Paradigm Shifts

I really had to get used to a lot of things when I first arrived in Nepal. For starters, the living arrangements. When I arrived at the volunteer hostel for RCDP (Rural Community Development Project---the volunteer association I'm with here), I felt like everything was so dirty. The greasy table and dirt-smudged chairs we sat in at when we ate; half the time the silverware was still dirty, and maybe that's because we also didn't have soap to wash them with after our meals of greasy wanna-be Western food. I was skeptical of the beds, trying to not think about the last time anything was washed; my bare feet having to touch dirty floors (because you never wear shoes inside the house in Hindu/Buddhist culture). And then there was the worst of all---the toilet/shower combination bathrooms. I don't think I even want to relive those first impressions yet, or maybe ever. Don't I sound like the hugest snot? (Even though I tried to not verbalize all of this---in retrospect, I think most of the volunteers were trying not to---I was thinking that Nepal had outted this closet germophobe inside of me.)

After several weeks in the country, I returned to the RCDP hostel with 9 other volunteers from our village stay in Lamatar (on the disco bus!), and I was shocked to find how everything was so clean and nice! Even the walls seemed cleaner and the lights brighter. I didn't even hesitate to sit down to use the bathrooms ("sit-down" toilets are a special luxury here) of which I was originally NOT a fan. I barely noticed the smells I first found so reprehensible when I arrived in the country. I was ecstatic! When I shared my enthusiasm with my friend Grace, she didn't really think that that much had changed, but that it was me: I had changed from my few weeks stay in Nepal. Even reflecting back on how I felt, it seems crazy that I could have changed THAT much in such a short period of time.

It is funny, though, how much you really do change when the circumstances require it. For example, we simply sweat and sweat and sweat during our village stay in Lamatar and our jungle activities in Chitwan National Park. We'd go for days without showers wearing the same clothes. You just start to realize that you're not really smelling THAT bad, and that your clothes aren't THAT dirty (sure, it's the 8th time you've worn that pair of pants, but they still look pretty good, right?), and it's just not worth the trouble to get clean in a shower when you're going to be dirty all over again in 30 minutes.

Landing in Chitwan, Grace and I were delirous with joy at the ceiling fan that we had in our guest room. It was our first air conditioning in the country, plus the moving air kept all of the mosquitoes away. The bedroom even had it's own bathroom, which in turn had it's own bathtub and shower area, separate from the rest of the bathroom. (Most hostel situations have a shared bathroom for all the guests on a floor, and usually the shower is in the middle of the bathroom and there's just a drain in the floor, between the toilet (which is either sometimes a sit-down get-up or a hole in the floor) and the sink.) It wasn't until a day later that I noticed that there was a lot of dirt in the bathroom. When I asked Grace if our bathroom had been clean when we got there and she said no. I was so happy to have what we had, I hadn't even realized that it wasn't a clean (by general hotel housekeeping standards) bathroom.

One night when Grace and I were up late talking we started fantasizing about all the foods we would eat when we got home. I am constantly fantasizing about steak and Mexican food (food I can't get here), and especially anything Cafe Rio that would include steak as an ingredient. Not only am I at the point where I'm obsessively thinking about eating the forbidden holy cow, I could even it off the bathroom floor or the toilet lid and probably not be phased by it (Maybe even wash it down with some toilet water). That is how excited I will be to eat it, and also how much trust I have in the cleanliness of my bathoom at home.