Woodstock, Vermont  

December 2009  


Magda asked me last week what I would write about this year for Christmas. She wanted me to write about the house that we bought and now live in. It seems like a big deal, but if you've ever bought a house yourself and moved into it, and found things wrong with it, and gotten to work fixing it, and found that process to be complicated and costly, there isn't too much more I could say about it which you wouldn't know already.

There was another thing that happened in 2009 which has given me even more to think about and maybe act upon than buying the house did. I received an email from a student of mine in Nepal. Receiving emails is even more commonplace than buying houses, so this will not seem remarkable. How can I explain my astonishment? The school I taught at was so bad that only one student had ever passed the national eighth grade exam. There was no electricity in Sittad, or telephone, or road. There was no way out of Sittad except to climb through the jungle down a very steep valley and up a mountain, and I mean that physically and metaphorically for any person who lived there. The only computers in Nepal were in Kathmandu. People from Sittad only went to Kathmandu if they felt like being ridiculed, because they could barely speak Nepali. They had their own language which was unintelligible in the capital.

Somehow Madhav Joshi passed the eighth grade exam and kept on schooling himself, and eventually got accepted at a university in Kathmandu, for a M.Ed., where they taught him computer literacy. He looked me up and found my gmail address. I found out from him that Sittad still doesn't have electricity, but the school may be getting better because around 15% of students pass the eighth grade exam instead of 0.5%. Madhav will have a hard time explaining to people in Sittad how exactly he contacted me. Nobody will understand such a thing as email.

On my web page I have had a picture of him for the last 10 years. He is the boy standing on one leg holding an umbrella looking over the edge of the hill, in the rain. You can't see his face, but that's him, Madhav Joshi.

In my second email to him, I asked about the student whom I loved, Shiva Raj Joshi. Shiva Raj was the one I would have picked to go to Kathmandu and learn to send email. The smartest in the class, he was also the most confident and lively. Madhav wrote me that Shiva Raj had been out herding goats when a rock fell from a cliff and struck him in the head and killed him instantly. This was six years ago, when Shiva Raj was 17 years old.

Naturally I cried and cried over Shiva Raj Joshi. Sometimes even now, weeks later, Magda has to ask me at the dinner table what is it what is wrong, and I tell her that I'm thinking about him. It is a gift whenever someone you love dies. It is a gift to you, because it gives you wisdom. But it comes with so much pain that you want to give the gift back or to someone else, or defer it.

To tell more about Shiva Raj, he was the student most interested in my camera. I let him release the shutter when I had it on the tripod. (Did I let him do this, or do I only imagine it? It has been so long, and I can't trust my memory. I hope that I let him, and it may be true. I think that I did let him.) I have a memory of the Sittad festival when I took a hundred pictures. He followed me around like an assistant photographer. He found it fascinating to watch me change the film.

A few years ago, when he was already dead but I didn't know it, I wrote this about him:

Back in the States, interest in my Peace Corps service was not very high. People had two questions : How was Nepal? It was really hard, I said. Then they asked, Did you make a difference? I didn't know how to answer so I would tell them a story. See, there was this boy in my math class named Shiva Raj Joshi. He was the smartest kid in the seventh grade but he couldn't see the blackboard. He needed glasses. Nobody in the entire village had ever worn glasses. I wore glasses. So one day Shiva Raj's father came to see me at school and asked was it really true that if he took Shiva Raj to Mahendranagar to buy these things like I had on my face that the boy would be able to copy his lessons down better? And I said that it was true, and that he should go, and that his son's education depended on it. So they went and Shiva got glasses. His classmates wanted to make fun of him for it, but the ridicule fell flat. Since I wore glasses myself, and since I was American, which was considered cool, Shiva wore the glasses with pride.


I counted it as my biggest achievement in Peace Corps Nepal that Shiva Raj Joshi had gotten his glasses. I was sure that if I returned to visit in twenty years, that he would be the headmaster of the school.

What does this have to do with Christmas and this letter I'm writing, and why do I have to tell about it? It is what's on my mind these days. That's all. I've been lucky in life. I have a beautiful family. We have beautiful days. When I have an especially beautiful day, I want to reach back many years and give it to Shiva Raj, and let him live it instead of me. He was smarter than me, and pure inside, and more deserving.

I look down at my hands and how they are still moving. It seems like a miracle. I think about this every day now.


I recently read the Nearings' book The Good Life. One principle thesis is that all old wooden homes are an abomination and a money trap. They advocate buying a piece of land in the woods and building a stone house by hand as the only worthwhile way to live. I picked up this book six months too late, shortly after buying my own old wooden home. Our house is in a nice neighborhood in an expensive town, but it needs a lot of work. Since we purchased it, we have discovered that it needs much more work and money than we had ever imagined or that a real estate agent would ever let on. Buying a home is part of our cultural happiness myth, also known as the American Dream. So, people tend to congratulate us. I tell them honestly there have been plenty of times this fall and winter when I wished that we were still renting. I like working on the house. It is the financial pressure which unnerves me. Our savings are gone and we live paycheck to paycheck for the first time ever. I had always promised Magda that we would buy a new dining room table and chairs after we bought a house, because the chairs we have are falling apart. They have been glued and hammered back together many times. We have to be very careful who sits in which chair. If a guest comes to eat at our table, and seats himself without being directed, there's a good chance I'll have to politely ask him to move so that he can have the best chair, the one least likely to collapse if he makes himself too comfortable. It sounds funny, but it's embarrassing really. What kind of people are we?

This winter when shoveling snow the first time I could see that I needed a new pair of boots. But if I buy new boots this week, we won't be able to pay the plumber. So I have wet feet. I have to remember about Shiva Raj, and how happy he would be this year to be standing in a snow bank by a house that he bought, in the wettest of boots. Suddenly, it seems like the best kind of fortune.


Finally, about our children: Zosia likes the art activities at the local library. She comes home with little projects where she has cut colored paper and glued things together. Staszek starts to understand what life is about and what's going on in his house. He doesn't talk about it much, but you can see the light in his eyes.