the regularness of irregularity

In this small, dust-covered town of Manipur, which fortunately shares the same climate as southern California, power comes on erratically a couple hours a day. And the locals contend that it is the corrupt, semi-autonomous state government's fault, who sells the electricity to their neighboring states, swelling up their personal coffers, and bullying the citizens into submission by ostentatiously driving around in really big military vehicles and flashing their guns. Probably true, but I don't have the time to investigate the facts. Though I have seen the big wheels and big guns. I'm too busy training medics by candle-light. Despite the regularity of having irregular power, the residents still find it alarming when the power goes out abruptly. I am sitting in my guesthouse and I was typing away and enjoying using the wireless modem on AC mode when the lights flickered out and a roar of human distraught/comedy wailed through town, and in through my window, to my amusement. The noise resembled something like a cross between a wail made by a crowd of eager futbol fans whose team just missed a goal and a moan coming from a group of boys who just witnessed a girl's dress fly up in the wind. Odd. That after so many years of consistent disruption in their lives, that they still react. And now there is a silence that cuts through this town, which is quickly replaced by generators working hard to provide a steady white noise for me to fall gently asleep to....Good night.

Tagore

The first time I learned about Tagore (or so I thought) was when I was in Calcutta last September, for work. I was strolling along Sudder Street, and there was this bust of this old man and the caption said that he used to hang out on this street and write a bunch of his poems. I was like, "cool". Whatever, I was more interested in taking a photo of the leathery old Indian man standing next to the bust. A week later, I'm reading an article in Harpers and it makes a reference to Tagore's poems. I thought, "How coincidental! I just happened to be in India where he used to hang out. Cool". But! A few weeks later, my best friend gives me a birthday card, and I was carefully reading her words since she always says the most thoughtful and heartwarming things in cards (not your typical "OMG, I love you! Let's be BFFs forevs!" stuff), and at the bottom of the card, there was a couplet written by no other than Tagore! Right then, I got the chills, and I told my friend Katy about the two previous instances with my Tagore encounters. I didn't put 2 and 2 together, but she did. She said, "Linda, you know what this means? Tagore is speaking to you. You must buy his book or read his poems and figure out what he is trying to tell you." Oooh, that gave me another set of chills.

So, I was resolved on buying a book by him. Of course, a few weeks go by, and I completely forgot about Tagore. I even had ordered a few books on Amazon.com and didn't even think to buy Tagore's poems. Well, I'm up at my parents house a few weeks later, where I store some of my stuff. I'm going through a few boxes, looking for old photos. I come across a box full of books, and I'm going through them really quickly, trying to prioritize which ones I can take home and make fit in my new bookshelf. I'm tossing books out left and right and there is one in particular, with a Korean title, and I was like, no way, it's probably one of my Mom's books from her literature club or something, toss that aside. I make a pile of the few books I'm going to take home and when I look at the pile to assess if it's too many for me, I notice the Korean titled book that I tossed aside is sitting on top of the pile. Just as I was about to toss it aside again, I look a little closer at the title, and it says "Tagore". Bam. There it is. Tagore just lands in my hands. Chills run down my spine, real bone-chilling chills this time. I open the book up gingerly, half thinking that some crazy light force was going to blaze out of the book, like when they open up the Ark in Indiana Jones.

But that doesn't happen. Instead, there's a caption my Mom wrote in Korean when she gave me the book 5 years ago. Translated, it says "So that my daughters can be loving daughters, love Mom". I never remember her giving me the book back then and it takes five years and a journey halfway around the world to finally accept her gift and the words of Tagore. Specifically, these are the Gitanjali poems.

I delve into the Gitanjalis, thinking big things, like they're going to tell me if I need to go back to school, or I'm going to find the love of my life or give me answers to what my purpose on this Earth is. But they don't. Yet, I'm not discouraged. I remember what my Mom has told me, particularly in reading Hesse. "You need to read Hesse every 10 years. What you get out of reading Hesse at age 20, will be different from what you learn from Hesse at age 30, and 40, and so on. " And so that is the approach I'm taking with Tagore.

One Gitanjali, #48, stands out in particular for me at this point in my life:

The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went our our way and paid no heed.

We sang no glad songs nor played; we went not to the village for barter; we spoke not a word nor smiled; we lingered not on the way. We quickened our pace more and more as the time sped by.
The sun rose to the mid sky and doves cooed in the shade. Withered leaves danced and whirled in the hot air of noon. The shephered boy drowsed and dreamed in the shadow of the banyan tree, and I laid msyelf down by the water and stretched my tired limbs on the grass.

My companions laughed at me in scorn; they held their heads high and hurried on; they never looked back nor rested; they vanished in the distnat blue haze. They crossed many meadows and hills, and passed through strange, far-away countries. All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path! Mockery and reproach pricked me to rise, but found no response in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad humiliation - in the shadow of a dim delight.

