena and I all ended up crashing and under various wheeled things and heaps of luggage on the floor. Since nobody got hurt, we’re still giggling like little kids about it. I seem to have figure out how to use the wireless here, but it’s glitchy. I’m about to post this and will start playing catch up some time tomorrow. But anyway, we’re more or less safely in the U.S. and trying to let our bodies figure out when we are.

Our Landlord’s family was ecstatic that this little girl arrived on the vernal equinox. Very auspicious timing!

Then we got up this morning to find that, in the wee hours, our Chime had produced these in the box we’d set up for her under our bed:

There’s three of them, all very lively and apparently quite healthy. She’s a proud momma. When we came in to see, she carefully rolled over and lifted her arms up so we could see them. She purrs madly when we pet and praise her for having such lovly offspring. And the best news is that all 3 are already spoken for - our friend Pia wants to take them with her back up to her fortress in Kinoor in September. They have a mouse problem and need cats and kittens from a cat like Chime who is really intelligent and very friendly are highly desireable. So no unwanted babies. We’re glad they showed up before Lena and I have to leave for Delhi. Kittens are soooo entertaining. Major awwwwww factor!

The electricity is still doing a disappearing act. It’s out almost all day every day and I am now so far behind that I swear I can see myself in the distance! I’m somewhat in despair about getting it all done in time. It’s really frustrating. I’ve been so chained to my desk the past month that I can tell I’ve actually put on about 4 or 5 kilos that I certainly didn’t need. I’m not actually eating all that much, I’m just so damned sedentary that I’m retaining water like a sponge on the ocean floor.  Well, it won’t be long til I can indulge in nice salads and seafood again and that should help a lot.

I’m working on sponsorship stuff and ought to be able to get back to people about that over the weekend. Bless you all and, please, anyone who might be considering offering to sponsor someone, do get in touch with me - we have a lot of people who need some ongoing assistance. We’ll get sponsors while we’re in the West teaching, but I’d like to see a handful of the most needy situations dealt with before we leave, people whose need is pretty immediate. I’m finding myself not wanting to leave here because there is so much work to be done at this end. There’s work to be done at that end also and people I love that I get to see soon, but I worry about leaving the sick ones and some of the babies and the elders for four months with nobody making sure they have medicine and food. I know there are people here who will take care of emergencies, it’s just that I fret about not being able to be on the scene, as it were. What, me, micromanage things? Nah, never….

Gotta go pet me some baby kittens.

Just got word that the power outage may well continue through the 22nd! Yikes! Power went off this morning at 7 AM. It’s back on now briefly (just before 9) but we expect it to go back out any minute. I’m hurriedly trying to recharge batteries. Doing a ton of work for Rimpoche trying to get ready to go west at the end of next week, so 98% of my on-line time, effort and attention has been, of necessity, dedicated towards that. Making airline reservation is the single hugest hassle - under good circumstances I often spend days at this stage of the planning, working out a flight plan, buying tickets, checking most effective and cost-efficient routes and plans. Doing it from up here on dial up without sufficient electrical power is definitely challenging my organizational abilities. Mostly I laugh, but last night Lena woke me up from literal nightmares in which I wasn’t managing to keep track of all the logistical, financial and political pieces that go into the various projects for which I am responsible. I dreamed that, in the middle of it, some political VIPs turned up angry at me about money matters and there was a huge hassle that ended up with me bursting into tears of frustration. Apparently I was shouting in my sleep which is why Lena woke me up. Guess I’m under a little pressure!

At any rate, we have a rough schedule up on Wangdor Rimpoche’s web site: www.customjuju.com/wangdorrimpoche so anyone interested can get an idea of where we will be teaching when over the next 4 or 5 months. This is almost entirely based on weekends at the moment. Because those are the big events for which we travel around North America, those get scheduled and then we open up a few days each week that people can book for single session teachings or empowerments at local venues. If you want to sponsor something in your area, take a look at the schedule and see if Rimpoche and Lama Lena are going to be nearby on a weekend. If so, contact me ASAP and there’s a good chance we can work something out for an evening or afternoon. It doesn’t have to be a huge space or public venue - often a good-sized living room in someone’s house works just fine, though we’ve also done evenings in places as big as the Tibet House or a Masonic auditorium.

We try to make this accessible to everyone. Even if you’ve never attended a dharma teaching before, feel free to come and sit and listen. One of the policies we operate under is that the dharma CANNOT be sold. Therefore ALL teachings are by voluntary offering only. People give what they are able based on their means and their inner motivation. We know that we’ve really made our point about things being open to anyone when we have everything from street people to multi-millionaires and receive offerings ranging from a handful of wildflowers from a little kid to a check for thousands from a corporate CEO! There are no prerequisites either, unlike in some places where meditation teachings come only after years of didactic study of details and philosophy. Wangdor Rimpoche and Lama Lena operate on the firm resolve that the Buddha sat under a tree and taught anyone (and anything) that showed up, how dare we put more of a filter than that on teaching. So feel free to come if you want.

