Where we were...

Tuesday night in Collegeville, and it has to be time now for my first, well, second listen of this winter season to Tom Waits' "Christmas Card from a Hooker I Know in Minneapolis." Maybe premature, but that's a chance I'm willing to take. But really, where were we? It's been a long time since I've last written, but not a lot has changed. The world continues to spin despite dire predictions otherwise. Certainly, though, that doesn't mean it's always going to, but so it goes. Back to Collegeville on a surprisingly mild November night. Only a fraction of last year's snowfall covers the ground, but when it fell from its celestial heights, it brought some interesting thoughts with it-thoughts of finals, of applications, of letters, of women, of the boys, and mainly questions-questions! The plague of uncertainty grips us all, well, not all. A few lucky souls have it figure out while the rest of us seem to desperately cling to whatever seems steady, whatever has the semblance of solidity. Not to fret, though. Not to fret at all. It's in adversity and challenge that we find our selves, and dear god I'm hoping that finding myself doesn't involve moving back in with the parents, and I have a feeling I won't, and more importantly, my gut feelings are usually right. Perhaps I've watched too many sitcoms, but I just can't help but imagine-maybe hope-that we all end up being wildly successful.

Cheers-

C

India, So Far

It's impossible to capture a country, let alone one whose history trounces that of Western civilization, in a week, but there is something about India in my veins already. It oozes out of every sandstone building; each cut brick possesses its own tale of how it came to be placed in this fort or that mosque. Each marble brick placed oh so symmetrically to the greatest testament to love ever built, the Taj Mahal, is identical, but each was carved by a specific builder. Today, we were fortunate enough to go to the Taj, and it was truly unbelievable. Leaving our hotel at 6.30 to beat the rush and the heat, we arrived not long after dawn, and without any coffee, this proved a feat. But once we were there, walking amongst the buildings that are nearly four hundred years old, I was overwhelmed by the history and the tale of it all. The Taj, according to legend and history, was built by Shah Jahan after the death of his second wife. Legend has it that the morning after her death, his hair turned white so powerful was his grief. To honor her and display his love, he ordered the construction of the Taj- perfectly cut white marble bricks form the four minarets which are pointed just a hair away from the mausoleum itself in case of an earthquake- they would fall to the side- and two sandstone buildings, one a mosque and the other a guest house Shah Jahan would stay in every Friday, the day of his wife's death, flank the east and west sides of the mausoleum, which itself is covered by some of the most beautiful in-lay work (marble carved to allow for the placement of semi-precious stones inside the rock itself!) that has ever been done. A few more days, though, and we return, with a much, much longer post on India, where, if all goes according to plan, I will return soon.

Goodbye Brother Bob

The title of this post is, of course, in reference to dear Brother Bob Seger, who, when he wasn't working on those Night Moves wrote a little song called "Kathmandu." Somehow, it's now the 16th of July, meaning that we leave Kathmandu tomorrow for Delhi. It's so strange how long we've been here; stranger too, though, remains that even after going to Pokhara, retrurning to Kathmandu felt like coming home. The Kathmandu Guest House, which I highly recommend, has a feel that is so much more than simply a place to stay. As I reflect on my time here, at the internship, at the religious monuments, as I trekked through the Annapurna Sanctuary, what comes to me the most was how spiritual of an experience this has been. Coming to Nepal as a rather typical liberal, Western, skeptical secularist, I expected to see these things, Buddhist stupas and Hindu temples, prayer beads and sacred cows, simply from an anthropological perspective, as something that was completely separated from me. It remained something that was merely to be observed with keen interest, but no real emotional connection. As I've been here, though, as I've circled stupas and spun prayer wheels, as I've watched prayer flags whisper their longings to the divine as they sway, blowing in the wind, as I've spent mornings in meditation, focusing on the bright blue splashes clouding my vision, I've become connected with a part of myself I didn't realize was present. One of the thing Indira has focused on in her work is the necessary connection between the sacred and the secular in relation to every person, and I think even those who don't necessarily find anyone religion satisfactory, myself included in that, find something important in spirituality. Of course, we risk falling into the old joke of being "spiritual, but not religious," but there seems to be something that permeates all sorts of faiths.

And with such sadness, I bid farewell to Kathmandu- a city of contrasts, of sights, of sounds, of smells, but above all, a city I have deep, deep love for.

Goin' On A Hike

Where should I even begin in a rather weak attempt to capture the last week? Should I begin with our slightly anti-refugee guide, or the porter powered by raksi who carried some of our team's bags (raksi being the local rice wine, the spirit of choice in the mountains)? No. None of these stories capture the essence of what it meant to sneak away in to the mountains and be surrounded by natural cathedrals (not my words) on all sides. Battered, bruised, and blistered, we reached towering spectacles that are not testament to humanity but rather to something ancient, something that is beyond human. Standing there, at the Annapurna Base Camp (from here on ABC), I could see mountains in every direction in which I looked, and I felt... so free- like the Colin Hay song, "Beautiful World," I was where a man could still be free, or a woman if you are one. It really was a place that was both everywhere and nowhere all at once. I felt so complete and yet so empty as I stood in the shadows of such skyscrapers (the largest were 8000m!). Over the last week, I probably wrote more than I have in the last few months, years maybe, and it served as truly great introspection. And, sorry to disappoint, but I think that's all I can write right now.