The repose of the sun-embroidered greem gloom slowly spread over my heart. I forgot for what I had travelled, and I surrendered my mind without struggle to the maze of shadows and songs.

At last, when I woke from my slumber and opened my eyes, I saw thee standing by me, flooding my sleep with thy smile. How I had feared that the path was long and wearisome, and the struggle to reach thee was hard!

The journey is just as important, if not more, as the endpoint, the arrival. What's the point of reaching your goals, or getting what you want if the process to get it wasn't fun, beautiful, appreciated? I just need to stop and smell the roses. In concrete terms, this means I will take a few days this year and head down to the islands of Thailand (which are so close to me) and actually wear my two bikinis that I bought and haven't worn yet. And of course, this poem is telling me about love, but I don't want to write about that now. That's for later to share.

aizawl, textiles and pineapples

this is aizawl. for those of you who have heard me talk about this city, i make it sound really just gross and unpleasant, but it's all part of the grand plan to counter any tourism efforts made by the the government of india, because i want to keep it my little secret. this last trip was the longest i'd stayed in india, an entire 30 days, and i managed to channel the powers of an ashram into our hostel room every morning. and it worked. it also helped that we brought yoga mats and the awesome yoga shakti dvd by shiva rea.....during the rest of the 14 hours of the day, we did the usual international health stuff.

you never know who you're going to meet when you're doing a little pretesting in a developing country. we ended up meeting b------ migrant village full or textile factories, and the women were making the most vibrant fabrics. a lot of the traditional textiles in the mizo culture have actually been adopted from the b------ textiles since so many of the weavers migrated to india. the pens with the thread are shot through across the big old textile loom like contraption, all powered by women textile workers pedaling of their feet.


of course, i had to take another picture of a dog with gigantor mammaries. this is not uncommon but still, something about this dog's boobs intrigued me enough to send this out in the information superhighway thinking it might intrigue someone out there as well...




...and in another village we went to i came across the most wonderful thing! wild pineapples! wild pineapples!!

largest hilltop village in the world

One word comes to mind when i think about this place and our trip - barriers. and signatures. Our health program workshop was an uphill battle, figuratively and literally. Starting from the numerous permits and tourist restrictions to the overwhelming level of bureauracy that we faced every day (to get out of this freagin insurgency-ridden town, i needed to walk through 5 security checks and get 4 signatures just to board the plane. Even my carry-on needed 2 stamps) to the fog that almost forced us to reroute our trip in order to catch all our connecting flights through the rough terrain (a 1 hr plane equals about a 35 hour busride), everything was a challenge. More importantly, other barriers included lack of communication, lack of coordination, high cost medicines, restrictions on supply chains, language barriers, lack of human resources, lack of education, little to no funding and political instability. Probably the biggest barrier was ignorance that perpetrates the minds of the government officials. The ministry of health of this state was a racist, blaming the ethnic minorities on pretty much all the problems of her state and beyond. "They bring over drugs, HIV and malaria and crime". During dinner at her house, she explained to us the horrors about 'bee wee' a local yeast that supposedly quickens the fermentation of bootlegged liquor here (this is a dry state) that the burmese use which causes major bleeding and ulcers all the while she is forcing fosters beer and red wine down our throats that she illegally smuggled in her government issued car. she claimed that rape was the biggest crime and that a chin (burmese ethnic minority) is usually the perpetrator. She also said that hiv/aids is a consequence of bad things a person does like sex work and druguse, but it you get HIV, at least you don't die right away and you have time to pray and repent for your sins. Whereas with Malaria, it doesn't discriminate between [good and bad] people so this is a disease that she is fully addressing in her state. Her idea of fully addressing this health problem? Passing out untreated bed nets at drug depot centers (that don't serve migrant populations), using sub-par antimalarials, and breeding drug-resistant malaria by giving chloroquine to the army as a prophylactic once a week. besides her being a big disappointment as a strategic health partner, everything else was inspiring. The health workers in our workshop were eager to learn about the health status of their people, they're equipped and ready to go out in the field to do some malaria screening and data collection. But we're still figuring out channels for drug supply distribution. The 4 of us had a ball every morning eating our dal and chapati, where the waiter, having finally figured our routine, out didn't seem to mind serving us anymore. And our also routinized lunch over at Hotel Chief was always good, where the menu read "designed for smart people". We're now in Kolkata, happy to be sitting in this airport for several hours and i'm looking over to see tom and luke trying to connect to each others' laptops, chatting away about the next program they'll design, and once in a while asking me for the umpteenth time if i don't just want to head down to maesot with them for another week of more workshops. As for me, i'm health-programmed out and all i want is to be home, taking a crap like a normal person and then taking a hot shower and extracting the multiple layers of exhaust out of my nostrils that was blown into my face every day for the past week or so in this hilltop of a city.