Dateline: Kathmandu, Nepal: March 2, 2011—Tomorrow will be the day I go to the Indian Embassy and try to complete the visa process, receive it and begin the all-night bus ride to the Indian border. Normally visas are all taken care of before I leave the States, except for those I can receive in airports. But this has not been the normal trip. In January I sent visa application for China and Russia, along with the fees, the Washington, D.C. The General Conference of SDA’s are very gracious to assist me in this process. China was no problem, or course, especially when I wouldn’t need it. Russia, on the other hand, kicked it back twice to the Visa and Passport office on minor technicalities. I was going to Perm and Molokova, Russia, but was planning to take the Trans-Siberian Express through Mongolia. In the visa process, they ask that a letter be written including, among too many other things, where all I would be going. So, knowing the former USSR mindset a bit having spent a lot of time in former USSR countries, I listed all the stops my train would be making. I planned to exit the train at these places since it was a five-day ride. Well, none of those cities were on the letter of invitation. So, a week before I was to leave, I pulled the plug on Russia. I had to have my passport back. Of course all of this eventuated my coming to Nepal and India instead.
My first day in Nepal I went right away to the Indian Embassy to begin the visa process. Tomorrow is my next and hopefully last appointment. Being the country of the Himalayas, one would expect it to be very cold but it is not, except in the houses. I took a taxi to the embassy but really took a chance and walked home. It got hot as I trudged down the unbelievably filthy streets, clogged with vehicles and smogged with the exhausts of ten thousand vehicles, all sounding their horns and racing pell-mell to nowhere or anywhere.
Back to the temperature, most people it seems live in large brick and concrete monoliths with no insulation or heating. During the night they adsorb the chill and breathe it off all the day long. I am sure it will be nice in the summer but it is still winter and so it makes for cold living at times. Of course cold is relative. They grow bananas here so we are not talking about what all of you are going through.
Yesterday we went over to Banepa where I gave a health lecture for a women’s literacy meeting. We had first gone up to the hills above Banepa where Bhaju has some land. From there we could see the broad reach of the Himalayas. Wow! I have seen a lot of mountain ranges, but this took the cake. My friend says one say, early in the morning, someone was passing the home he is building, and a mother tiger and her cubs were sunning themselves in a clearing. This is a land of tigers, and Maoists. The Maoists, communist insurrectionists who want to take over the country, rise up and fight every once in a while so the Nepalese army has tactical positions in many places. Walking up to see the big Buddha we passed through concertina, past machinegun emplacements, and under the gaze of the ubiquitous soldiers. I took some great pictures.
We took the bus back down to Banepa for my lecture and on the bus I lost my camera. That was a real blow. I had to buy another as a camera is a part of my work but I was terribly discouraged for a while. But this too shall pass and I move forward. Perhaps making the pain a bit more acute, besides having lost all the pictures I had taken since before Christmas, and perhaps even back to Hawaii, was the fact that I am a very careful shopper. I will research, read reviews, pray, compare prices; frankly, I am not an impulse shopper. But this time, feeling I really needed to get it done, I went to a camera shop in downtown Kathmandu and, after a huge struggle, bought a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W530. They charged me $188. Now, insult to injury, upon checking on the internet, the same camera sells for $130 in the States. Probably made in China which is probably less than 100 miles from here. Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” Sometimes it is dreadfully hard to see the blessing and perhaps sometimes I am just suffering a consequence.
I am not really looking forward to the all-night bus to the border. Don’t picture a nice comfortable Greyhound bus here. It will probably be on the par with the bus ride I took from Lusaka, Zambia, to Mafinga, Tanzania. Oh well, all part of the job. I will be traveling with a man who knows the ropes although he speaks no English. But he will be one I can trust to watch over my things, not that my guardian angel hasn’t done a capital job over the years of keeping my bones together.
I have found in my travels that the countries practicing polytheism are among the most degraded. This would include any worship centering around multiple objects of worship and idols or images. Nepal is a Hindu state and thus Shiva and large pantheon of other “gods and goddesses” such as Vishnu (incarnate as Rama and Krishna), Kali, Durga, Parvati, and Ganesh, predominate. Temples and shrines are everywhere. Basically, they have millions of “gods” and the other day, just past the big Buddha, are there are some Buddhists here too, there was a Hindu shrine for one of the many “goddesses” and leaning against her enclosure there were a row of “unknown gods.” It reminded me so much of Paul in Acts 17 when, on Mars hill in Athens, he said, “You men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious [very religious]. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore you ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” Brilliant.
Hindu society, and therefore Nepal, practices and promotes a caste system. It is a huge injustice but you will not hear the west railing against it. Oh, our (USA) government will rail against our capitalist system, seeking to fleece those who have worked to clothe those who have seen no real motivation to try. Thank you FDR. But you have to see the caste system in action to begin the fathom the depths of injustice being perpetrated upon innocent people who have done nothing more than be born into the wrong caste. And once there, there is no climbing out of the pit, and the lowest caste works in the pits, literally. To see dusky children picking through the trash, men working in the sewers, families living in hovels beside rivers flowing with muck and mire and the refuse of a thousand sewers, giving off a stench that would make a fly lose its lunch…this is the lot of the Untouchables. And all the “social justice” foisted upon the West will not change this system one iota. Nor would we dare to, for it is their “culture.” The empty idealism we hear trumpeted by the left rings hollow over here. Anything the West sends this way will never trickle down to where the real need it. It makes you weep.
Okay, off the soapbox. I will try to send one more blog from Nepal before moving on to India.
God’s blessings,
Don
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