We'll All Be Friends in Heaven

"For five seconds, I didn't know where you were!" Milan says to me, laughing through a giant grin. For five seconds, I didn't know where I was, though, either. We went white water, well, more like brown water, rafting yesterday during our travel to Pokhara. The water was the color roughly of the national drink-masala tea with milk and sugar, a light brown color. Six of us, and our two guides, boarded our small inflatable raft on the nearly flooded river. The monsoon rains have been ever-present, but only intermittently (it rains everyday, just not all day long). With life jackets buckled, helmets strapped, and paddles in hand, we began our voyage down the river. I began at the back of the boat, near Milan, Jess, and our other guide, and the trip was wonderful. We stopped for lunch and ate with some Brits on a tour of South Asia, and then we began once more down the river. Milan, I think, became rather bored. Many of the rapids were covered with water because of the monsoon rains, and it was pretty easy going throughout, so we started to play games, i.e. everyone got in the back of the boat and we tried not to capsize. Eventually, I found my way to the front of the raft, and, due to my own ill-thinking, forgot to secure my foot by placing it firmly under the cord. We hit a rapid, and suddenly, I felt myself falling out. I lurched forward to grab the rope, but this little movement provided me with just enough momentum to fall into the masala mess. Quickly, I was submerged in the brown water, and I struggled for the surface. I could not get up. While I attempted to fight the current pulling me down the river, I first ended up coming under the boat. I kept fighting, kicking, with my heart pounding in my chest, and finally I emerged, arms flailing, mouth gasping, eyes searching. Jess and Megan grabbed me and I grabbed the rope; Milan pulled me in and handed me my paddle. And all I could do was... smile. What adventure.

Tomorrow morning, we leave for a seven-day, six-night trek to the Annapurna Base Camp (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/expeditions/tianshan/photos/images/annapurna_base_camp.jpg). I cannot wait.

Field Trip

Yesterday, at 830 in the morning after a night featuring football and an Everest (the local brew), I awoke and prepared myself for the day ahead. One of the other members of our cohort who was doing research on oral health in Nepal had organized a field clinic with a number of dentists in the village of Suldungal (spelling is probably incorrect). The plan was simple: set up a free, one-day dental clinic in the village for the villagers and require them only to fill out one small survey regarding their oral health. Simple. And, unbelievably, it was. Out of all the plans that had been made here for various people and their respective research, this one has gone by far the best. Over 120 people, young and old, came to the clinic to receive free dental examinations, and some even lost a tooth or two. As impressed as I was about this whole endeavor, two things stood out to me in particular. The first was the attitude of the dentists. It seemed as if they didn't consider this charity work that they were doing outside of their jobs. Rather, this, going to an under-served village and working without pay, simply constituted part of the job that they had to do. Signing up to be a dentist meant much more than simply seeing thirty patients a day in some sleepy suburb. This especially proved important and inspirational to both Megan and me as we look for different approaches to the practice of our respective medical interests. There's much more than simply working in an office for patients who can afford it. In less than an hour, these dentists turned a classroom into a clinic, and they treated, without stop, over one hundred and twenty patients. It was amazing.

The second thing that I noticed regards some of the boys who quickly developed themselves into my posse. There was a group of about six, including one who worked rather weaselish and one who was the spitting image of a Nepali Heath Ledger. Anyway, the weasel displayed a remarkable amount of pessimism about his country; he could not wait to finish his school and leave, resigning himself to the belief that this country would never get any better. It would simply languish in a garbage-covered backwardness. Heath, though, thought differently, and perhaps most inspirationally claimed, "This is our country; we are responsible for it. We can make it better, and we must make it better." Heath, you serve as an inspiration to this would be ex-patriot. What a great lesson for the 4th of July.

NO HOMO!

Ever since stepping of the plane, one of the most curious, and, for me, refreshing, things here in Kathmandu is the constant presence of male physical intimacy with other men who are simply friends. Two men, more even!, will simply be walking down the street, arm-in-arm, holding hands, draping arms across shoulders. There is no shame, no fear. It simply is the way it is. Albeit this culture remains one that is incredibly touchy, but the presence of actual male-male expression of love, platonic or otherwise. With some elements of the SJU community being different, this is so very different from what we experience in the West, where two men hug, give each other the three "I'm Not Gay," pats, and then conclude this delightful experience with the ever-comforting pronunciation of "No homo bro!"

Of course, all of this started my cognitive analysis. When we are infants, we constantly need physical touch for our continued development. Without being held and holding someone, we human beings do not develop properly; we remain shells. But why does this stop? Why has touch become so criminalized (excluding, of course, unwanted touch which is and should be)? If we think that human beings are constantly developing and never arrive as finished products, then wouldn't it make sense to say that we have a constant need to be held, to be touched, and to hold and touch back.

And So It Goes

They say that life is a miracle. Each birth represents something radically new entering the world. What they don’t say, as the joke often goes, is that this “miracle” is rather gruesome in its procedure. With blood and fluids, screams and tears, life enters the world-through possibly the most excruciating pain life enters the world, pain which, I would imagine, renders the sufferer desiring death as an end from such terrible calamity. All this, of course, comes of reflection of what I saw today. Four students, myself included, had the privilege of shadowing a doctor at Patan Hospital this morning, and during our time we each saw two surgeries. While much could be said about the difference between the system at Patan and the distance at Avera or St. Cloud Hospital, what was most amazing was not these differences but what was actually taking place. Through two surgeries, I witnessed the progression of life.

Beginning at the end, ironically, I first witness a hysterectomy. A woman present with large cysts on her uterus, and as a result, the surgeons removed the whole of the uterus, the ovaries, and fallopian tubes, ending their slicing just at the cervix. After an hour of clamps, sutures, stitches, slices, cuts, and scalpels, the uterus, the womb, the bearer of human life lay there in a small plastic cup; the cysts protruded like some unholy growth, damning the owner to a hell crueler than one with fire and brimstone. But there it sat- all of its destructive power (hopefully) removed.

What amazed me the most was the size of the womb, however. It lay there in this plastic tin, taking up no more space than my two fists, but this, THIS!!!, can expand and hold life. And now, the expansion. The second surgery we saw was a Caesarean Section. First the iodine, then scalpel, then clamps, than scissors, then a tug here, a stretch there, then a leg, another!, the butt, the back, an arm, and finally, finally the head emerged. The newborn cried immediately and was quickly clamped; his umbilical cord cut, he was removed from his first dependence upon his mother (a dependence, which, in some sense, should be seen as representative of our dependence upon the world which sustains our lives). He cried and was wrapped, and then he struggled against the cotton confines of his new womb.