Looks like we’ll be all over the map. I say “we” but I won’t necessarily be with Rimpoche and Lena on every stop. Generally I meet up with them every few weeks or so to do paperwork, bring needed items, catch up and help out. For instance, I’ll probably start out by going to most of the U.S.venues with them in April because we still have a lot of organizational details to complete and will need time together to work things all out. So I’ll travel with or meet up with them on the Big Island of Hawaii the first weekend of April after which I’ll visit my daughter while they head up to the Toronto area. Then we’ll meet up the following week in Massachusetts where they will teach in Shelbourne Falls on the weekend while I head up to Vermont and a glbt knitting camp with a group from one of my lists in for a couple of days (I am SO jazzed about this!) From there we will head up to Whidbey Island, WA. I expect that they will go back to CA right after, teaching in Napa the first weekend of May, then again we’ll meet up in Mt. Shasta, CA, which is near enough to my daughter’s that I’ll drive down to it. After that, they’re off to the East coast again - Tallahassee Florida, Washington DC, then Kansas City, Milwaukee (Hi Michael and Diana!!! Hi Robin!) I may need to join them again in Santa Fe, NM - we’ll see as it will have been a month and there will be business to sort out by that point. Then they are at Tara Mandala in Pagosa Springs, CO late June for which I don’t expect to be needed. July is back in Northern California, everywhere from the Monterey Area up to the Oregon Border, ending up in the SF Bay Area from which we will depart.

Now that departure may get shifted around as Rimpoche has been invited to teach in Santiago Chile. If we can work out the visa issues (always the main question) they’ll be heading there for a week in August. No idea if I will go also and we’ll return to India from South America or just how that is going to work. Fortunately, there’s 4 months in which to work it out.

Weather here has started to warm up quite a lot. It’s still chilly at night and in the rooms built into the mountain, but the sunshine is warm. The rains of the first half of the week washed everything clear and clean and you can see vast distances across the mountains to the far snow peaks.

I expect by the time we head down to Delhi to fly out, it will actually be hotter than I like my weather. At the moment however, the balmy warmth of spring feels quite welcome!

Better get this posted while I can - I expect the power to go off within the next half hour and I have about 5 hours worth of stuff to complete TODAY that requires light and internet. I probably have about 3 weeks worth of stuff to do in the next 4 days, but some is more critical than others. Better get cracking.

Oh yes… (this girl just can’t stop blogging eh?) I am working on getting back to potential sponsors with the neediest of people. I have this big stack of photos of people who have asked for help. This week’s project is to investigate and determine who is most truly in need and try to match them up with volunteers. My first priority is making sure that every family has enough to eat, that nobody is seriously ill without medical care and that the kids can go to school. I expect to be able to make some of those determinations within a couple of days and will write back to people who contacted me about sponsorship.

For those who can’t take on ongoing sponsorship, but asked if they could send a care package or something, the answer is a qualified “yes” - we’re headed to the States ourselves in a couple of weeks. Nyondo is staying here and can catch packages until we return. Hmph, internet ate part of my blog post. I had a paragraph about posting our weird wish list as a blog post for people’s amusement seeing as how the stuff we can’t get here ranges from rubber spatulas to bouillon cubes to sock yarn and makes a pretty strange compendium. Some things we can drag back, some things might be better to post. We’re still figuring out what’s reasonable, what’s vital and what we miss. A British visitor passed through this week and brought us some cheddar cheese and dark chocolate. We nearly kissed her feet.

Okay, back to work…

I know I haven’t written much this past week. I also know that I owe a whole bunch of wonderful people responses to private e-mails they have sent me. I have a pretty damn good reason though for not writing much: we’ve been mostly in the dark all week. The storms that began last week escalated. Tuesday was pretty much non-stop thunder and lightning, continuing into Wednesday. The temps continued to drop into the single digits. We had a hail storm that was so fierce that the ground was covered in white pellets. The mountains got a new frosting of snow. 5000 pilgrims were trapped by this same storm up in Jammu and Kashmir and had to be rescued. The power was mostly out, though we usually got a bit in the early morning and mid-evening, just enough to let everyone take care of emergencies and recharge drained cell phone batteries. I haven’t had a shower in a week as our small water heater tank is electric.

