The Last Pygmy
July 26, 2010
In the remote border region between Burma and Tibet lives the Taron people, a “pure-blood” race of Mongoloid pygmies on the verge of self-imposed extinction. Rabinowitz shares his encounter with one family member, Dawi, who saw the “deep, deep hole” existing within both men — and the bounty of that friendship in his own life.
This story touched me, especially since I’ve been reliving my experiences in Nepal on this blog. I hope you enjoy this 4-min video. We have so much to offer each other regardless of race, language, religion, or geography.
The Last Pure Pygmy and His Gift from Speaking of Faith on Vimeo.
Trekking Nepal: Episode IV
July 25, 2010
Vampires in Paradise
I have seen a goddess. And now she is gone, vanished behind stacks of clouds. Other peaks come and go in the billowing mist, but I watch them without seeing. My pupils focus inward again and again, straining to see the twisting ridges of Machapuchre, her vaporous after-image burned on my retina. Looking back, it’s hard to believe the horror I would confront this very same morning, not on the horizon, but at my feet.
After breakfasting on boiled eggs, fried cornbread, and wild honey, we set out for Pohtana. I am not happy about making Pohtana our destination for the day because it is only an hour and a half up the trail. We are short on time and I want to get higher, farther, faster. Our guide, J.V., normally leads three-week-long treks that require slow acclimatization to altitude. But, due to my busy residency schedule at the hospital, we have only four days. Despite my pleas, J.V. will make no exception to the rules of acclimatization.
We slug forward.
After forty minutes of steep climbing we stop at what looks like any other pleasant resting place along the trail–with flat grass, smooth boulders to sit on, and small rocks for foot stools. A cool brook babbles nearby and the ground is only mildly spongy. There is no hint of the squirming hell that lurks beneath the mossy turf.
Sitting comfortably on a stone, I remove my boots and spread my toes, messaging the balls of my feet.
In my peripheral vision, the grass appears to move, like a shag carpet fingering the air in a breeze. But there is no breeze. Something is off. I can’t put my finger on it.
I squint and look closer. The patch of ground at my feet darkens, like an expanding blot of ink. The margins of it are hairy and wriggling. It expands unevenly, almost spastically, like a hoard of arthritic fingers ratcheting toward me. I feel a needling rush cascade down my spine, corkscrewing the hairs on my neck into quivering spikes. Something primal in me screams and I grab my boots, cram them onto my feet, and jump up without bothering with the laces.
But I am too late. An undulating mass surrounds me and fear and fascination hijack my nervous system. I am rooted to the spot.
With curled lips and wide eyes, I watch as a knot of spaghetti-like creatures crawls up my bootlaces. Caterpillars, I wonder? No, these move too fast.
They spring like grasshoppers up my ankles, making a bee-line for the warm regions of my socks. They surge over me like barbarians over a Roman wall. I feel a pulling sensation as small weights accumulate on my calves.
Dear Lord. I’m sinking into living quicksand.
“Leeeeches!”, J.V. screams.
Like a key, the word unlocks me. Leeches. Of course! But these are nothing like the leeches that cling to rocks in American lakes. As J. D. Hooker writes in his Himalayan Journals of 1854, “Leeches swarmed with incredible profusion… they got into my hair, hung from my eyelids and crawled up my back.”
Suddenly, I dance and shake as if I am on fire. Dad and J.V. do the same. With flicks and flings and curses, we hop and zig-zag away from the marshland as quickly as possible. We behave as if we have stumbled into a hornet’s nest. Our eyes are wild and unfocused. Our nostrils flare like snouts of horses at a derby. After fifty yards of flailing, we turn around abruptly and stare back at the marsh, breathing hard, trembling with nervous energy.
“What the !@#$!” I gasp.
Even Dad, normally so cool under pressure, looks disheveled and unnerved. J.V. simply collapses into a pile of loose limbs, saying nothing.
Haemadipsids–or Land Leeches–are a nasty slice of Nepal’s biodiversity. This is what I learned in my research after I returned safely to U.S. soil:
“They drop from trees on men and animals and creep through all the openings in one’s clothes, even the eyelets of one’s shoes. If one tears them off, one loses more blood than if one lets them drink their fill, when they fall off by themselves. Some of the valleys are infested to such a degree by leeches that one simply cannot protect oneself against them. The best way of keeping them out is by wearing socks and trousers steeped in salt,” (Heinrich Harrer, 7 Years in Tibet).
These annelids evoke both horror and fascination in me. They are terrestrial blood-feeding worms of unusual stealth and speed–with an equally unusual biogeographic distribution; found only in the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Australia, Melanesia, Madagascar, and the Seychelles. All other leech families are aquatic and have a global distribution. Haemadipsids (from the Greek word Haematodipsia, meaning “a sexual thirst for blood”) are only about 2 inches long, but what they lack in size they make up for in numbers.
“…they swarm in myriads in every wood… it is impossible to take a single step without being attacked… they are on every bush and tree, from which they drop on the head and neck of the passer-by,” (Haekel, 1883 — A Visit to Ceylon).
And if I had read the following sentence before venturing out, I would have searched the world over for a pair of Teflon underwear:
“I counted no fewer than ninety-seven of them on my body, most of them concentrated round my private parts!” (Campbell, 1953 — Jungle Green).
Thankfully, I fare much better than any of these early explorers. After a meticulous body check, I find not a single leech has gotten its slurping kisser into my skin.
