Random Wednesday Redux
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Every time I go to write a post, I think “oh, today I will talk about all the lovely things around me; I’ll focus on the positive and let the difficult things wait for another day.” Because there are many fine and wonderful things all around me - I am surrounded by beauty and miracles!
However sometimes those miracles seem overshadowed by all the work there is to be done, all the need and all the urgency. I get caught up in the day-to-day activities and then I don’t get much chance to write again for awhile until the pile of stories gets enormous. Because we’re busy keeping up with the reality behind the stories. I pick from that stack and talk about it. Or them. Usually it’s a them as the situations and the stories are myriad and complex. And really, many of the things I’m calling miracles arise out of those situations and people’s responses to challenge.
So this morning I sat down to write a blog post. I was going to write, as amusingly as possible, about the various critters around here. Two footed, four footed, six footed and even eight footed critters abound in Himachal Pradesh. We’re made well aware here (as we rarely were in a U.S. city) how very much the wildlife outnumbers the human life, particularly in this mostly rural environment. Like nature almost everywhere, most of it is benign and we’re able to co-exist quite pleasantly with our neighbors.
Some, like the wild parrots that live on the mountainside, are quite shy. I was lucky to get this shot where the subject was silhouetted against the sky rather than camouflaged in matching greenery:
The lizards that live in our house and feast on bugs each night absolutely delight me. These are relatives of the huge monitor lizards that live around the springs up here and which can reach up to 9 feet in length. Watching these guys is my one incentive to wear my glasses indoors since the small ones tend to hang out near the ceiling:
I was thinking about critters this morning since, as I was sitting with my first cup of coffee, a monkey came right on in past me (eyes not open yet apparently) and began helping himself to food out of the cats’ dish in the back hall! They’ve been awfully bold this past week as entire troops migrate from the top of the mountain where it’s now getting quite cold at night down to the milder terrain downslope from our house. A lot of them are mothers with babies clinging to them:
It’s harvest in this farming community. Everything is being stirred up, rearranged and the fields, once a good source for simian bandits, are full of people cutting and picking and threshing. I suspect that’s part of what is driving the monkeys to brave indoor raids as well as the colder nights up top. The farmers are cutting and drying winter fodder for the livestock as well. Roofs are piled with branches and grasses going from bright green to brown/gray in the afternoon sunlight. The cows themselves seem to know that they’re gods in this Hindu land and aren’t the least little bit worried about going hungry. They amble slowly along the road, stopping occasionally to munch a tasty looking stalk or to philosophically drop a load in just the spot guaranteed to be stepped in by the next passerby. In the afternoons they tend to stop and nap on what would be our front lawn if there were any grass:
Now, not all the beasties are totally benign. Some of them are merely creepy such as the spider below. These guys are fairly common and the part that really gets to me is that they are big enough (8-10″ in diameter) that they make a clacking noise when they walk. They’re super skittish though and run the other direction if you startle them. Still, I prefer they hang out somewhere other than over my head.
As for the not-so-nice critters well… One major reason that I haven’t blogged much the last few weeks is that I got stung by a scorpion. On my neck. In bed at night. Not a fun experience, even for someone born under the sign of Scorpio! A few people who heard about this have commented that they thought that the sting of a scorpion was lethal. Not so. Not usually. Unpleasant yes. My neck and hand (secondary sting when I brushed it off me) swelled up, I itched, ran a fever, had two weeks of awful headaches, but I survived and would say that I was nowhere close to death at any point, just uncomfortable as hell! Today is the first day I feel pretty much back to normal. I do seem to be the one with scorpion karma this season. Earlier in the spring, during the first hatching season, Nyondo had a few encounters, though they were visual rather than physical contact fortunately. Here’s a picture she took of one she found in her bedroom. It’s laying on its back here if you were wondering:
The one that got me was smaller, I think. But then I was half asleep and it was dark and, by the time I realized what had happened to me, it had scuttled away into the night. I was simply aware of waking up, seeing something sitting on my shoulder, wriggling and waving at me and smacked it off reflexively. Wasn’t until I swelled up like I had the mumps that we realized what had happened and, by that time it was long gone. I did, however, have a second near miss a few days ago when I found another, very small, black scorpion on… my toothbrush! So glad I spotted it before sticking it in my mouth!
I’ve been working on this post for nearly 4 hours off and on. I write a bit and something occurs. I crop and upload a photo and the phone rings. People come to our door. Lunch is ready early and must be eaten while hot. More arrivals, new tasks, questions. I think I know what I’m doing and then discover I must sit and recollect my thoughts which have veered off in unexpected directions. Some of those thought trains have derailed and vanished. As Ferron sings in one of her songs “life don’t clickety-clack down a straight line track, it comes together and it comes apart.”
I think that, in a lot of ways, life in India comes apart pretty easily. The pace of life here is no less busy, no less full than life in the West. It is, however, a more erratic pace with more varrigated textures and different sorts of interruptions. Far fewer appointments, far more occurances. Family life and work and community are not distinct, separate aspects of our daily existance. Rather, they weave in and out, sometimes all tangled together like a pile of sleeping kittens, sometimes hieing off in many directions simultaneously, seriously challenging anyone with an attention deficit! So it can take an entire day to write a blog post because, in between paragraphs are many other happenings, none of which can truly be either predicted or avoided.
