Teachers get to go to conferences once in a while, and depending on the school, and the location, sometimes the conferences are in exciting locales. At my first school, for example, in Gastonia, North Carolina, several of us piled into a car at dawn to drive down to Columbia, South Carolina for a day-long AP conference. At my next school, in Charlotte, I attended a great week-long conference in Vermont during July. That was nice…and then from Hackley, I went back to Vermont again (and again…the conference site also hosted a culinary school in the summer!) and also went to San Diego for a conference! Well…last week I attended the Fall Leadership Conference for NESA (Near East South Asia International Schools) in…wait for it…Kathmandu. I have stepped up in the world since that little day-trip down to Columbia.
But going to conferences is never easy during the school year—in fact, it is just plain hard to be absent; there are too many duties and well, you know, my life in middle management is just so hectic, it is often easiest to just stay put. But I attended this conference last year in Athens, really enjoyed the speakers, and well, it is excitin’ for this boy of the Midwest to end up at the base of the Himalayas (I will get this out right now, for those of you who read the blog aloud—wait, seriously, did I just think someone would read the blog aloud? I just hope a few treasured friends and family keep up a little—oh, back to my point—I have learned from my very sophisticated friends that the way we pronounce Himalayas is rather gauche. Hit the ‘al’ part like the word ‘all’ and put the stress on that and not that the ‘lay’ part. I would hate for any of you to ever be embarrassed by how you mis-pronounced this important mountain chain!) As it turns out, no one wanted to teach my AP Art History class (although they missed good lessons on Hellenistic Art and the Etruscans!), so my friend Gary (I know I keep promising his own showcased blog) suggested that he film me teaching him the art and he would show it in class. Okay! Finally, I will be a film star—please keep the close-up on me a little, Mr. DeMille, and not just on the gorgeous turbulence of Hellenistic art.
All the planning is taken care of, and I realize that for this conference in Kathmandu I have three full-time jobs: attend the conference and grow as a school leader; strengthen the bonds with the three women with whom I will be touring Kathmandu; and write the nearly 60 comments for the fall report cards for my students. Those comments are due the day I am back, and I then have 500 comments from my department to read so they must be done. Okay. Three full-time jobs…I am a multi-tasker, and I will make a schedule. And I will do all three of the full-time jobs.
Of course the blog readers are most interested in the Kathmandu part…the wait-where-is-that-exactly-?? part. At my sit-down lunch table the day before I left I announced I was going to Nepal for a conference and one student asked, “Isn’t that in Italy?” Before I corrected him, I said, “I think I know why you said that! Italy has a city called Naples, and I am going to Nepal.” How many of you thought it was in Italy? Okay. Quick geography lesson Nepal is at the base of the Himalayas (did you pronounce it correctly??) sandwiched in between India to the southwest and Tibet China to the Northeast. Given that it is in the valley of the highest mountain range on earth, I will be going to the Top of the World (you know I have to cue the 1970s Karen Carpenter tune…).
I am travelling with some formidable powers that be: Dana, Deputy Headmaster and head of the finance at KA, Ola, the Operations Manager for everything at the school, and Sheena, Deputy Headmaster as well, and Dean of the Faculty. And little ole me. One of the great promises of a conference with colleagues is a chance to bond with them in new ways, whether it is sitting through a long layover, laughing over some old piece of business, seeing a new site, exploring a new country, trying a new food, or feeling inspired by a speaker. Those were my hopes for that full-time job as we set for the airport.
