The Giving in Nepal

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I had to go.
I mean I really had to go.
Rattling my way through the jungly-darkness, I was smack-dab in the middle of a 17-hour bus ride when my bladder issued its final warning.
Stepping once again onto the feet of my fellow passengers, I approached the driver.

For the third time he’d denied my plea. I returned to my seat. A doozy of a pick, perched right over the wheel-well. There, atop a skin of disingenuous Naugahyde, I attempted to avert my attention by visualizing all things dry; deserts, cotton balls, Saltines, Al Gore. All to no avail. Meanwhile, the dilapidated bus shook and lurched – intermittently bouncing my head off the ceiling like an Olympic volleyball.
I was going to burst.

I snuck to the back seat, where within the bumpy darkness, I performed a minor miracle – filling a plastic bottle without spilling a drop. Ironically, the bus came to a stop.
I took this as my cue and ever-so-ninja-like, slid open the back window and peered out into the impenetrable blackness. I dashed my eyes from left to right. Nothing. I held the bottle out and turned it upside down. Then, in a moment of indescribably bad timing, the bus driver rounded the back corner. It was a direct hit. I was dumbfounded. Not quite realizing what had happened to him, he tilted his chin, then pulled the wet shirt from his skin and sniffed. His eyes seemed to roll back into his head. When they returned, he looked up as if to say, “This is NOT what I think it is.”
When the whole thing blew over, and the the bus began to move again, I fell asleep with one eye open, while the bus driver traded glances between the road and his least-favorite passenger in the rear-view mirror.
Shaken and weary, I finally arrived in Kathmandu, and the first thing I came across was a headline that read “45 killed in bus crash.”
Feeling as though I’d just dodged a bullet, I set out on the streets to reclaim the 25 pounds I’d lost in Tibet.
My plan: eat anything that wasn’t nailed-down. Striking fear into the hearts of my fellow diners, I devoured pizzas, cakes and curries with the voracious abandon of a turbo-charged branch-shredder. “Tape worm,” I’d offer before I’d burp and walk away.
October marked a series of Hindu festivals in Kathmandu, where Nepalis took to the street to drink and dance among an explosion of rickshaws, beggars, hawkers and hash dealers – all of of them churning wildly in the city-center mosh-pit.

One afternoon, my attention turned to a poster hanging on my hotel wall. It had a picture of a local orphanage and stated, “Volunteers needed.” As I read, a voice asked, “Would you like to go see?” It was front-deskman, Krishna Jaisi, who volunteered his time at the orphanage on his days off.
Before long, Krishna and I were walking through the front gates of a tumble-down household, where we looked upon a handful of children engaged in the hard work of play.
“Welcome,” came with an extended hand from Christian pastor and Nepal Orphanage director Ram Bhandari. He had started the orphanage after becoming tired of looking helplessly upon the armies of children sleeping in bus stations or on the streets of Kathmandu.
After formalities, I asked Ram if I could take some photographs. “Of course,” he said, and I went straight to work. Within moments I was immersed in the group of mini-people. They responded as all children do, happy to have attention directed at them. It seemed to give them a well-needed sense of importance. And as I began to make images of their playful smiles, I couldn’t help but notice an underlying seriousness. As if they’d somehow been forced into becoming adults.
It was just this seriousness that struck me as I raised my camera to photograph 7-year-old Suman Nagarkoti. “C’mon now,” I said, making a funny face, trying to coax a smile. Ram interrupted. “Suman was brought here by the police, after her father left her, and her mother was thrown in jail.”
I looked back at her. She looked through me as if I were a sheet of glass – her gaze fixed on the window – as if her parents had merely gotten lost and were soon due back home.
I turned my attention to a playroom, where a handful of boys penciled textbooks scattered randomly across the floor.
I crouched down to get a photo of Manis Thapa, who at the age of 10, had never known his parents. “Do you like it here?” I asked, not quite knowing what to say.
“This is my family now,” he said, seemingly pleased. “And we will never be separated … even when we grow up.”

His statement seemed to come from the center of his heart.
Before I was done, I came upon the youngest member of the household, Juti Gurung. When I raised my camera, I captured an image of her tiny eyes, as they looked curiously upon her surroundings.
“How old is she?” I asked Ram.
“We think she’s 3,” he said.
“You think?”
“We found Juti a month ago, after she’d been abandoned in a downtown bus station.”
My heart sank. I turned back to the child. Her clear-bright eyes seemed to reflect all things possible within the universe. She ran across the room, into the arms of volunteer Judy Berta.
Berta had come all the way from Budapest, Hungary, after learning of the orphanage on the Internet through the non-profit organization Hands for Help Nepal (www.handsforhelp.org.np).

This year she’d spend her monthlong vacation volunteering at the orphanage. As she spoke, I watched young Juti move closer into her arms, and I felt a certain warmth as I watched love flow from one human being to the next, without regard to age, culture, gender or race.
“What made you come here?” I asked Judy.
“In Europe and the West,” she began, “everything is about money. But me – I have another idea about life. I don’t have a lot of money,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean that I cannot give from the heart.”
Before long, it was time to go, and I said my goodbyes to those within the orphanage.
A few days later, I packed my bike-bags for the first time in a month.
As I pondered my upcoming journey across India, the silence was overcome by a vacuum of thoughts.
I thought of Ram, Judy, Krishna and the orphans – each of them expanding my definition of what it meant to care, give and love.
Then I thought back on a conversation I’d had with 11-year-old Bisan Gurung. Having lost both of his parents when he was young, Bisan was no longer hedging his bets on fate. As I’d watched him dig deeply into his books, he looked up at me for a moment as if to state a purpose: “I like to study,” he said confidently. “Someday, when I grow up, I will be a teacher.”

Little did he know, that deep within my heart, he’d already begun.
- For those who are interested in information on volunteering or adoption, or contributing to the Nepal Orphanage please contact: Helping Hands Nepal, www.handsforhelp.org.np
Nepal
Where: Kathmandu, Bhaktapur, Pasputinath, Patan, Swayumbanath
When: October 15-30, 2006
Mileage log: 12,040
Elevation: 2,970 feet