Thank God for small miracles.
To be continued…
Trekking Nepal: Episode III
May 23, 2010
Featuring:
A himalayan Hilton–a Mermaid mountain–a 25-year-old memory–and a mirror of another world.
Around the bend and up a small hill is the town of Dhampus, with its celebrated view of the Himalayas. Even better, it is home to one of the poshest hotels along the Anapurna base-camp route. After hours of hot and sweaty trekking, followed by a slog through torrential rains, we are eager for some dry clothes and hot food.
When we step into the lobby of our two-story hotel, we immediately feel like tramps. We are dripping from every crevice. Muddy pools collect at our feet and spread like oil slicks across the clean tile floor. A concierge in a red vest looks up from his mahogany desk and asks, Read more
Trekking Nepal: Episode II
May 9, 2010
Featuring:
A stone escalator–a fern poultice–an official swindler–and very soggy GORE-TEX.
We eat a hearty breakfast of Dal Baht and boiled eggs and set off into the mountains. The trail is literally a stairway to heaven. Laid into the precipitous canyon wall are thousands upon thousands of rough-hewn stones, forming an ancient staircase, a belt of stone twisting skyward past ferns and Eucalyptus, past waterfalls and vines, up and out of sight into green mists. The fact that each stair is man-made astounds me. In some long-forgotten past, I see wizened villagers with slick and muddy hands planting every stone with individual care. I cannot fathom how many years it took to build this stone-age escalator.
After an hour of climbing and wiping greasy sunblock off my brow with the back of my hand, we come to a plateau. The canopy of ferns opens and unveils a small village clinging to the canyon wall–a green expanse of millet fields and squat huts. Pale curls of smoke rise from a dozen chimneys, seasoning the air with Read more
Trekking Nepal: Episode I
April 18, 2010
In which I introduce myself and my fear of heights, crash landings, and tapeworms…
We settle into the plush seats of a lightening-fast twin Beachcraft. She is wasp-like, sleek and thin at the waist. By comparison, the large and smiling letters on her flank look chubby, almost quaint: Buddha Air.
It is 1999 and I have just completed a month in Nepal doing surgery at Sheer Memorial Hospital, a Christian mission about an hour southeast of Katmandu. Dad has arrived to join me in a four-day trekking adventure to Fish Tail mountain, the holiest of holy peaks in the Anapurna range of central Nepal.
Buddha Air launches us with screaming turbines, up past racks of clouds. The Himalayas play hide and seek below. The mountains seem to know we are looking at them; they dodge our attempts to find the one summit we seek most: Sagarmatha, Mount Everest, the highest point on earth. She ought to be the closest perch to us, the easiest to see. But she is cloaked, enwombed in sheets of stratocumulus Read more
Shift
March 22, 2010
Sometimes waiting on God means realizing he is waiting on you–waiting for you to face your giants, like David, head-on and full throttle…
Rich stands in the boathouse, massaging his head with a towel as thick as a blanket. He works slowly, lolling his head in the fabric, twisting spikes of blond hair into elaborate whorls like crop circles Read more
Young Goodman Brown
February 24, 2010
I just read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story Young Goodman Brown. Great!
This story really pushes the reader to consider how we run amok when we try to become ultra pure and holy. We’ve all met people like Goodman who, when they are confronted by the ugliness of the human condition, draw the wrong conclusion and miss the point entirely.
In reaction to sin, Goodman isolates himself on his own little island of holiness–and becomes a complete failure as a human being. Ouch. The darkness of the story is its own irony.
Hawthorne seems to suggest that we cannot focus on the opposite of an idea and thereby escape it. We cannot focus on sin and thereby escape it. Hawthorne asks the question: can we find goodness if we’ve trained our eyes to see only badness–in ourselves, in the world, and in other people, especially in those closest to us?
There’s no sense doing violence to Hawthorne’s prose by attempting to summarize the story itself; it only takes 12-15 minutes to read. Get it from the library. Or borrow my copy. Or download it for free. Or read it online.
Read: go forth and be thoughtful.
Salvator Interviews Marc Wagner
February 21, 2010
Salvator interviews Marc Wagner about his new book, There and Back Again, and asks the author about his next writing project…
Click here to read the interview.
Soul Friends
February 16, 2010
The following passage from John O’Donohue’s book, Anam Ċara, made me think fondly of ConneXions and Band of Brothers and all the wonderful small groups that have sprouted up in our church over the last three years. These are places of belonging, of knowing and being known…
“In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is anam ċara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and ċara is the word for friend. … In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam ċara. It originally referred to Read more
Green Peace
February 8, 2010
I awoke one Sabbath with the urge to get high, mountain high. I had just changed jobs and my new responsibilities pressed in on me like a crowd in an elevator.
An image jutted through my mind. It levered me out of bed: I saw myself in an alpine forest, dewdrops on morels, sunbeams on water, me sniffing mountain air so fresh it seared my nostrils like a nip of wasabi. I dressed, blinking, squinting. My limbs moved unconsciously toward the car.
It wasn’t long before I found myself on a wooded trail deep in the Cascades without remembering quite how I got there. Soft needles crunched under my feet and a breeze tugged at the mossy beards of the pines. I was alone, except for my iPod, and as I trotted past a huge obsidian flow I heard the first notes of Mozart’s Symphony #40 tinkling in my ears. I smiled. The strings dipped and sawed and eventually knifed their way through a melody that was clearly going someplace, as I was Read more
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