floor, then silence. I took this as my chance.
“Okay, good night, boys! Sleep well!” I called, backpedaling quickly out the door, reaching my arm back inside to slap blindly at the wall until the lights went out, then closing the door behind me.
That could have gone better, I thought. I gave up on the idea of telling the kids anything. What they needed from me was to screw up as little as possible. They needed me to not tell them, right before they went to sleep, that my favorite food was their God on a bun. They needed me, for three months, to just make sure they were okay, fed, clothed, and bandaged up when need be. I was just a caretaker, but I needed to do that well. That would be a high enough bar for me without trying to change their world.
I never stayed away from the orphanage long. On occasion I would head into Kathmandu to meet up with other volunteers from my orientation program, have a beer, a yak steak and fries, and exchange stories from our volunteering gigs. I would tell them about village life; they would talk about life in the city. We tried to outdo one another with crazy stories. My favorite was the time my friend Alex Tattersall, an English guy from Manchester, volunteering in an orphanage in Kathmandu for troubled kids, had his camera stolen by one of the children. By the time he found out who it was, the boy had traded it for a chicken, which he had already killed, cooked, and eaten. The camera had cost five hundred dollars. Alex took a day to cool off, then he came right back to the orphanage, forgave the child, and continued taking care of the kids.
Other times, when the children were at school, I would go into Kathmandu to visit a simple, run-down artificial climbing wall, where one could practice rock climbing right in the city. The commute to the outdoor climbing wall took three hours, round-trip. There are no destinations written on the front of the local Kathmandu buses. One learns the route from the ten-year-old boy leaning out the open side door as the bus speeds along, looking for passengers, barking the final destination. Often the bus does not even come to a full stop. You are meant to run alongside it, grab a metal bar, swing onboard, then quickly cram your way into the horde of humanity already aboard. If it’s too crowded, you simply cling to the outside and hope cars don’t pass too closely. Sometimes an old lady would be waiting by the side of the road, as there are few official bus stops, and the boy would pound the side to indicate that the driver should slow enough to give the woman a fighting chance to swing herself aboard with the help of the boy.
I came to enjoy the commute. It was hypnotic, watching life on the Ring Road. It’s different in many ways from the center of Kathmandu, which is dominated by random alleyways lined with tiny shops just large enough for a man and his wares—carpets or plastic buckets or wool. The narrow streets expand into plazas built around Hindu temples, Buddhist stupas, and towering pagodas, giving pedestrians a breath of (relatively) fresh air, not to mention the opportunity to stand still for more than three seconds without getting hit by a bicycle.
The Ring Road is different. It’s not the claustrophobic labyrinth of Kathmandu but a postapocalyptic, tattered circle of pavement where buildings often sit forty or fifty feet back from the road, choked with vehicle exhaust. The faded yellow line dividing traffic is more of a suggested boundary; cars and motorcycles pull into the path of overladen trucks without hesitation, forcing oncoming traffic onto the dirt shoulder that could have been an extension of the road itself were it not for the clusters of pedestrians, cows, goats, stands selling plastic watch bands, and other stands selling bananas, and everything coated in dust and tinged with carbon monoxide.
Men and animals, side by side, rifle through large piles of garbage at the edge of the road. The people at this end of the
“Okay, good night, boys! Sleep well!” I called, backpedaling quickly out the door, reaching my arm back inside to slap blindly at the wall until the lights went out, then closing the door behind me.
That could have gone better, I thought. I gave up on the idea of telling the kids anything. What they needed from me was to screw up as little as possible. They needed me to not tell them, right before they went to sleep, that my favorite food was their God on a bun. They needed me, for three months, to just make sure they were okay, fed, clothed, and bandaged up when need be. I was just a caretaker, but I needed to do that well. That would be a high enough bar for me without trying to change their world.
I never stayed away from the orphanage long. On occasion I would head into Kathmandu to meet up with other volunteers from my orientation program, have a beer, a yak steak and fries, and exchange stories from our volunteering gigs. I would tell them about village life; they would talk about life in the city. We tried to outdo one another with crazy stories. My favorite was the time my friend Alex Tattersall, an English guy from Manchester, volunteering in an orphanage in Kathmandu for troubled kids, had his camera stolen by one of the children. By the time he found out who it was, the boy had traded it for a chicken, which he had already killed, cooked, and eaten. The camera had cost five hundred dollars. Alex took a day to cool off, then he came right back to the orphanage, forgave the child, and continued taking care of the kids.
Other times, when the children were at school, I would go into Kathmandu to visit a simple, run-down artificial climbing wall, where one could practice rock climbing right in the city. The commute to the outdoor climbing wall took three hours, round-trip. There are no destinations written on the front of the local Kathmandu buses. One learns the route from the ten-year-old boy leaning out the open side door as the bus speeds along, looking for passengers, barking the final destination. Often the bus does not even come to a full stop. You are meant to run alongside it, grab a metal bar, swing onboard, then quickly cram your way into the horde of humanity already aboard. If it’s too crowded, you simply cling to the outside and hope cars don’t pass too closely. Sometimes an old lady would be waiting by the side of the road, as there are few official bus stops, and the boy would pound the side to indicate that the driver should slow enough to give the woman a fighting chance to swing herself aboard with the help of the boy.
I came to enjoy the commute. It was hypnotic, watching life on the Ring Road. It’s different in many ways from the center of Kathmandu, which is dominated by random alleyways lined with tiny shops just large enough for a man and his wares—carpets or plastic buckets or wool. The narrow streets expand into plazas built around Hindu temples, Buddhist stupas, and towering pagodas, giving pedestrians a breath of (relatively) fresh air, not to mention the opportunity to stand still for more than three seconds without getting hit by a bicycle.
The Ring Road is different. It’s not the claustrophobic labyrinth of Kathmandu but a postapocalyptic, tattered circle of pavement where buildings often sit forty or fifty feet back from the road, choked with vehicle exhaust. The faded yellow line dividing traffic is more of a suggested boundary; cars and motorcycles pull into the path of overladen trucks without hesitation, forcing oncoming traffic onto the dirt shoulder that could have been an extension of the road itself were it not for the clusters of pedestrians, cows, goats, stands selling plastic watch bands, and other stands selling bananas, and everything coated in dust and tinged with carbon monoxide.
Men and animals, side by side, rifle through large piles of garbage at the edge of the road. The people at this end of the
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