From Nepal to Scotland.... My 2016 journey.
I’m not sure whether the official start of a new year, 2017, means much to me, to my private, inner life.
In my mind, I haven’t closed 2016 yet. 2016 has been the most important year in my life, a very eventful year, and memories of all these events are still playing gigs in my head, making it impossible for me to close the chapter. Not that I’d want to, anyway ;) .
I started 2017 in a small village in the Gorkha district of Nepal, in the Gakhu VDC (Village Development Committee). Living with an old lady in her little house, struggling to have a wash or even change my clothes- or even crawl out of my sleeping bag in the mornings! ;)) - because of the creeping chill from which there was nowhere to hide. Nobody in the village spoke fluent English, and since my Nepali vocabulary was not rich enough for me to master deeper conversations, I pretty much didn’t have any chats which would go beyond basic topics about khaanaa (food), mero desh (my country), and “bihaa gareko ho?” (are you married?). I missed everyone. My family, my friends, Rohan, I missed intellectual stuff, and, well, access to the wider world called the Internet. The beautiful jolly kids and youngsters I was teaching were accompanying me everywhere, I couldn’t go anywhere on my own. I may have been the biggest curiosity which had occurred in their life up so far. I loved them, I loved the villagers, but I would lie if I said I didn’t feel isolated. It was hard. Not the cold weather, not the lack of hygiene or comfort, not even the absence of information or connection with the rest of the world, but the fact that I didn’t have a mate to chat to, any mate, anyone to relate to. No phone signal either.
But I read books. I read so many books, and I still remember their contents so well because I lived the stories I was reading. There was nothing to distract me from reading. I was reading, and that is what I was doing, and the book meant the world to me there and then.
I was making plans about my future, about going back to uni and doing PhD, about living in Austria, Germany or Switzerland, in a country with a lot of discipline and order and cleanliness and civil obedience. Gosh, I was making grand plans there :))
I have started 2017 in Glasgow. A year on, I am in Scotland. Scotland has come as a winner out of all the grand plans I made in 2016. It may not be the most disciplined country out of all of those I planned to move to, and Glasgow is hardly ever the cleanest out of all the places I thought I would live in. Civil obedience may not be the strongest Glaswegian feature either, but let’s not talk about this ;))
I have made it to Scotland.
After travelling alone in Sikkim and West Bengal, celebrating the Tibetan New Year at a Buddhist monastery in Darjeeling, hiking through forests of West Sikkim, praying with monks in Pemayangtse and suffering from awful tonsillitis in Gangtok.
After returning back to Nepal on Shiva Raatri and indulging in numerous cups of “marihuana smoothie”..... After instead of enjoying the ray of colours during Holi ending up at a police station in north of Kathmandu and starting a police case that dragged for more than a month and cost me a great deal of emotional trauma and deep lines on my face from crying and frowning...
After trusting and loving so much a guy I should not have trusted at all. Nothing new.
After meeting my “soul sister”, my bahini, a dear friend I will love forever.
After being on the verge of setting up a business in Kathmandu, and then throwing it all out of the window because I felt I couldn’t commit to living in Nepal.
No matter how well I could speak Nepali or know the customs, traditions and way of life, I would always be a foreigner. I set off to travel the country on my own, went to hike in Lamjung, off the tourist-trodden paths, staying at a friend’s uncle’s house in the Nalma village. It is not easy to be a single white woman in Nepal. Not easy if you go around with the mindset “This country is going to become my home.”. Nepal is friendly, Nepalese are cheerful, lovely and mostly very helpful and generous people. But I found it very hard to imagine living there, making it my home. I could assimilate in myself, yet most Nepalese would never see it. I am a Western white woman. I left Nepal on 3rd June, and oh God, I didn’t want to leave.... But I knew it was impossible to stay....
And since then, Nepal has been on my mind. There isn’t a single day when I wouldn’t think about Nepal, when I wouldn’t reminisce, process memories, situations, when I wouldn’t analyse “What if...”. What if I had stayed. What if I had started a business, a social enterprise, what if I had been more open to it. What if I had been more resilient and hadn’t let a bad experience have such a big impact on my wellbeing and in consequence on the way I perceived Nepal.... What if.
There is a handmade natural candle from the Isle of Skye burning on the chest of drawers in my bedroom. My bedroom is warm. I have a king size bed for myself, avocado, kale, almond drink and British Cox apples in my fridge, raw cocoa, spirulina and God knows what else in my cupboard. I have a job where I not only use my intellectual capacity and education, but I also work for a good cause. I help to develop and manufacture treatments for rheumatoid arthritis, for autoimmune diseases, for cancer.... It is what I wanted. Well, I don’t rest on roses as I thought I would when I was making my grand plans, and my life is not picture-perfect as I had imagined it to be once upon my return to the world of great “order and civil obedience”. There are everyday battles to be fought. There is a lot of loneliness as one would expect there to be upon moving to a new place. However, I am not isolated. I could go out and connect so easily with people not only thanks to the fact that they all speak English, but also thanks to our common cultural background.
Sometimes I feel like I stand inbetween these two worlds, not knowing where I belong. Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong anywhere. Yet the true remains that I was born and bred in Europe, and culturally I do belong here.
God knows then why my battered mind keeps wandering to Nepal.
Life is a journey. A journey that presents a plethora of choices, and along with them, the huge challenge to choose our path. And then stay on it and make it worthwhile.
They say it is the journey not the destination that matters. I’m not sure I totally agree. I often wish for the moment, the feeling that “I have arrived”. The feeling I once had. When I woke up in Dhapasi on 22nd August 2015.