New life being brought into the world while death being removed. This is the way things should be. Creation remains while destruction is removed. Alas, though, to maintain this world, both have to exist. There remains a constant balance between creation and destruction, a cycle nearly. Everything that is at some time will not be, and everything that is at one point was not. Plato, anyone?

Trying to "Get Over"

The sights, the sounds, the smells of the city constantly enliven something new within me. Each day, to poorly paraphrase Emmanuel Levinas, I'm constantly forced to shift my ontology, to allow new things to appear, and each day, new things do appear. That's the most amazing thing. I remember Kyle once told me that after he read Heidegger, he saw the world differently- he saw birds in trees. I didn't think the same would happen to me, nor did I think I would reference Being and Time in so many of my intellectual and highbrow, i.e. all, of conversations. All joking aside, though, this idea about what encroaches upon our care as appearing to us is dead-on.

Moving on, though, today at work I finished the first draft of the project report for the Ford Foundation after which I spent the afternoon reading once more about gender. It's interesting how intricately related all forms of power discrepancies are, be it race, gender, class. The unholy combination of these, though, proves immensely devastating, and unfortunately prevalent still everywhere in the world. As a white heterosexual man, I am incredibly privileged just in my "thrownness" (ha, another Heideggerean term for you). Just by being white, male, and heterosexual, I remain in the the upper caste of society not by merit but rather by birth alone. By chance. Now there's reason for egalitarianism. Chance, a roll of the dice, a flip of a card, an empty chamber in a revolver (for those more daring), that has determined so much about my life. My efforts and attempts, my inability to resign myself to a simple satisfactory life of settling drive me forward, but still I start a few lines forward. The question remains for me, as it always does, how does a white heterosexual man break down the terrible trifecta of racism, patriarchy, and class conflict that are at the fundamental core of modern society?

With Love and Trust and Friends and Hammers...

In a routine. Stay in the routine. Get out of your routine. I’m surprised as how a routine has formed here in Kathmandu; I shouldn’t be, of course, but I am. I wake up, eat a banana pancake, drink my masala tea while I read The Kathmandu Post or The Himalayan, and then I’m off to the office. The surprising thing, though, is that this routine isn’t bad-far from it. I work in an office everyday where work begins with an hour’s worth of meditation, where shoes aren’t allowed but meals are provided, where conversation and conscious are as important as carbon copies. The people here, and Indira especially, are so driven. Working with them, side by side, elbow to elbow, neck deep in the trenches of discrimination, of backwardness, of taboo and stigma, is one of the most amazing experiences of my life; it’s something I’ll always treasure, and I’m sure it will leave a lasting influence, tinting my progressive glasses just a bit more.

In what was a break of the routine, though, we went to Pharping Monastery yesterday to pick up Liz; she had spent the last week staying at the guest house and interviewing Buddhist nuns. We visited both the nunnery (their words, not mine) and the monastery, where we witnessed part of an ancient ritual. At least two dozen young (12 or younger) monks sat and recited Tibetan verses to drum beat and horn blast. Each bobbed back and forth, heads moving to chest and back, pleading for world peace. Tibetan Buddhism remains itself a unique entity; there are gods; there are demons; there are a thousand who have reached enlightenment, but millions more who have returned to the world, reincarnated once more into the world of suffering. There is the exception, the Bodhisattva- the one who has achieved enlightenment but, because of such great love for humanity, returns to the world to assist others in their pursuit of enlightenment. In fact, this is, in some cases, considered the ideal towards which a Buddhist should strive.

I was, once more, very affected, especially by the peace of the whole place. Just like the Benedictines, the Buddhists know how to pick a spot. The hills in the distance each day are slowly swallowed by the swilling clouds. The monastery is positioned on a hill-top with the terraced plains covering the ground below. So great was my experience that I have decided to stay at the monastery for a time (3 July-15 July) instead of going with the group to Pokhara. One of the main appeals if I demand utmost honesty of myself is the individualization of the time; I cannot remember the last time I took days to myself, days to read, to write, to think, to be. There are a number of hills surrounding the monastery, and each one demands its own climb.

And now, for something completely different, as simply recapping my adventures will bore all of you, dear readers, to tears before I can actually make any real point, so I’ll try to use this medium, amplifying my voice by at least ten-fold, to do that very thing. I was thinking today about love. Oh love- to figure out what you are, dearest of virtues, sweetest of vices, is a pursuit which remains always unending. I was reminded of something I wrote once, and I’m still shocked by its quality. Love always prevails. It’s what holds us together, and it’s what tears us apart. It’s the strongest and weakest of forces. We are love. To be human is to exemplify love, and as such-god. Romantic that I am, I believe, above all things, except in the goodness of French fries dipped in a frosty and rock n’ roll, in love, both romantic and plutonic. Poetry aside, though, I think that love, however little it may be, makes us and keeps us human. It either holds us or pulls us back from the edge. I was reading Emmanuel Levinas’ work Humanism of the Other last week and came across this line: “…the impossibility of canceling responsibility for the other, impossibility more impossible than jumping out of one’s skin, the imprescriptible duty surpassing the forces of being. A duty that did not ask for consent, that came into me traumatically, from beneath all re-memorable present, anarchically without beginning.” Bound before birth, each of us is uniquely connected to the human beings around us in the world, and it remains, without reward or completion, to attempt, for we never can fully understand, to understand the needs and desires, the wants and cares, the being of those with us. That, perhaps, is a more philosophical description of what I’m trying to reach with my initial stipulations. Love is that very desire that constantly drives us towards other human beings even though we know distance will always remains. It demands that we continue to push ourselves closer and closer, removing inch by inch as much of that distance as we can, but we can never remove all of it; we can never, as much as we might wish, put ourselves in the other person’s place.