We flew from Amman to Doha (oh, my…talk about hot!) and then had a six-hour wait before we boarded for Kathmandu. When we landed in the morning at Kathmandu, we aimed to spend that pre-conference day discovering the city and seeing what this country was about. In our 20-minute drive from the airport we got a sense as to this city. I knew poverty was a wet blanket on Nepal, so I was not surprised to see it so graphically in the drive. But in the next few hours as we meandered through the shopping district, looked for lunch, got a feel for the goods and services available (oh, don’t go to Nepal hoping for high-speed internet access or cell phone coverage) and saw each other in action in the realm of haggling, we did more than just drink in the warm sunshine. We drank in the beauty of the pashminas and the Buddhist painted banners and we were amazed at the number of trekkers in Kathmandu (duh…we are at the base of the Himalayas; again, have you gotten the correct pronunciation??). We also kept trying to figure out the time…from the airport to the hotel to every clock we saw, we surmised that Nepal is 2:45 minutes off from Amman. What? Not three hours?? But two and three-quarters?? Can they do that??? Very strange…
But the afternoon was wonderfully relaxing as we tried to connect the dots as to what we saw in Kathmandu. We walked about a half hour to the tourist shopping district (these women are fierce bargainers…again, with the duh…duh…they run the school! But I swear I saw some merchants crying over these transactions!) and saw the Royal Palace (more on the politics later) and finally found a restaurant a merchant had recommended (we promised to patronize his shop after lunch—sucker!) and we laughed and enjoyed a long leisurely late lunch at a place called Anatolia, a hole-in-the-wall gem (wait, every restaurant we saw was a hole-in-the-wall—we knocked at a place called Taj Mahal, and they opened and said, “Not open today. Come back tomorrow.” Anatolia specializes in Indian, Turkish, Tibetan, Chinese, and French cuisine. We picked out a banquet and took care of the bonding part of the trip. As always happens, you see each away from a desk, or away from an impending disaster, and the beautiful human elements stand in high relief to the mundane matters of an institution. I felt grateful to travel and visit with these colleagues. Oh, even the name of our hotel gave rise to good laughs—we will be staying at the Yak and Yeti Hotel!! Yakkety, yak…don’t talk back…oh, a deficit of sleep and a tummy full of food will make that joke funny again and again…
I spent a chunk of the evening beginning the comments so that I could do my other full-time job of conferencing tomorrow. Well, yes, I did work on the comments for a couple of hours, but I spent time in the evening in the hotel spa and became instant good friends with Raji, the guy at the desk running the spa. In between trips in the steam room, I learned a great deal about Nepal from him.
It seems we came to Nepal at a very auspicious time, at the tail end of a fortnight holiday known as Dashain. Raji and Buzzybashar (that is a transliteration of how his name sounded to me) explained that about 80% of Nepal is Hindu, and Dashain is a big, big festival honoring the Goddess Durga who showers her people with prosperity. It is two weeks long in which family members try very hard to travel and visit each other, buy gifts, especially new clothes, enjoy big meals, and get the vermilion-powder mark of Durga’s blessings on the forehead (it looks like a neon-orange-colored Ash Wednesday mark). The guys also grumbled and groused about how the prices were jacked up for the holiday season and that the heavy rains created such mud that the new clothes got dirty. I spoke with them on and off for about two hours, enjoying their kindness and learning of the holiday. “It is like your Christmas,” BB said, “and we try and forget all the feuds and quarrels.” They explained to me the elaborate public dances and animal sacrifices in honor of Durga, who in a victory (against whom I didn’t get quite understand) saved the world from the evil forces.
The following morning we four piled into a taxi about the size of my dining room table—seriously, it was sooooo tiny; oh well, we drove over to the Hyatt for the opening of the conference. I will discuss the conference in another postcard, so I will fill in a few more details about Kathmandu. That afternoon, in between the speakers and the evening cocktail party, we walked around the beautiful hotel gardens, out the back gate, and down a lane to the Baudu Stupa, a Buddhist shrine. I believe about 10% of Nepal is Buddhist, and there are several important shrines in the area. A stupa is a bell-shaped, pyramidal structure, made of earth, or stone, and holds sacred relics. When we arrived we saw a large contingent of pilgrims there, regular folks, and monks and tourists, all circumambulating around the stupa (it must be clockwise) and spinning the prayer wheels as they reverently sought protection and guidance. For the Buddhists it is a carefully calculated understanding of the cosmos as envisioned by Buddha. We joined in the walk after a bit, and at sunset it was a striking thing.
The following day, as much as I pondered the helicopter ride up into the mountain range (we know how to pronounce it, do we not?) I decided I needed to work on the student comments during the conference break. After a couple hours of mad typing and adjective spewing, I went back to the spa, and found my friends from the day before. They urged me to go and visit this Hindu temple nearby. In fact, they said they would take me after their shift. A little later I am on my way to Pasupati, a Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. I was not allowed to go into the temple, but I was able to stand a little bit away and witness the live cremation of bodies on funeral pyres. Oh, my. My guys explained different things to me so I would understand the significance. The pyres were built of wood and the bodies were wrapped in white cloth for purity and burned in 7 different pyres, historically representing the 7 levels of the caste system. The ashes and any remaining body parts were then ceremoniously tossed into the river along with flowers. The Bagmati River eventually flows into the sacred Ganges, so it is certainly a sacred rite in Nepal. Not your average evening…But then I needed to get back and write a few more comments.
Along the same lines, it is October 31, and while many will celebrate Halloween today, I always have college recommendations due on November 1 and I have a couple more to go…I will write another postcard tomorrow evening to conclude my trip to Kathmandu.
You know, for a boy from the Midwest, I have also travelled to Disney World a few times, and one of the newest attractions is a roller-coaster ride called Expedition Everest. I gotta say, having been on that a couple of times, the Disney people sure do their homework well. The set-up and landscaping of that ride looks an awful lot like Nepal!
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