Yesterday was clear and clean, but freezing cold. And again, no power. All friggin’ day! Apparently, on top of the lightning strikes and downed lines, the state electric company had scheduled this week for MAJOR work on the lines running up the mountain. So there is no power ALL DAY for the next few days! As I am trying to do Rimpoche’s travel scheduling work and keep up with the sponsorship and medical fun tracking, I am pretty much on emergency only status with the laptop and cell phone modem. The batteries last a few hours, never long enough to handle the critical stuff, so I’m having to triage what I work on. Hopefully, by next week, it’ll be better - just in time for us to leave. If you know you ought to have heard from me by now and haven’t, this is what is up.  I feel like I just stole 10 minutes to write this blog entry!

Life is good, will try to talk more about it when I can come back and give details.

If it weren’t for the photos, I’m not sure I’d be able to remember what I’ve been doing because the last few days are mostly a blur. Fortunately, we have two cameras and a tendency to take a picture whenever something interesting or weird or pretty goes by. Which is usually several times a day. I need to get a new camera though because the one that works well in low light is getting elderly and there’s dust in the lense since Lena took pics of the plasterers working on the ceiling. The other, a decent Olympus, isn’t rechargeable and sucks at indoor and nighttime picture-taking.

Nyondo blogged about Friday’s pujas on her site. I think she focused on the fact that, in the process of doing many ceremonies to bless this house, an awful lot of stuff got burned around here to the point where I nearly stopped breathing and had to escape to the roof for part of the afternoon! Still, it was an amazing day and well worth the near-fatal smoke inhalation.

Our Landlord and his lovely wife

had a very elaborate and beautiful puja performed by a Hindu pandit that went on for quite awhile in the back room of the house which had been set up specifically for this purpose.

Plenty of fire there:

They then took it outside and a minor construction project resulted in this small shrine being built in front of the house, where it will permanently house the household deities. Bitu, the owner of the house we’re renting, will do monthly ceremonial offerings for prosperity and well-being at this shrine.

I did some ceremonies then which Nyondo reported on her blog to be Native American. However only one of the ceremonies was directly drawn from First Nations shamanic tradition. The primary ceremony was a sur chod, a burnt food offering of the Tibetan Bon lineage (the pre-Buddhist shamanic tradition of Tibet.) So more burning of grain and incense, though I did try to balance that using a modern convenience of a spray mist of herbal oils, to keep the balance between fire and water a little more effectively.

Just as I had finished, our Tibetan friends showed up to do their part of the houseblessings. The Khenpo (professor/scholar) of Zigar Monastery and young Palga Tulku

(who is going to be one seriously rocking lama in a few years!) had graciously agreed to come and perform the ritual of involking and making offerings to the spirits of this place. See the huge bowl of incense and grains in front of him? All of that was burned before they were done, producing the enormous clouds of smoke that I am certain drive all malefic influence (as well as all the people at one point) from the premises.

After that, Bitu and family fed everyone a big vegetarian feast which I neglected to photograph until all of it was inside of people and no longer photogenic. Fortunately, he did that at his house, a few doors down, as our was temporarily uninhabitable due to the massive and unexpected fumigation.

We did a post-prandial cleanup and rest then, literally and figuratively catching our breaths before the next thing could descent. We didn’t know *what* that next thing might be, but we were pretty sure that something would eventually happen. It is our karma to live in interesting times; peace and quiet is not our lot it seems. Now some of the lack of pandq was due to a big Indian wedding across the lake that had nothing really to do with us. It was simply raucous, having double the usual big brass band and enthusiastically cheering guests. So, between our all-day puja/openhouse thingie and that wedding, the vibe in Tso Pema was definitely lively.

Along about sunset, Bitu came by and said that his family would like to come over and sing for us. Realize that, when he says “my family” he is talking about a LOT of people - he is one of 7 brothers and 3 sisters and their assorted spouses, kids, parents, in laws, etc. that is the typical Indian extended family. So we cleared back the furniture on the veranda, threw down mats and they piled in with instruments and began to sing and play:

Traditional Indian (Hindu) music is among the most lovely and joyous sound imagineable. In the year that we’ve lived in these parts, I’ve come to absolutely love the strains of singing and drumming that come from the temples and villages and parties. Our house has wonderful accoustics so, full of music and singing and laughter, the energy of Friday night just got better and happier and more vibrant as time went on. We brought out tea and cookies for all. The kids were bouncing, even the grandmothers got into it.