On one more different note in this post that is already far to disorganized to be qualified as one whole blog post, I’ll post the speech that was given (that, for the most part, I prepared) at the workshop last Sunday:

In a routine. Stay in the routine. Get out of your routine. I’m surprised as how a routine has formed here in Kathmandu; I shouldn’t be, of course, but I am. I wake up, eat a banana pancake, drink my masala tea while I read The Kathmandu Post or The Himalayan, and then I’m off to the office. The surprising thing, though, is that this routine isn’t bad-far from it. I work in an office everyday where work begins with an hour’s worth of meditation, where shoes aren’t allowed but meals are provided, where conversation and conscious are as important as carbon copies. The people here, and Indira especially, are so driven. Working with them, side by side, elbow to elbow, neck deep in the trenches of discrimination, of backwardness, of taboo and stigma, is one of the most amazing experiences of my life; it’s something I’ll always treasure, and I’m sure it will leave a lasting influence, tinting my progressive glasses just a bit more.

In what was a break of the routine, though, we went to Pharping Monastery yesterday to pick up Liz; she had spent the last week staying at the guest house and interviewing Buddhist nuns. We visited both the nunnery (their words, not mine) and the monastery, where we witnessed part of an ancient ritual. At least two dozen young (12 or younger) monks sat and recited Tibetan verses to drum beat and horn blast. Each bobbed back and forth, heads moving to chest and back, pleading for world peace. Tibetan Buddhism remains itself a unique entity; there are gods; there are demons; there are a thousand who have reached enlightenment, but millions more who have returned to the world, reincarnated once more into the world of suffering. There is the exception, the Bodhisattva- the one who has achieved enlightenment but, because of such great love for humanity, returns to the world to assist others in their pursuit of enlightenment. In fact, this is, in some cases, considered the ideal towards which a Buddhist should strive.

I was, once more, very affected, especially by the peace of the whole place. Just like the Benedictines, the Buddhists know how to pick a spot. The hills in the distance each day are slowly swallowed by the swilling clouds. The monastery is positioned on a hill-top with the terraced plains covering the ground below. So great was my experience that I have decided to stay at the monastery for a time (3 July-15 July) instead of going with the group to Pokhara. One of the main appeals if I demand utmost honesty of myself is the individualization of the time; I cannot remember the last time I took days to myself, days to read, to write, to think, to be. There are a number of hills surrounding the monastery, and each one demands its own climb.

And now, for something completely different, as simply recapping my adventures will bore all of you, dear readers, to tears before I can actually make any real point, so I’ll try to use this medium, amplifying my voice by at least ten-fold, to do that very thing. I was thinking today about love. Oh love- to figure out what you are, dearest of virtues, sweetest of vices, is a pursuit which remains always unending. I was reminded of something I wrote once, and I’m still shocked by its quality. Love always prevails. It’s what holds us together, and it’s what tears us apart. It’s the strongest and weakest of forces. We are love. To be human is to exemplify love, and as such-god. Romantic that I am, I believe, above all things, except in the goodness of French fries dipped in a frosty, in love, both romantic and plutonic. Poetry aside, though, I think that love, however little it may be, makes us and keeps us human. It either holds us or pulls us back from the edge. I was reading Emmanuel Levinas’ work Humanism of the Other last week and came across this line: “…the impossibility of canceling responsibility for the other, impossibility more impossible than jumping out of one’s skin, the imprescriptible duty surpassing the forces of being. A duty that did not ask for consent, that came into me traumatically, from beneath all re-memorable present, anarchically without beginning.” Bound before birth, each of us is uniquely connected to the human beings around us in the world, and it remains, without reward or completion, to attempt, for we never can fully understand, to understand the needs and desires, the wants and cares, the being of those with us. That, perhaps, is a more philosophical description of what I’m trying to reach with my initial stipulations. Love is that very desire that constantly drives us towards other human beings even though we know distance will always remains. It demands that we continue to push ourselves closer and closer, removing inch by inch as much of that distance as we can, but we can never remove all of it; we can never, as much as we might wish, put ourselves in the other person’s place.

Welcome Note (National Workshops on Sexuality)

· Indira Shrestha (With assistance from Corbin Cleary)

· 20 June 2010

On behalf of the entire Shtrii Shakti Family including myself, a very wamr welcome to all of you special people on a one to one basis!

Thank you very much for attending our conference today regarding women’s sexuality and empowerment. As many of you are aware, Shtrii Shakti since its inception has been driven towards furthering women’s empowerment. Shtrii Shakti was established in 1991 as a women-led national development institution working at all levels-local/grassroots to international. S2 is an inclusive development institution that works towards empowerment of excluded communities, especially women and youth, based on informed action.

Shtrii Shakti works with a holistic view-out to reach not just the head but also the heart or the spiritual centre, not just thinking but also feeling of a person. In other words this institution is guided by the principle of the 3 E’s-energy, emotion, and esteem. 1. Energy, as in physical energy and vitality, a powerful physical force. 2. Emotional Energy, a powerful creative force. 3. Esteem or positive thinking as life directing force.

Today’s conference represents another new step in the direction of our holistic approach to addressing or looking at an issue of importance as it examines the link between sexuality and women’s empowerment.

Despite the many advances made with regard to women’s empowerment in Nepal, including in the economic, political, and reproductive health sectors, our movement has failed until now to recognize the importance of women’s sexuality to the continued empowerment of women, and it is a failure which remains, until resolved, highly delimiting.

Before continuing though, we must attempt to understand what is meant by sexuality. First and foremost, our sexuality is tied up most intimately and essentially with our humanity. Not one of us can be a human being without possessing sexuality, nor can anyone of possess sexuality without being a human being. As such, for every person here, our sexuality remains something that is in each case unique and individual to our very own selves. Though no universal definition of sexuality exists and no dictionary definition proves sufficient, to provide for a working terminology, let us turn towards the one provided by the World Health Organization, which defines sexuality as, “The central aspect of being human, encompassing sex, gender identities/roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy, and reproduction.”

