Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [30]
We sit outside on the step, eating oatmeal with powdered milk for breakfast. Sunlight pours down thickly and the whole green world shimmers. Jane is talking about how hard it was when she first arrived. She hadn’t quite realized ... how hard it would be. But then, she got to know people, Jangchuk and Pema befriended her, she learned a little Sharchhop. And she started teaching and that made up for everything else. The kids make it all worthwhile, she says. They are bright and unaffected and responsive. She loves them.
I say maybe I’ve made a mistake, maybe Bhutan is not for me.
Jane nods. “I felt that way at first. But you know what they say about these overseas postings: anyone can live anywhere. You think you can’t in the beginning, but then you do.”
After breakfast, we go to collect water, each of us carrying a plastic bucket. A group of children follows us, shouting “Good morning, miss!”
“Good morning Kezang, good morning Nidup, good morning Karma,” Jane calls back. The village tap is a black standpipe in the center of the village. Several people are there with an assortment of buckets, bamboo containers, jerry cans and tin pots. Jane knows everyone. “Pema Gatshel lopen, ” she tells them, pointing to me. Lopen means teacher. We fill the buckets and haul them back. I slop most of my water onto my ankles and shoes. Jane washes the plates and pots on her front step, scrubbing them with a gritty powder first and stacking them up in grey soapy piles, rinsing each item carefully so that no water is wasted. The kettle on the kerosene stove is steaming, and I pour the water into a Chinese thermos. There is no shop in Tsebar: kerosene and all other manufactured goods have to be carried across the valley from Pema Gatshel. Jane cooks on the mudstove in the evening, and only uses the kerosene stove in the morning, to cook breakfast and boil water. Her stove uses wicks and is easier to light than my “pump and explode” type. “Oh those things,” Jane says. “They terrify me. I don’t know how you manage.” I like the sound of that word, manage. How is she doing? Oh, well, it’s difficult but she’s managing. I do not tell Jane that I manage by not cooking.
Now she collects the buckets again: she is going to the creek to wash clothes, and I go with her. We walk through the village, several stone and mud houses scattered around a temple. Groves of ancient mango and oak trees crowd close around the village. With its tarmacked road and gypsum trucks and shops, Pema Gatshel suddenly looks like a big town in comparison. I ask where the path goes to after Tsebar and Jane says that India is only a few ridges away. I stand and turn, taking in the view: 360 degrees of mountains folded into one another, ridges running down into unseen valleys and rising again, this geography repeating itself over and over. It is hard to imagine the plains of India from here. It is hard to imagine anything at all beyond these mountains, and I have the strangest feeling that I have been here forever, that I have dreamed up that other life in Canada.
We turn off the main path and hobble down a slope to the creek, where Jane immerses her clothes in the shallow water, and I sit on a rock in the shade. She tells me about Jangchuk and Pema, how they took care of her in the beginning, bringing her dinner every night until she could manage for herself. Jangchuk is a gomchen, Jane says, a lay priest and the caretaker of the temple. Gomchens usually belong to the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism (slightly different from the Drukpa Kargyue sect, which is the official religion