I\u2019m curled up in a sleeping bag, listening to a Hindi song that someone has been playing on repeat for the past three hours. The loudspeakers are too far away for me to catch the lyrics (not that I would understand them), but I\u2019m starting to get to know the melody really well. I\u2019m actually working on memorizing it. Anything to keep my mind off reality for a bit, because the reality of the situation is not the most ideal: I\u2019m sick. Yesterday I had to puke in the street while I was walking. Today I\u2019m in a state of constant nausea, my insides are squirming, I feel cold and dehydrated, and I know that soon\u2014very soon\u2014I\u2019m going to be spending a lot of time in the toilet.<\/p>\n
Welcome to Nepal 101. The first thing you need to know about Nepal is that if you stay there long enough, you will get sick. There often is not running water because a) the infrastructure for running water is not fully developed and b) running water often requires electricity, which there\u2019s not much of (look up \u201cload shedding\u201d to learn more). This means that if someone else is making you meal, they might not be able to wash the food or their hands before cooking. Even if the water is running, this should not be much consolation. In Kathmandu the sewage system was (very wisely) built above the plumbing system. Generally speaking, you can and should assume that the water and food you are eating is actually poop water and poop food.<\/p>\n
Before going to Nepal, I had the general attitude that food was an enemy to be avoided. I was on the don\u2019t-eat-too-much-food-especially-sweets diet, so I saw food as a sinful temptation that made me put on pounds. In Nepal, food literally is the enemy. No matter who makes it, all food has the potential to make you suffer through gastrointestinal hell.<\/p>\n
For the people who live in Nepal, food has very different connotations. I\u2019ve heard that the locals build up immunities to nasty bugs and bacteria when they are young, so they don\u2019t actually get sick as much as Westerners. Try explaining that to someone who offers you possibly sketchy food as a gesture of kindness and welcome. My monk friends at Tharlam Monastery always offered meals to me\u2014definitely a cultural gesture\u2014and it was really hard to shut them down.<\/p>\n
Another interesting thing is that people in the impoverished country of Nepal actually want to gain weight. I remember my skinny amala (my Tibetan host mother) looking at herself in the mirror, voicing regrets that she wasn\u2019t fat. Perhaps because food is less accessible to the masses, people idealize fatness. When I returned to America, 15 pounds skinnier due to malnourishment, women complimented my body, asking if I had been working out. Should I have said, \u201cYes, thanks!\u201d or admit that I looked the way I did because I spent weeks enduring severe abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea, and puking?<\/p>\n
In America, the body is a reflection of your personality and your efforts (i.e. working out). People in Nepal don\u2019t carry the same burden of responsibility on their shoulders. They tend to recognize that body weight is a reflection of situation. People are skinny because of sickness or lack of financial resources, not because they want to be that way. Despite all the pain I went through in Nepal, it was liberating to live according to that attitude.<\/p>\n
In reality, I think that body weight reflects some of both extremes: personal choices and situational realities. Unfortunately, here in America we put a lot of emphasis on the personal. Will a resource rich, individualist country ever be able to see body weight in a more balanced way? Now that I\u2019m surrounded by American culture again, I have slipped back into American mindsets about body weight. Perhaps if I want to perceive my body weight in a more secure and balanced way, I must first accept\u2014not just borrow\u2014both the Himalayan and American mindsets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m curled up in a sleeping bag, listening to a Hindi song that someone has been playing on repeat for the past three hours. The loudspeakers are too far away for me to catch the lyrics (not that I would understand them), but I\u2019m starting to get to know the melody really well. I\u2019m actually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[243],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}