Even in accepting the W.H.O. definition, a variety of perceptions exist regarding sexuality. The first of these is the anthropological perspective which remains closely aligned with social constructionist theory. These perspectives regard sexuality as primarily a social construct; everything from our actions to our behaviors, from our roles to our desires has been determined and set by the demands and dictates of society. The whole structure of society, including economic and cultural elements, is directly responsible for producing what has become the accepted norm of sexuality.

Moving in a similar vein to this structuralist approach is the feminist perspective. This perspective finds women’s sexuality as something that established within a society already disposed to differences in power based upon gender. The men who possess the power within the patriarchy define sexuality for women. They establish what is acceptable and what is not, what is clean and what is dirty, and what is pure and what is tainted.

Differing from these approaches is the biomedical perspective, and in this perspective sexuality is reduced simply to a combination of hormones and organs. It expands naturally from the right combinations of hormones interacting with the proper cells found in organs in just the proper placement. From this cellular construct spawned the difference in sexuality between men and women.

Older than all these, and until only recently somewhat unexamined, is the mythological approach. Prior to the studies of sociology and psychology, human beings operated within their societies according to the established myths, legends, and tales which both encouraged and condemned specific behaviors, champion and damning legendary heroes and villains as either exemplifiers of virtue or vice.

While each of these perspectives offers some understanding towards a unified theory of sexuality, not one is complete within itself. Sexuality rather is something that should be seen as a combination of biology and society, of myth and of power, and women’s sexuality in Nepal serves as a perfect example.

As our research has shown, women in Nepal have been so exposed to systemic patriarchy that it has become ingrained into their very own selves. A woman’s being remains consistently and constantly controlled by a society which defines them as subservient, as less than their male counterparts. The consequences of this ever-present patriarchy manifest themselves in the responses gathered in our initial surveys. Women were, for the most part, unaware of their own rights as human beings, especially with regard to sexuality and reproductive health. Patriarchy drives women into silence and hesistance in open discussion regarding their own sexuality and discourages further learning, both about their own sexuality and sexual health generally. This further leads to misunderstandings and misconceptions of sexual biology and in particular to the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, most worrisome of which is HIV/AIDS. In doing this, society is attempting to separate the woman from her sexuality, delegating her to no more than something to be objectified.

What is needed now for the continued empowerment of the women of Nepal is an attitude shift regarding their own sexuality, but this shift can only be brought about when the women of Nepal are no longer ignorant or ashamed of their sexuality. By bringing them into open discussion, women can begin to recognize the value of their unique sexuality, elevating their self-esteem.

The contradictions and ambivalences in our society regarding women’s sexuality are almost overpowering. In our myths and legends, we are goddesses and creative forces, the divine mother and the source of life; we are uniquely tied to the creation and the perpetuation of the universe. Thinking of women’s sexuality while mindful of our historico-cultural and spiritual background, the patriarchal assertions seem a travesty at best. What creates life it calls unclean; what carries life it calls impure. Patriarchy attempts to drive our sexualities into the darkness, demeaning us as human beings. It places demands upon women to hide our sexuality while men abound with their libertine licentiousness.

Changing attitudes remains far from easy. It is indeed a challenge. Before we can even egin this task, we must create safe spaces for women to speak openly, honestly, and loudly about their sexuality. Only then can we move on to recognizing the patriarchy inherent in women’s sexualities and begin to remove its painful stain.

We must work with women to defeat the destructive elements of patriarchy which have become so internalized into our own sexuality. For too long women have regarded their sexuality as something to be hidden, as something that is not their own but rather belongs to their husbands and to their families or society at large. By allowing for open and honest discussions of this much contested issue, we are creating for women the opportunity and space to reclaim their right to be.

In an attempt to begin this conversation and the resulting shift in attitude regarding sexuality, Shtrii Shakti has initiated this action research since 2007 to date. This has been made possible with the assistance of the Ford Foundation and UNFPA. Shtrii Shakti would like to extend deep appreciation and gratitude to the Ford Foundation and UNFPA, especially Ms. Ugochi Daniels, Deputy Representative, and Ms. Roshami Goswami, the focal person for this study from the Ford Foundation.

As our conference continues this evening, my hope is that you will see the value in this conversation regarding women’s sexuality and empowerment. Thank you very much for your attendance here today, and let us all begin to make an impactful difference in breaking the silence and stigma associated with the issue of sexuality.

Thank you.

Why We Do What We Do.

The conference yesterday went swimmingly. My speech was heard, and well-received, by members of the Nepalese planning committee, UNICEF, UNFPA, W.H.O., and many, many gender activists. I’ll try to post a digital copy later this week, but I cannot make any guarantees. Despite the success of the conference, today we immediately returned right back to work. I found myself re-writing a foreward and a blurb, the short description of a book found in the back cover, for a publication that examines the results of this study on women’s sexuality in Nepal. What remains most interesting in all the research I’ve read here is the dissonance between religious belief and social practice. In Hinduism, the creative force of the universe is the divine feminine, and this resides peacefully with the masculine force. As such, femininity is worshipped as something which creates, sustains, and perpetuates life. Socially, though, women occupy some of the lowest rungs of the social ladder, e.g. when a woman has her period, she is forced into isolation for between four and twelve days. Though most of these practices have ended in urban areas, they still remain quite prevalent in rural areas, hence the need for this project. Simply by encouraging women to openly discuss their sexuality allows them to be able to reclaim it for themselves. This, creating safe and open spaces for women to be women, is the first step in breaking patriarchy. The continued empowerment of women, despite some of its successes, will remain incomplete until women can reclaim their sexuality and make it something that is their own, something that is not possessed by their husbands or their families.