Then the younger women got up and began to dance. It was infectious, lively, beautiful. They pulled Lena and Nyondo into their dancing. My knees had pretty much had it for the day so I watched and laughed as Nyondo and the younger sisters got seriously in synch with the drum and cybal-thingies:

Only, because I couldn’t dance, I got called upon to sing. Fortunately I can hold my own in that regard, so I sang a rather plaintive folk ballad and then, because neither Lena nor Nyondo ought to be called upon to sing solo, but were asked for a song also, I led them in a round of “Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore” which is somewhat lively and doesn’t require vituosity! All in all, it was a splendid, lovely, festive evening among new friends, feeling so very welcomed into this community. My face hurt from grinning so much and now I really need to learn more Hindi so I can learn some of the lovely songs I heard that night.

It poured that night. One of the reasons, I guess, that my knees were not going to let me dance. It’s been raining pretty much steadily since. We’d had a few nights of the most amazingly gorgeous moonrises over the mountains and lake:

but haven’t much seen moon or stars or sky since.

We haven’t seen a lot most nights as the electrical power has been out more than it’s been on since the weekend.  We think that the gods and spirits of this place must have liked our offerings on Friday since, during the first brief break in the weather on Saturday morning, they graced us with this:

stretching across the lake directly in front of our balcony.

By Sunday, the deluge was pretty much constant and the weather was back to being freezing cold as well as wet. We hunkered in the kitchen and built a fire in the fireplace there. I’m still learning how to cook in the dark with strange ingredients over a wood fire, but I did manage to turn out a nice batch of rice pudding and then, by evening, a really delicious stew made with local root vegetables and the shank of a somewhat mature goat that Nyondo brought home (the shank, not the whole goat - that’s another store entirely…) Even the cat appreciated that part of it:

Yes, Chime has definitely moved in and become “our” cat as her pregnancy progresses. Smart kitty she is and quite happy to slurp up yoghurt and rice or bread and fresh milk, but quite ecstatic with whatever bits of mutton or goat she can beg for from our plates as well. She’s taken to sleeping in our bed at night and protests vocally when moved because she’s hogging the pillows. She’s gotten a bit too wide now with kitten lumps in her abdomen, to squeeze out through the gate (how she got in in the first place) so we’re having to convince her to ask us to be let out when she needs to go. She’s actually quite an affectionate, purrful puss and likes to curl up on a lap or next to one on a couch while we knit, read or cook. Definitely knows her name - she’ll actually come when called if she’s around. We’ve gotten extremely fond of her and a house is more homelike when there’s a cat on the hearth!

Oh yeah, during all of this kind of domestic bliss on Sunday (hey I didn’t even get out of my bathrobe) the power was off for most of the day after we got struck by lightning early on. Boom, crash, sizzle!!! This is why we spent extra money on high end voltage regulators for the power system. They have definitely paid for themselves this weekend - we still have computers and a refrigerator that work. At least they work when there’s current in the lines. Which happens to be now - the lights just came back on. So I think I’ll go grind some coffee while I have this chance…

Will write when I can stop to catch my breath

It’s a runaway rollercoaster ride for the next few days. I’ve been on a fast paced roll of scheduling the upcoming trip, trying to wrestle a non-cooperative internet into giving me the info I need (tail end of Mercury retrograde anyone? geeeesh!) Tomorrow oughta be just wild. Beginning at 8 a.m. there is a Hindu puja to bless the new house to which the landlord has invited 100 people (and we’ve invited about 20) then two Tibetan lamas are coming to do the same until noon when a big feast will be served. After that, we’re scheduled to have some visitors from Mongolia, but they may or may not show, who knows. I expect the pujas will be quite enough to put us out of commission for the rest of the day!

Meantime, while I was wrestling electrons, Lena got over to see Kimi Devi, the carpenter’s grandmother. Turns out it’s her ankle that’s badly broken. Looks like it will need to be pinned. She’s feisty and sharp and good for a lot more time on this planet so it looks like she’s up for whatever it takes to get her walking again.  Here’s a couple of pictures:

This photo shows a good example of the kind of things that makes us chuckle when local women see Nyondo’s lip ring and ask her “why don’t you wear that ring in your nose like NORMAL people!”  Seriously. They do. THIS is normal.
I’ll be back as soon as I can, maybe even tomorrow. So for now I’ll just say a big Hi! to Hannah and a thank you and I will get back to you asap to Elizabeth and Cloud and Dale-Harriet and Rhonda and anyone else whose name has fallen out of the holes in my head.

