NEPAL~ The Battered Wife ~ Sad Letter (March 10, 2013)

Comparing Nepal 1988 & 2013. Temple visits with Tibetans.


Visiting Nepal after a 25 year hiatus, I felt as if I was returning to find a battered wife, one I’d left long ago when she was a beautiful, fragile young woman.

When I arrived in Nepal in 1988, on my way home from Japan, I wrote this sentence home to friends,

“If only for 15 minutes, everyone in the world should visit Nepal.”

Thuli, Mulkharta village

The airport 25 years ago was a simple Quonset hut.  Even before I arrived in Kathmandu, I was introduced to Nepal’s poverty, as Nepal Airlines had only two aircraft in those days.  One flew and the other was in constant repair, while passengers, already checked in, waited in a decrepit airlines-owned hotel in Bangkok, lukewarm, murky water in the swimming pool. 

NEPAL ~ A Modern Day Arranged Marriage

The Happy Letter (March 1, 2013)



Tenzin Dechen & Nawang Lhadon on their wedding day, Feb 20, 2013

Marriage Arranged via Skype:  In 1993, I met Tenzin Kelsang, a Tibetan refugee to the US who ended up in Madison, Wisconsin, and three years later, her 4 kids and husband all arrived in Madison too.  This year, daughter Lhadon turned 29 years old, and her mother Tenzin and father Migmar decided it was high time for her to be married.  Through some conversations with their neighbors who’d come to Madison from Nepal, a nephew in a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal was identified, and Lhadon had been “Skyping” with him for seven months.

I panicked – an on-line engagement seemed too risky to me.  Lhadon is the only girl of the four kids in my adopted Tibetan family and epitomizes all the conflicts inherent in growing up as an individual belonging to a rich, ancient culture, under direct attack, and yet at the same time a 21^st century woman, desiring to be stylish and modern.  It’s been fascinating, if sometimes painful, to have watched that cultural battle wage within one young woman’s life.

I grilled her – what did she know about this guy in Nepal?