On an unrelated note, I remembered something yesterday I heard in passing in some predictable picture (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist-despite its predictability, still delightful). In passing, one of the characters mentions the Jewish idea of tikkum olam, or “the repairing of the world,” a belief which states the world is fragmented and shattered. It is the responsibility of each human being through her actions to strive to repair the world. Now, if ever there was a way to form a morality this would be it; actually, it would be a combination of this and Nietzsche’s thoughts concerning the eternal return. Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that each choice we make, we should make believing that we will relive it and its consequences for all time. Life repeats, over and over and over, ad infinitum. Instead of fearing this, we should live in such a way that such a fate would be one we would great wholeheartedly, yelling on our death beds, “DA CAPO!” “Once More!” “From the Top!” The combination of this, and the repairing of the world, now that, that should be how we live.

Adventures Abound and Friendships Form

It’s been a few days since the last update, but, dear readers, this absence has been far from dull. As the week continued, we finished up our preparations for the workshop this weekend on women’s sexuality and empowerment in the Nepalese context. Indira, my boss, wanted to shape the focus of the conference around the dissonance between Hindu culture, in which women are regarded goddesses and the creative force of the universe, and the actual Nepali situation where women are subjected to demeaning and demanding work. As Parjwal, Gokel, and I toured near Dhulikel yesterday, I noticed this peculiarity. Women were the ones doing the vast majority of the work: women made meals, women harvested, women cleaned, women carried. Men do work, of course; the work in the fields, in industry, in offices, on the roads, but when they describe their wives, their response shows ambivalence to what happens under their own roofs. Our wives, they say, don’t work. They stay at home. The irony remains that as to actual hours worked, according to the UN, women’s hours grossly outweigh men’s hours.

Changing pace and topic, yesterday, with my two Nepali friends Parjwal and Gokel, a student in public health and a medical student, respectively, I went to Dhulikel to see Gokel’s medical school and training hospital. Little did I know what they had in store for me. What began as simply an excursion to the Dhulikel hospital quickly became a spiritual odyssey as we journeyed to Nomabouddha, a newer Buddhist monastery, and the largest statue of Shiva in the country, if not the world. The Buddhist monastery once again affected me greatly; the scenery alone was enough to send a sense of reverence to the most hardened of Hitchens. It was built on what has historically been considered the den of the five lions; an old Buddhist myth holds that a young prince came upon the mother lion and her five cubs, and seeing them so hungry he gave his own flesh to feed them. The Buddha witnessed this, and reincarnated the young prince. What was most interesting to me was the reverence paid to the monastery by Parjwal and Gokel. While both are Hindus, both displayed the utmost veneration towards the Buddhas within the monastery. When I asked why, Parjwal explained that Hindus considered the Buddha one of the avatars of Lord Vishnu.

Parjwal and I returned to Kathmandu in a bus, and after that ride I will never complain about another Link ride again. It was crowded, sweaty, smelly, and… I loved it. There bus was designed for probably for forty people, but nearly eighty people embarked with us on this interesting journey. The bus ride took much longer than it should have, for we stopped nearly every ten minutes to drop some people and pick up some more. People even dared to crowd the roof. Holding on with clenched fists, they braved the dangerous, disparate roads of the Kathmandu valley. Secretly, though, I wished to join them. I have a strong desire to fully immerse myself, and if that includes riding on top of a bus, so be it. Parjwal promised me next time we would ride on the roof.

Before ending, one brief mention must be made on Parjwal and Gokel. These two young men are some of the most amazing men I have met. Both are so full of life and highly motivated, but most importantly, and paradoxically for the youth of this country, they have a strong devotion to Nepal and its people. After they establish themselves, they wish to start their own hospital. The paradox remains because the youth of Nepal by droves are attempting to leave the country, but these two remain. They refuse to give up hope. I think there’s a lesson here to be learned for me; just because the problems within your community, society, or country remain seemingly insurmountable, that is not a reason to run away.

It's surprising how quickly such a different place can feel like home. Despite being here for under a week, although this grand adventure began a week ago today, plus or minus some hours to account for time-zone differences, Kathmandu, or at least the Thamel neighborhood where the Kathmandu Guest House is located, has become very familiar. I have a breakfast place already where, in a perfect example of reversion, I ordered bacon with breakfast (this confession only bears import as while here I'm attempting to keep a vegetarian diet). Slip-ups notwithstanding, the longer I'm here, the more it begins to feel like home, and this group begins to feel like family. The Guest House does not feel like just a place I'm staying, but rather it seems to be a place to come home to.

Work with Shtrii Shakti remains fascinating; it's so delightfully progressive, and I love every minute of my work there. The staff is wonderful-an odd assortment of students, interns, women, and activists. My boss, Indira, was in fact one of the 1000 Peace Women nominated, as a group, for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

An interesting thing in regards to the work of Shtrii Shakti is the presence of praxis-the place where theory and action meet. As with all activist groups driven by intellectuals, to change from simply words into action remains the fundamental difficulty, but Shtrii Shakti attempts to do so, and does so very well, especially with regards to doing so in a cultural sense. Shtrii breaks down in to Sh-women, t-training, r-research, i-information, and i-intervention. It moves from the research and theoretical to practical application. Major projects of late have included gender master's training where men and women are trained in Kathmandu and then sent out to the villages to encourage discussions between women and women, men and men, and women and men about sexuality and sexual and reproductive health.

Football fever is present everywhere, which is shocking especially as neither Nepal nor Kathmandu are fielding teams in the World Cup. All over though tv's are on showing the fanciful footwork of the finest footballers, and everywhere everyone, including staffs when they are between work!, stop to watch the matches. One note quickly on the staffs of restaurants- I have never experienced better service anywhere. The staff takes your order, and then after serving, they wait near you to see if you need anything else. They do not serve you the bill unless you specifically ask for it; otherwise, you simply sit, chat, enjoy your masala tea, the Nepali tea of choice served with milk and sugar, made very similarly to a chai.