Before I say anything else, I want to stop, take a deep breath and thank all of you who have so thoughtfully, so wondrously donated to the Medical Emergency Fund. I prostrate to your generousity and compassion. however each of you have found your way here to this blog - through word of mouth, through other people’s blogs (thanks Claudia, thanks Stephanie, thanks to all of you!) through the online communities, or through a shamanistic vision (yes, that too has happened!) you each typify the very best that humanity can aspire to - people who genuinely care about others in difficult circumstances, even though those others are different, speak another language, have different customs, skin colours, beliefs. You are people who DO something about that caring and compassion. Because it’s easy enough to speak, but the actions make a louder noise, penetrating deep into the heart of the Mother Earth, into the hearts of Her children. Thank you for understanding that we are all interconnected in this living organism and that, by helping one, you help all in a fundamental way. It’s a ripple effect, spreading outward, helping to counterbalance the fear and war and hopelessness. Those are the things we hear about in the news - the abuses in Darfur, the poverty in every nation’s ghettos, genocide and infanticide and all the millions of human dramas that go on every day. Each contribution, each gift or sponsorship takes a stand against the helplessness so many of us feel when we hear about all of these things going on all over the planet. Some of them seem - perhaps are - insurmountable by any means an individual can throw against them. What I try to do - what you all have been helping us here to to - is to make daily differences in the lives of other individuals. Seeing those differences keeps me hopeful about the future, not only of each person, but hopeful about the future of this little blue ball we live on together.

For the past few days, there has been a new influx of donations as people like Claudia (who has been sponsoring a student for several years - hi Claudia!) mention what we’re doing in their blogs and people come over here to see what’s going on. This is particularly wonderful because we’ve had rather a lot of needs lately. Right now, as I write this, our house is full of people who have come to see Lena about this medical problem or that. There’s a seriously ill monk in the clinic-to-be room, a nun with sciatica in the bedroom, a Ladakhi mother with excruciating headaches from an old car wreck, an elderly woman on the veranda and a really, really sick farmer waiting next door. We’re taking the monk to Mandi for an uper GI series, getting blood tests and stool tests for the old lady who may have parasites, subsidizing the Indian farmer’s ability to buy the right kind of food in an attempt to control his spiralling type 2 diabetes. Word is getting out and people are turning up at the door, hat in hand and hope in their eyes. Right now we’re trying to take care of as many of the urgent problems as possible so that, when we make our trip back to North America in April, we’ll be able to leave Nyondo in a position to simply administer rather than triage the emergencies as she doesn’t have the medical training that Lena (or even I) have.

Lodro Tayes’s mother is back from Chandigarrh, having had gallbladder surgery and some other procedures that we’re not yet clear about, but which appear to have helped. We’ve requested the medical records to review. Her expenses rose to 30,000 INR (somewhere around $800 US) but the glorious thing is that she COULD get the operation due to the generousity of strangers. The carpenter’s grandmother has a cast on her leg and will be evaluated to see if she needs/can be helped by surgery. Sometimes it’s small things that make a huge difference. Liz sent a care package all the way from Virginia with essentials like antibiotic ointment, sanitizing gel and reading glasses. Here’s somebody seeing the nearby world clearly for the first time in years:

She was absolutely amazed by her hands, which have been just a blur for a long, long time! She thinks that the biggest boon will that she can now thread a needle and sew her clothes - the eye of a needle has been invisible to her. She cannot read or write in any language, but reading glasses help, not just with reading, but with the million small tasks of life. Liz, you rock!

There are also a few of you who have inquired about taking on sponsorship for those in need and what that’s all about, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about that today. This is the unpaid work I’ve been doing for the past 20 years, matching individuals - usually Tibetan refugees - in need, with people in the west who are willing to send the equivalent of $20-25 US per month to help those without any other means of support keep body and soul together. It’s amazing what $25 will buy for someone who has nothing: rice and dal, shoes and shelter. Not fancy but far better than the alternative.

