Kathmandu

            

     Since landing in Kathmandu I've yet to find silence. At dawn, pressure cookers hiss 'rice is ready' after the puja bells are done ringing the gods, a swaddled soft cotton cloth somewhere cries, diesel exhaust pipes rumble by beckoning the roosters to compete with the dogs as the evening's stereos blare before fading with static. The white noise of night buzzes from the old wooden telephone poles tangled with a hairball of black wires. Some dangle with live death. Electricity in the city is like roulette, even the wealthy can lose in an instant.  The quietness I crave does not exists- not even in the dull flickering glow of street lamps hours before the surrounding Kathmandu Valley turns golden with dawn. The sun rises over the royal purple Himalayas alighting the rice fields beyond the city's silhouette of ancient temples and modern high rises; the view from Shilpa's fifth floor.

       Long before the National Anthem blares from the schoolyard below and the Himalayas turn as white as the children's uniforms singing along, my mind wakes to a faint dog's yelping and the low buzzing beneath my window. My tired limbs are ready to explore beyond the high walls where I lay beneath a crystal chandelier hanging far from the fumes above the streets I wander by day. Guilt plagues my steps. Confusion leads. A familiar feeling from my time in Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake, only I didn't come to Nepal to rebuild a school or volunteer with an organization. I came on my own mission, one that I question every time someone asks what I am doing in here. Everything within cringes. "I am here to trek," I say knowing this too is lie; I can't explain my real mission. It is a secret I've vowed to keep in hopes my ego doesn't make the purity of it into something it isn't. 

       Kathmandu suffered from a 7.9 earthquake in April 2015. A year and a half later, I step over bricks from the walls of the Narayanhiti Palace located in the heart of the city. The whole scene reminds me of Port-au-Prince's National Palace: the rubble of a former dictatorship rebuilt by future dictators in form of foreign loans. Its same old story: millions of international donor dollars fall into the pockets of government leaving communities to rebuild themselves. The Kathmandu Post articles on the rebuilding corruption read like the Haiti en Marche, the newspaper whose front page I carried home to remember the Haitian dancers I spent the summer of 2012 in 100 degree rehearsals.

           Unlike Haiti, the first island in the Caribbean to over-throw its colonizers with a bloody revolution, Nepal was never colonized. The British on the Indian border came close, and the Chinese on the Tibetan boarder even closer, but Nepal remained independent with its monarch until the 1990 People's Movement, when the country demanded democracy and ended absolute monarchy. Although the real end seemed to occur a decade later when the Royal Family massacred themselves at a dinner party in 2001. Haiti and Nepal, two completely different worlds, are the same in one definitive way for me: I'm forced to look at my myself in afternoon light- the time when your shadow looms the darkest and biggest. Finding the newspaper in the Port-au-Prince (PAP) airport minutes before departing to Miami was a moment when this light shined, and the shadow still looms onto the sidewalks of Kathmandu.  

           On the cover of PAP's most widely read paper was a photo from the 2012 Carnival de Fluers, Carnival of Flowers of a dancer from New York, the only other blan white girl in the National Dance Troupe, Ballet Balacou. Haiti's biggest cultural event since the 2010 earthquake which claimed the lives of more than 100,000 Haitians was represented by a dancing blan. This dancer was a friend of troupe's Haitian choreographer from days when he was in NYC on a student visa. She flew in a week before the carnival already knowing the folk-dance congo, a dance of courtship and a mockery of the French colonialist dances, and thus was given my assumed role. I had been rehearsing the dance with the troupe for months and was still a flower twirler! The amazing Haitian dancer, who showed up at every rehearsal early (something nearly impossible to do in PAP traffic) ended up twirling a plastic flower after I stood up to the choreographer for his injustice, not realizing I was creating one too by taking her role.

        As I sat in the airport staring at the paper feeling betrayed by the NYC dancer, suddenly the truth hits: I am just like her. I too felt entitled to dance. I was yet another blan (literally translated as light or white skin) acting upon unspoken privileges. The dancers forced smiles at rehearsals were finally understood- envy, dismissal. These dancers gave everything to the only thing that could not be taken from them by the colonizers, and once again were slighted by the hand of their own brother who wanted more the hand of a blan; in hopes to uplift himself from the feeling of colonial reside of inferiority and poverty that still plagues that mysterious island?  

Haitian or not, betrayal is felt in every heart. And everyone is betraying themselves on some level. 

        When I see the fallen Krishna (God of creation and destruction) temple in Patan, one of the oldest known Buddhist cities, I feel my own temple is in a similar state of collapsed beauty. Lord Krishna's head lays split in two and his missing arms were probably sold on the Chinese black market; the fate of many temple's intricately carved (every inch requiring hours of woodwork) columns and statues before they became guarded.  Once again I am in foreign land trying to rebuild with the parts that are lost in bedrooms, the pain once buried in ruins of memories is uncovered. I betray my temple, each time I open its gates to addiction. It was through Haitian dance that I really began to feel these memories, and understand my escapism when the pain arises. I followed these voodoo dances to their origins in the Haitian countryside, hoping to heal. Only I encountered the reality that binge eating is a privilege when I looked into starving sunken yellowish eyes of children. I left Haiti with the harsh reality that I was living a privileged life, and whining about it along with everyone else obsessed with health in America. We've lost our gratitude.

         The rubble of Newar architecture, the indigenous style of Newari people who built Patan's 136 courtyards and 55 temples in Durbar Square, has been stacked in neat piles: bricks, wooden columns, stone statues, golden pinnacles. The Nepali women and women working to rebuild their heritage, have bodies that are lean, strong and as flexible as the bamboo scaffolding they climb in flip-flops. 

Along the temple's iron construction barricades, the usual tarps are spread with piles of made in China. Dusk is encroaching when Shilpa and I finally stop for the day and take rest on a wall facing the Bhimsen Temple, a temple tourists are not allowed in, only devotees. “I remember hanging out here as a teenager. Somethings never change,” Shilpa says admiring all the young Nepalis gathering in the square. They sip from Nestle cups in their skinny jeans. The ones on the wall next to me are crouched over, their faces glowing blue from their iPhone screens. Like them I drift off into my own world trying to make sense of my mission in Nepal. In Haiti I at least volunteered helping in the camps in between pursing the dance.... I'm doing nothing for Nepal...but I believe in what I am after is ultimate compassion... am I really going to do it? 

           The deeper lessons from Haiti I am reliving in Nepal each time I pass the earthquake's new shanty towns constructed of rice paper bags, old sheets and zinc panels: To truly help others one must master thyself. A confused person can feed and clothe another person, help them rebuild their house,  teach them English, educate their children but how do liberate another from the wheel of craving? We must first liberate our self.