That's it for now but a more reflective post will come soon.

Words offer the means to meaning, and to those who will listen, the enunciation of truth...

The title quote comes from V for Vendetta, or at least the movie version. The reasoning for the title remains something else entirely, and is related exclusively towards the assignment I received during my first day of work at Shtrii Shaktii. After an hour of silent meditation and some reading from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu epic telling the tale of battling brothers, which in fact serves as metaphor for the inner conflict within the human spirit. Hindus believe there exists within each person a constant battle between the positive and negative, the creative and destructive. Immediately upon the cessation of the reading, Jaimie and I were given our assignments for the day-she to design, and I to... speech writing. Indira is to give a speech this coming Sunday regarding female sexuality and women's empowerment, and she asked me to prepare a draft for her. So, I took pen to paper after reading some notes and began to write. At first, the words came slowly, but within minutes, there were sentences, then paragraphs, then pages. Words flowed from me onto the page, and page and then page became filled. Writing about female sexuality as a man, albeit a feminist man, is a unique experience, especially when one is to write from the perspective a woman. The word is still out; I'm waiting to hear comments from my boss. If she approves, or even if she doesn't, I'll post the final draft later this week.

On another aside, my iPod woke up dead today. Despite my best efforts, it will not turn on, even though it did when I awoke at three a.m. Perhaps this is for the best. I feel already, after only three days here, that this trip is expanding my vision, my perspectives. Perhaps now I'll finally learn how to listen to.

More to come later this week.

Namaste.

Out and About Across the World

This was the first post I wrote last night, but I was unable to log on due to a problem with Google. One detailing some of our touristy adventures will follow.

Running for, due to a variety of time zone changes, roughly three days with naps and coffees we have finally reached our destination in Kathmandu. The flight from Delhi to Kathmandu was absolutely amazing this morning. Beginning with a dusty dawn take-off in Delhi, we slowly rose above the haze until we reached our cruising altitude. What was most amazing, though, was that at this altitude we began to see the crest of the Himalayas crowning just above the clouds. After landing and a brisk trip through customs, we embarked upon one of the most fascinating vehicular rides in my life. Streets crowded with bikes, motorcycles, people… shops and banners line the city streets. The smell of food, curry especially, lingers over the whole of the city. Men and women sell the work of their labor in the streets, and statues, masks, foods, spices, teas…

The Guest House itself is absolutely wonderful; it possesses huge open areas, and despite the noise of the street remains consistency quiet. The view from the fourth floor balcony is quite good despite not being particularly high, and in the distance, I can see the mountains which encircle the city, but they remain in a haze omnipresent this time of year due to monsoon season. The temperature is warm, but not overly so, and it is certainly not humid.

We spent part of the afternoon walking around the city. This is like a place I want to live; it’s so alive. There remains everywhere; despite the presence of modernity, it still holds on to something that it has possessed since its earliest days as a trading center on the Silk Road.

That’s it for now. Later tonight we will be meeting with our internship coordinator, and hopefully I’ll be able to hammer down details with my internship. If that fails, however, I’ll probably end up at the Whitefield School assisting in English lessons, but I really hope that the first one, the one at Shtrii Shakti, works. I’m excited to be doing something that so represents my values.

June 13

Today we began our role, hopefully short-lived, as the typical tourists. With cameras ablaze, we set forth into the city in our bus tour, traveling from spot to spot and flashing and photographing all the way. It. was. wonderful. I love this city-the sights, the sounds (drivers drive by noise rather than vision; it's fascinating) and most importantly the smells- and today we got to see a large portion of it. We began our day traveling to a Buddhist Stuppa, which is a large, dome-shaped outdoor temple, surrounded by a series of spinning cylinders, each of which contains a specific prayer. The devotion holds that devotees circumvent the stuppa in a clockwise manner, and continually spin each of the prayer wheels.

Then, we went to the temple of Shiva, the Hindu god who is the deity of the city. Shiva is the creator, destroyer, and protector of the universe. He created the world when he danced, and when the destructive forces of the world outweigh the creative, the world must be destroyed and started anew (according to Hindus, this cycle has continued forever and will continue forever as time remains constantly cyclical. Near the temple, there ran a river, a small, nearly empty river, but a life-giving, and in some senses life-taking one nonetheless, and right on the banks the reverent worshippers cremated their dead and then pushed their ashes into the river. What remains most fascinating is the openness and acceptance of death in the Hindu faith as just another element within the cycle of birth, death, and re-birth. Death serves as a liberation, shedding this life for the next one.

From here, we went to Buddhanat, the largest stuppa in Nepal, which also serves as a main gathering point for Tibetan Buddhist monks. Monasteries litter the nearby area, with twenty or so (rather smaller than the ones with which we are familiar) in a five-mile radius. Seeing the child-monks especially was powerful; to commit to such a path at such a young age puts us indecisive college students to shame.

That, for the most part, is a fair recount of the adventures of our day. The plans for the newxt few weeks stand as such: two weeks here in Kathmandu, two weeks in Pokhara, one week in Kathmadu/Pokhara, and then a week in Delhi. My plan right now is as such: two weeks with Shtrii Shakti in Kathmandu, at least one week with its sister organization in Pokhara, some time trekking, some time in a Buddhist monastery (with a subsequent stint in a Benedictine monastery, i.e. St. John's Abbey, when I return to the states), and then a tour of northern India, primarily in Delhi/Jaipur. I'm not sure how or if I'll be posting pictures, but when I can figure it out, I'll let you know.

Namaste.