In the beginning, our focus was primarily on the nuns, monks, lamas, and yogis of both sexes living lives of meditation and simplicity up in the caves on the top of the mountain. Some of them have been in retreat for years. Many escaped with the clothes they stood up in when the Chinese came to burn and raze the monasteries and nunneries of Tibet. It wasn’t just the practitioners who escaped, though they were the first to settle here in Tso Pema where they could continue their practice in relative safety. Over the years the community of Tso Pema (Lotus Lake) has grown to include families with children, many elders, as well as householders in their prime. It’s a hard life, being a refugee here. The Indians have been incredibly kind and welcoming to permit these homeless refugees to share their land. There are, however, not even enough jobs to keep the Indian population out of poverty. The refugees eke out a living as they are able, families working together to create small businesses where possible, pooling their resources and living many to a room. They are, however, hard pressed for things like medicine and school fees for the kids, even in the best of times. For many, there is the trauma of being displaced, of having seen their families killed, of losing their homeland, of walking across the mountains, of being inprisoned, raped, tortured. Even those born in India are affected by all of these things - the children most of all I think. This is where we also try to help out. It’s actually where we began, the business of finding sponsors whenever Wangdor Rimpoche came to teach in the West. He would bring photos of the neediest folks and stories of those who had no photos and we would do what we could to match them up with people who volunteered to sponsor them. Over the years, scores of people have been helped in this way, but people age, children are born, people continue to escape occupied Tibet, so the need is ongoing. We were able to do a lot of that kind of matching up even when we were living in the U.S. and a lot of my time and energy these past two decades has been given to this grassroots program where 100% of what people donate goes to the individuals who need it. That continues. The medical fund came once we got here, to Tso Pema/Rewalsar and discovered that there were very few medical resources available to the refugees and that, of the resources that are there, many people cannot afford them. We’re also able to see who is falling through the cracks and try to do something about them.
I’ve decided to post about a couple of our more urgent cases for sponsorship in the hopes someone will read this and step forward. We’ll continue to look for sponsors when we’re in the West this spring, but some of these are people who can’t wait several months, whose situation is really critical right now. Generally, sponsorship involves sending a personal check 2 or 3 times a year and keeping up a light correspondence. Some people have formed very close relationships between themselves and their sponsee, others just like to know they’re doing something beneficial, but don’t have the time or attention for much correspondence. Both are fine. Not all of our refugees find it easy to write often - kids in school, the sick, often have to have someone handle things for them as they aren’t able to do much themselves. But I’ve seen some amazingly close ties emerge over the years, some real miracles that bridge cultures and life experiences to benefit all parties concerned. The practitioners, lamas and yogis and nuns and monks, do practice for their sponsors and all share in the merit. Even the lay people here are usually strong Buddist practitioners and hold their sponsors in their thoughts and prayers. We have one middle-aged lama here whose sponsor recently died after a lengthy illness. Nyima is really broken up about her death. He has been rising at 5 a.m. to do special ceremonies and prayers on her behalf and has requested prayers for her from H.H. the Dalai Lama and H.H. Karmapa. This kind of caring and sharing is not uncommon.

I guess I’m rambling here, but I have been so moved by both the need I see around me every day and by the astounding kindness of people I don’t even know trying to help from all the way on the other side of the world, that I tend to wax hyperbolic in my enthusiasm. I think I’ll stop here and just let pictures do most of the talking. Here are the people we’re trying to help in an immediate way:

This is Tenzin Zangmo. She’s 7 and still in kindergarten, despite being exceptionally bright. Why? Because around here, schooling costs money (about $25 a month) and her parents don’t have enough to pay tuition. The local kindergarten (run also through donations) is a wonderful place that really teaches the youngsters something, but Tenzin has learned pretty much everything they have to teach her by now and is ready for a “real” school. Her folks are Magom Dorje and Pema Wangmo:

Dorje is an old cave yogi who fell in love with Pema and married her. Together they have a little stall near the lake where they make and sell prayer flags and beads. They aren’t making it, despite working constantly. They figure they might have to pull the older girl out of school so they can send the little one for awhile. It sucks to have to make those kind of choices. Frankly, whoever gets sponsored in this family, any money will go towards educating the kids. They don’t say it, but you can see the desperation in their eyes despite their smiles when they talk about their kids. We need to get Tenzin Zangmo a sponsor so she can get out of kindergarten.

Our other serious situation is Kangshel Chodron:

Her son is Tsering, a lama in his fifties who has lived in the caves on the mountain for over 30 years now. Tsering has one leg and a terrific sense of humor. His mother has multiple health problems and, as you can see, isn’t very cheerful. She also has no means of support and is too old and ill to do any work now. Tsering has brought her here to live with him in his cave, but he has nothing of his own either. We’re talking her for a bunch of lab tests to see what we can do to improve her health somewhat, but she also needs food and shoes and a blanket and life’s necessities. Her needs only partly fall under the medical fund’s scope. We hope to find someone to help with the rest.
There are others, there will always be others. These two families are simply at the very top of our list at the moment. If you want to help, e-mail me at zangmo@customjuju.com and I’ll tell you more. If you have already helped, thank you again, from the depths of all of our hearts. Blog readers really ought to rule the world!

I was born and raised in Chicago,Ill USA, which makes me a big city kid. Other than Chicago, I’ve spent time in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco where I lived for about 25 years. Urban to the core. I did have all those camping trips and Girl Scout things during the years when you actually learned to build a fire out of something other than charcoal briquets and cook on hot rocks, identify poison ivy and sew on your own buttons. As an adult I’ve spent time in the country, camping and backpacking and sleeping out under the stars while freezing my tuckus off in a sleeping bag on wet sand.Little did Mrs. Froelicher know that the things we learned under her tutelage in order to earn those embroidered badges, would end up being useful life skills for me 40 years later and halfway around the world.