The hijacking of a thought train can literally take days. A good example of this came last week. Lena had rather a lot of sick people who needed to go into Mandi for lab tests, x-rays and second opinions. She scheduled all this for Thursday, taking them all at once for efficiency’s sake since even one trip into town takes the better part of a day. She planned for six and figured it would take all day and they’d each get seen, tested, whatever. When she met the jeep at 8 a.m., she had 10 people waiting for her, more than half of them seriously ill. By the time she got them to Sanjivan Hospital, an hour away, three of them were in bad enough shape to be admitted, including the nun who’d been hospitalized late last month. In fact, all 3 of the admissions were nuns, each with a different serious ailment. Between them, the younger two read like an internist’s full caseload: heart valve defect, gallstones and inflammation, uterine fibroids, severe dehydration, a kidney stone and a whopping heap of post traumatic stress disorder on the one newly escaped from Tibet.
The third, an elderly nun named Sonam Chodron, has severe rheumatoid arthritis and it had gone septic - her joints were infected.
In the U.S. or other parts of the western world, they would have been admitted to the hospital and Lena could have come home, assured that they’d be taken care of by hospital staff. Not so in India, at least the part where we live where it often still seems like the 19th century. Here, when you are admitted to hospital, you get a room with a bed for the patient and a bed for whatever family member or friend stays with you to take care of you. “Nursing” staff administer meds, draw blood, handle emergencies, but they don’t feed, bathe or otherwise assist the patient, not even to the toilet. Of *course* you have a family member, that’s what families are for!
Sonam Chodron has a son, very competent and intelligent (just like his mom) who stayed and took care of her. But the younger nuns have nobody nearby. Calling around, we found the sister of one living in a nunnery in another state and she was summoned to help. In the meantime, Lena ran up and down and all over Mandi, taking this one for an endoscopy, that one for a bacterial culture, etc. etc. She left at dawn on Thursday and returned home, back to Tso Pema, on Saturday night - still in the clothes she’d left with. No, not a straight line track at all and this is the twenty-five cent version that doesn’t take into account any of a hundred other things that occurred in those three days. The excellent news is that three different people are alive today who might otherwise not have made it and several others are much happier and healthier than a week ago. It was worth the effort.
What’s harder is the ones we don’t have resources to help, whose needs are beyond the scope of what we can do. Those are the hard stories, the ones who don’t always have pretty or interesting pictures to go with them. We cannot restore a sense of safety to the young Buddhist nun from Dharamsala who was raped at a bus stop in the middle of the night. All we can offer is help getting tested for STDs and pregnancy and protect her confidentiality while she comes to grips with the trauma. We don’t have the resources to really help the young monk from Spitti who needs bi-monthly treatments and expensive medication for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia. It’s a condition for which the survival rate is excellent - with proper medicines and therapies. How do I look into the eyes of a kid of thirty-four and explain that his chemo would eat up every penny we’ve raised so far, leaving nothing for anyone else and still wouldn’t be enough to cure him?
And what the heck do we say to the latest situation that walked through my front door as I was writing this blog, sat down on a bench and smiled shyly?
Her name is Anjeli. She’s eight years old. Her father is a farmer in a village about 4 kilometers from here. This past April she was playing in a field while her parents worked nearby and somehow managed to get poked in the eye with the not-so-proverbial sharp stick. 20 days in hospital in Chandigarrh where the doctors are some of the best in India, but they couldn’t save the eye.
They think that a corneal transplant will restore her vision and give her a future. Here, in India, a girl child with one eye will be shunned and forever dependent on the charity of her family. Already the children tease her and she is refusing to go outside to play, to be seen. There’s nothing that can be done about the culture in which she’s living. But about the eye? I read through the extensive records and other papers they’ve brought with them that details the history of Anjeli’s tragedy. A transplant might become available, might help, might be… one and a half Lakh which is about four thousand U.S. dollars. A bargain by U.S. standards. Barring that, some reconstruction and a prosthetic implant. Estimated at only one Lakh. Maybe the family can raise some of the money. Everyone in the village who can contributes to these kinds of things. A hundred rupees here, eighty there, five hundred from a merchant, it’ll ad up. But a Lakh is a Hundred Thousand Rupees. She’s smart, good in school, but now there will be no higher education for this kid or the others in this family.
Dammit. I hate this feeling so helpless. She’s sitting in my house with a blank space where a lively brown eye should be. Her father looks whipped. He doesn’t say a lot. They haven’t gone back for followup assessment. They can’t afford the fees and the trip to Chandigarrh even for that. That we can do something about. I make copies of Anjeli’s medical records and return them to her dad along with two 500 rupee notes saying, “take her to see the doctor again. We’ll give you a letter to give to him that will ask a bunch of questions about what can be done for her. Bring that back and we’ll see what we can do to help.” It’s a start. A step in the journey and I can’t promise that it will lead anywhere, that we can help Anjeli out of the woods. But we’ll try. That’s what we’re here for. I wasn’t sure when we came exactly why our karma drop kicked us into this life, this place, but the picture keeps getting more and more clear. There’s an awful lot to be done here.
And how was your day? Please don’t hesitate to comment. I really like hearing from folks in the big, wide world of lattes and traffic and broadband connections.
