Tihar

The bus from Pokhara to Kathmandu was bumpier than I remembered the outbound trip… One bounce sent the woman sitting across from us flying into the fan on the ceiling above her. I listened to two somewhat lackluster podcasts and passed the rest of the time daydreaming.

In Kathmandu we returned the (mostly unused) sleeping bags and ate dinner. I indulged in a blended ice cream oreo dessert that I did not regret. Sam and I recorded a joke beat on the garageband app which had us geeking.

Today I woke up early, talked to ruf, and meditated. Once the gang was up and at’em we walked across the street for a greasy american style breakfast. I paid $3.25 for ginger tea, a chicken breast, toast, fried eggs, and a heaping pile of hash browns.

Back at home base we waited until Ojash arrived with John, a retired teacher & travel enthusiast, and Mike, an ad agency guy from Milwaukee. The group rendevou’d at a nearby restaurant to muck and swap ideas.

John peacefully led the discussion on curriculum and afterwards we divided and conquered. I doctored up a donation page on the Ganga Ghar website via an ancient CMS platform called Umbartu (?) while Sam, Avi, Louise and the rest of the team hashed out projective financials. Louise is feeling a bit frustrated with following the project, finding her place, and being surrounded by a foreign team. I can’t say I feel entirely differently.

She also mentioned that she feels like its difficult to fully give yourself to a cause when your own life is in such disarray. I agreed. Maybe an internal investment is what we really need at the moment?

For dinner I ate a chicken naan at a super cheap local spot and we watched men dancing around in celebration of Tihar (Diwali). Colorful mandalas accented the sidewalk, illuminated by flickering oil candles all oriented in the same direction. At home Sahil invited us to design a mandala of our own… we spent the evening drinking beer and smearing colorful powder into a lopsided rainbow wheel. We fended off Leo, Sahil’s curious pooch, from walking through the center of our creation… until we knocked over a beer and destroyed half of the mandala. We laughed.

As a final touch, we disassembled strings of marigolds and flooded the mandala with the orange, sweet petals.