There really are days when I think I could write my own version of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book wherein our intrepid journeyers make their way in a strange land with far less resources and technology than they are used to, under conditions that would seem primitive to most folks back home.

I’m giggling because, as I was writing the sentence above, the power went out in Rewalsar. Again. I have battery power on my laptop, but there isn’t a light visible for many kilometers. We’re used to living by candlelight for hours on end. I spent today working out ways to bake in the coals of the fire (I need better pots for that) using local ingredients. Our milk comes to us every morning still warm from the cow - across the street - and has to be boiled before use. Now there’s a cat in the house so we have the additional step of remembering to put the milk up where she can’t get into it and spill it all over the floor and into the woodpile. Ask me how we learned about that…

One of the conveniences in this house is that it has a real toilet - a sitter - out on the front balcony. I posted a picture a week or so ago. What I didn’t know about this is that the pipe from the toilet leads down to the street and under the road that runs past our house. It’s literally a one lane dirt road where, if two vehicles meet, one of them has to back up to a wide spot to allow for passing. This is the main road up the mountain, the road everyone uses for everything. So. This plastic (uh huh) pipe was run under this dirt road to the septic tank on the other side. Under the dirt road where buses and goods carriers and cars and everything run. And we had these humongo storms last week that saturated the main road, turned it to mud.

Once the mud dried a bit, I came out Friday morning to find a real problem - when a person flushed, instead of the contents of the toilet tank going down the pipe, under the road and into the septic tank, they went down and… oh dear, and made a nice big wet spot under the toilet room. This was soooo not okay, with us, with anyone. The guy who owns the house is very very sweet, but he is a fretter. So he fretted and worried until we finally managed to get the plumber who installed things over - right about sunset. And they set about trying to figure out the problem. Eventually they found it:

The plastic pipe that runs under the road had been crushed by the weight of the many large vehicles that run over the road. Now I’m no plumbing expert, but it seems to me that this is the kind of thing you might expect with that configuration. But no. This is India and everyone was quite surprised that the buses had crushed the plastic pipe allowing our sewage to run out onto the street. Anyway, the next thing was they wanted to come back and fix this situation in the morning. Until Lena pointed out that, beginning at about 6:30 a.m. there is a bus to Durghapur roughly every half hour and this is the ONLY road in or out from Durghapur. And the next day was Holi, the festival of colours that I talked aobut in my last blog post. The prospect of digging up the road while blocking bus loads of holiday revelers armed with bags of coloured dyes was enough to motivate the plumber into overtime work. So, he and Bittu, our landlord, began to dig up the road as it got dark while someone went off to find a new pipe.

Now this is India (somehow that refrain keeps recurring doesn’t it?) and so you not only need people to DO the work, but people to watch people do the work and to kibbitz about it. We called in some favours and got the loan of 3 labourers from the statue project to come help dig. Our friend Yab came to supervise them and contribute some concrete reinforcement materials. Lena was called to be one of the watchers. The landlord’s wife made appearances. Neighbors gathered. Some guy heading up the mountain on a motorcycle stopped to watch and kibbitz (tho he was one of the people who could get by the ditch.) Somebody (Lena I think) came up with the idea of using rebar as well as the concrete reinforcement so that maybe it wouldn’t happen again. Not soon anyway. Pretty soon there were at least a dozen people out there, including the guy whose job it was to stand there with a naked light bulb held up high:

Tea was served. A little bonfire was built to warm the workers and the watchers. If it hadn’t been so late and so cold, it might have been more festive. Somehow, fixing a toilet in the middle of the road in the middle of the night took on the community air of an old fashioned barn raising party. Eventually it was done and done pretty well and everyone went home to get some well deserved rest. Of course many people had to come by in the daylight to see the damp patch of concrete and watch it dry. This is what we do for entertainment - watch things dry.

A last couple of pictures. This is a housewarming gift given to us by our dear friend Minchun Dorje, fondly known as Yab. He’s quite an amazing guy and his story is equally as amazing and delightful as he is. It’s the story of a genuine Ladakhi princess who fell in love with a brilliant, but unschooled Tibetan refugee who was working as a coolie and ran away with him despite her family’s disapproval. More than twenty years later their story continues. Their son has been recognized as a tulku (reincarnation of a great lama) their daughter is as brilliant as her papa and mama combined and even more beautiful. There are all sorts of twists and turns to the saga, but above all, these are fascinating, courageous people who I am very proud to know and to call my friends.

