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Brighter Futures | |||
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by Kathleen Coskran (Ethiopia 196567) | |||
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![]() We welcome submission of travel essays from Peace Corps writers for consideration for online publication. Click here for information about how to submit your writings to PeaceCorpsWriters.org. Other |
“A PLACE DOESN’T TUG AT YOU the way a child does” the last words in the journal I kept during my month as a volunteer at Brighter Futures Children’s Home, in Bistechap, a village of 79 households southeast of Kathmandu, Nepal. The valley was beautiful; the village exquisite. The wheat was ready for harvest when I arrived, golden stalks swaying in the breeze across a vast valley and up terraced hills, nearly to the giant golden Shanti Ban Buddha who shed his universal light on us during the day and who glowed through the star-filled nights. I heard bells in the morning welcoming the spirits in every household, smelled incense burning, saw the mist lifting and the green day unfolding. In the distance women in bright red, yellow, and purple saris harvested the wheat, cutting it with a scythe, piling it on their backs, huge sheaves twice their size, walking the narrow paths home, where they spent the next several days beating the stalks on the ground, separating the wheat from the chaff. By the time I left the shorn wheat fields had been tilled with short-handled hoes by hand, and seeded with rice, the paddies now brilliant green rectangles up and down the valley. It was stunning. So the place was beautiful, but it is the 14 children, ages 6 to 16 9 boys, 5 girls whom I think about every day, who taught me the power of human connection and the sweetness of simple things, a story, making music, picking wild berries along the path, skipping rope, talking, making a joke, laughing together. I knew about such pleasures of course, but living with these children who had lost their families and who had few material possessions, but who greeted each day with joy and curiosity reinforced my belief in basic human goodness and in the responsibility we all share for the health and wellbeing of each other. They taught me concrete things too such as don’t waste food. We ate dal bhaat twice a day , a huge mound of rice bhaat on a wide metal plate, seasoned with a thin lentil dal soup, and garnished with a spoonful of curried vegetable potato, okra, cauliflower the vegetable being the only variation day to day prepared by Sita Didi (Didi means big sister; I was Kathleen Didi.). The boys sat in one row on the floor, the girls in a row perpendicular to them, I faced the boys and Sita Didi sat to my right surrounded by our 15 plates, doling out the dal bhaat. When the plates were ready, each person picked up his or her own, in order, handicapped children first, then the youngest to the oldest. The dal bhaat was delicious but sitting cross-legged on the floor hunched over my plate, eating hot rice and thin soup with the fingers of my right hand left an embarrassing halo of dal to mark my place on the floor. As the children finished eating, they took their cup and plate to the water spigot outside, washed each and set them on a rack to air dry. I watched them closely to know what to do, but the first time I washed up, I rinsed a bit of rice off my plate. “No, no!” seven-year-old Udai shouted. “You are wasting. Give it to the chickens.” I was ashamed. At the next meal he demanded to see my plate before I cleaned it, then wouldn’t let me approach the spigot until I had pinched the last grain of rice from my plate and drunk the last drop of liquid. “You are the dal bhaat police,” I complained. He was delighted to be the dal bhaat police and from then on lay in wait for me after every meal. Life there was simple. Days unfolded predictably with a rooster alert at 4:00 am, children stirring at 5:00, everybody up by 5:30 performing their morning ablutions at the cold water tap as the tinkle of bells rippled through the valley; by 6:30 the farmer’s boy had delivered the milk and Sita Didi was boiling it for the children. Then morning chores: everybody swept their area, polished their shoes, somebody got the newspaper from the tea shop and children crowded around to read it; others lined up to get their vitamins or ear drops or antiseptic on their nose piercing. We ate dal bhaat at 8:00, then there was a flurry of washing dishes, brushing teeth, getting dressed for school, primping in front of the mirror, filling their water bottles with boiled water, picking up the tin with their snack from Sita Didi, organizing their back packs, and by 9:00 we were all walking up the steep, muddy hill to wait for the school bus. Tell us a story. Every morning the same request as we walked up the hill, the older children as insistent as the younger: tell us Sleeping Beauty, no, Robin Hood. We had Robin Hood yesterday, do Puss ‘n Boots, no, please Robin Hood. You promised. I told a lot of stories that month, over and over, their eyes round when the ogre or witch or the evil Sheriff of Nottingham appeared, eyes shining when the prince finally showed up and at the end, when I paused, everybody chorused “and they lived happily ever after.” Which is my most fervent wish for those children, that they live happily ever after. The founding of Volunteer Service in Nepal Comparing care-givers It is the volunteer who is the luckiest |
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Kathleen Coskran is a writer and teacher. Her collection of short stories, The High Price of Everything, won a Minnesota Book Award as did Tanzania on Tuesday: Writing by American Women Abroad which she co-edited. She is the recipient of numerous artists' fellowships and residencies including an NEA Fellowship, a Bush Artist's Fellowship, and two grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Since her retirement as head of Lake Country School, a large, nationally known Montessori school that serves children through age 15, she and her husband Chuck, (Ethiopia 65-67, Kenya staff, 68-70) walked the thousand-mile pilgrimage from Le Puy en Velay, France, to Santiago, Spain and the following year taught at Zhejiang College of Media and Communications in Hangzhou, China. In May of 2008 she traveled to Nepal to work in a children’s home and develop curriculum for Volunteer Service in Nepal (VSN). |
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