Just some information about my trip

Departure: June 10

Return: July 24

Location: For the first five weeks, we'll be based in Kathmandu, Nepal, and primarily I will be working with Shtrii Shakti, or S2, a women's empowerment center. What I'll be doing, though, remains a mystery, but here is the link to the center's website: http://www.shtriishakti.org/

For the last week, roughly of course, we will be traveling in India, primarily in Delhi and Jaipur. My personal hope is to be able to sneak over to Dharamsala, which is where the Tibetan government resides in exile.

Besides that, I plan on climbing mountains and traveling as much as possible.

If life were a sitcom...

It's a sleepy summer night in silent Sioux Falls, and after watch a magnificent seven hours of sitcom-esque television, I have to admit, my thoughts remain in twenty minute spurts. And wouldn't it be great if that, sometimes at least, was how life truly was? What if in twenty minutes all the problems we have could be resolved in a nice, neat finish with an indie rock crescendoing just as the credits begin to roll. But alas, the difficult problems of life seem rarely resolved within these brief interludes, and rather they seem to last way, way to long (coincidentally, like many American sitcoms). Regardless, as I sit here on my patio with a long cigar and a fine Nordeast, I wonder about those things towards which we project ourselves. I don't know if it's possible for us to imagine our lives as anything other than neat and tidy. No one, speaking of course in generalities, imagines her or his life tainted with difficulty and tragedy; we believe that not only will the best happen to us, but it will also happen for each of our friends and for all those we care about. As unrealistic as it may be, though, when I think of the future, I cannot help but imagining that each of my friends is incredibly happy, with successful jobs and wonderful relationships, both romantic and not. I don't know what it is, for even though there are days when I have no hope in the decency of human beings, that lost letter still gets mailed.

As many of you know, I struggle with religious labels, and even though I remain most unsure in this regard, I do believe that we are all being directed towards something. Call it fate, destiny, the call of the universe- we are moving towards something. Everything that happens to us and everything that we cause to happen leads us there. Just as each thing that has led us to this point had to happen just in the right way to lead us to who we are now, so must each action we make lead us towards some future version of ourselves, and I, as the cynical optimist, the happy humanist, and the occasionally imbibing intellectual, choose to believe that this future version is going to be even better than the one now.

...Let the Countdown Begin

The first of June. Summer has long since started, but what remains of it? Actually, probably the best parts. I depart for adventure in nine days, and I cannot even begin to explain how I feel. I'm excited, I'm terrified, I'm eager, I'm anxious. I haven't felt all of these emotions at once since... probably not since I left for college the first time, although if true confessions are to be given, and, honestly, what a better place for true confessions than this painfully public venue of the internet, the end of last summer actually left me feeling terrible. Last summer, with its emotional distress and academic duress almost killed me (emphasis added not to display any literal sense but rather to serve as reference to outside material- this will be constant throughout), but thanks to some great friends and some wonderful music (talking about you Craig Finn- your music reached me unlike any ever had before) I found myself surprisingly not ready to leave what I'd built throughout the summer. I'd entered it shattered, and I remained skeptical that my patchwork job could last, that the positivity I strove for so badly could continue to remain in the face of everything the world had to throw at me. I feel like it did- not that this year was perfect. It had its struggles, but that is what we live for. Today I started reading Schopenhauer's On the Suffering of the World, and in it he claims that suffering is the most basic way in which we experience the world. Happiness and a good life then are merely the absence of suffering. Not sure where I'm at with this yet.

It seems he may be perhaps making a strong point that the world is suffering (very similar to the first noble truth of Buddhism), but I'm not sure that leads to the conclusions he wishes it to. Granted, I haven't come anywhere near completion nor understanding, but I do agree that the world seems to be filled with suffering, and I may even grant that the world is suffering, but where does that leave us? How are we to deal? His answer that we should live our lives in constant atonement for the sin of existence, for the great evil that is our very existence in its disturbance of the most holy nothingness, that... seems lacking, so for now, I'll turn that grey volume nob just a little more to the left and let the waves drift over me....

...This shouldn't hurt, you might just feel a slight discomfort...

First Post

In what has been a rather delightfully nostalgic week, I have re-read old letters, rang many a friend to re-live those "Massive Nights," and now, of course, I'm creating, for the second time, a blog. This time, of course, I'm not going to limit it solely to tails of my travels and goings-on. Rather, this is going to serve as, hopefully, a megaphone, providing my voice which, in my over-powering sense of self-importance, will be heard by the world. Ha. Regardless, I remembered, while in the midst of this nostalgia, of my early thoughts on social networking. First e-mail, then Facebook, then Twitter. I laughed them all off, claiming in each case that I wouldn't be that guy. And, of course, with very little surprise, I am now that guy (@snorbin if you, like myself, guiltily and rarely Tweet).

I sit here, though, at this old wooden desk, older than me by decades, and I look at my record player as Ryan Adams slowly spins, singing sweetly, "Honey I was just a kid, with bubblegum on my shoe..." and I can't help but marvel at where we've come. We started so large. To hear music, e.g. we began with concert halls, and now we have iPod raves. Computers used to process coordinates for artillery, and now we have iPads that are our readers, our video players, and, dare I say, soon ourselves. Please tell me, Steve Jobs, when does the iLife begin? When is the iFriend application available?

All self-righteous ranting aside, I've just been curious lately about where we (the human race) is headed. So we build a bigger plane, a taller building, a faster computer, a more efficient car...

but where are we heading? What's the point in progressing towards more progress? Even more curious a thought, where does this leave us as human beings? Where are we headed?

Answer:

Currently...

Nowhere.

So why? Why be? Why continue?

I don't know, but I feel as if we should. Let's continue and progress, but let's not lose sight of us, of those for whom progress is desired. Let not the bonds between us be broken. There's still, in spite of all the computers, digital signals, and text messages that divide us, something here with us, reminding me, ironically, of the Gospel: where two or three are gathered, there am I. If we cut out the Christ, or consider it within a different context, I think we can reach even more clearly what I'm grasping at. When we get together, now there's something...