So, the gift. Yab shares our sensibilities about things like wood and metal and craftsmanship in objects and surroundings. He was the one that managed to convince the Indians, who like to paint everything, that we were serious about leaving the woodwork unpainted. So, for a housewarming gift, he gave us an antique. This is a lock, a very old lock in traditional Ladakhi/Tibetan design. Every part of it was made by hand, including the key. I have always been fascinated by the workings of locks anyway and this piece - as well as the key that makes it work - is a thing of beauty. Having done a goodly amount of metalsmithing myself, I really can appreciate the workmanship that goes into it. I’m posting the pictures here hoping that others might appreciate it also. Something unusual and very, very cool. It works just fine with a little oiling. The only trick will be getting the key duplicated!

There seems to be more special occurances here lately than I have the time or bandwidth to actually describe. I still haven’t posted pictures from day 2 of Losar or from the week of empowerments that just finished and I’m already backlogged with pictures from the last few days.

Yesterday was Holi, the Indian festival of colour. It’s a really upbeat and totally celebratory holiday. It’s about colour and blurring the distinctions of colour and caste and social convention by turning everyone multi-hued on purpose. Everyone goes around and paints everyone else. Up here where it’s cold, the custom is to use powdered dyes. In places where it’s already hot in this season, water pistols and even buckets full of liquid dyes are squirted and dumped on ones friends, family, lovers, etc. And not tame colours either - but brilliant, vibrant, intense ones. Other customs are to eat sweets and party foods and for the adults to get intoxicated on bhang or booze or whatever.

We’d been up late the night before dealing with a plumbing distaste (stories and photos another time) so we were a bit bleary first thing in the morning. Still, Lena and I were here for last year’s Holi revels and we all are aware of what they’re about, so we dressed in washable, not precious clothes. Early in the day, our neighbors were out, the wives and kids of the families already laughing and calling and tossing handfuls of bright colours at each other. They waved to us:

Then came upstairs to our house and cheerfully painted our faces while we handed round candies to everyone. Considering the possibilities, they were somewhat restrained in how much they decorated Lena

and me:

And even Nyondo. Except that she then went down to town and, as she was already decorated, nobody hesitated to add to the mix so, by the time she got back, she was covered in pink and green and purple and yellow and scarlet and had acquired her own bag of bright yellow dye to use in return. Even her glasses were coated in the stuff until she cleaned them off and, after a thorough shower in the evening, the front of her hair is still bright red:

She actually looked much happier and more festive than this picture shows!

Oh and Holi is a full moon festival also. Once the day’s laughing and brilliancy was done and the seriously intoxicated part got going, there was the most amazing moonrise above the lake:

Much more fun than digging up the road to fix the toilet pipes in the middle of the night.

Dale-Harriet commented that our Tibetan Losar festivities sounded a whole lot like a Native American/First Nations powwow. Having been to a number of these, I think that her observation is very accurate. Where we’re living, the majority of the Tibetans are Khampas, nomads from Eastern Tibet. The culture is a culture of herders and warriors, both very fierce and very spiritual simultaneously. Furthermore, it’s a clan-based, tribal culture that has had many centuries to build up and develop customs, festivities, pathways and unique habits that, nonetheless, are very similar to other nomadic tribal cultures. The coming together, the reuniting of families and clans for trade, games and feasting, is important to any people who spend their lives in many places, following the needs of the seasons and living off the earth and its bounty.

Sometimes the similarities are almost eerie. There is some speculation about common roots between some of the North American tribes and the peoples of Tibet, Mongolia and Central Asia. Certain patterns, esthetics and even words tend to support this theory. Examples would include a preponderance of jewelry that combines turquoise and coral by both Tibetans and the Indians of the Southwest region of the U.S. - both of which are landlocked places in which turquoise abounds, but coral… Well, they’re landlocked territories and coral is a product of the oceans. Thus, it is precious. And rare. How odd is it that it should be so much used in both cultures? Then there is something I’ve heard (but this isn’t a scholarly statement, rather a repeating of information absorbed in the course of life) that the Tibetan words for “sun” and “moon” are the same as the Hopi words for “moon” and “sun.” I find this truly fascinating if it is true.

Anyway, a Khampa friend went home this past summer to visit his family who are still yak herders and nomads in Kham, living the same lifestyle as their ancestors have lived for centuries. He took pictures of his family in their normal environment and I just got permission from him to share them.

Outside the summer tents:

A young woman singing traditional folk songs in fancy dress:

Milking dzo (the word for a female of the yak species. The actual word “yak” means “bull” so yak milk would be a funny term.)

inside the “winter house”

dressed up in their very best: