Marble in My Backpack
Theology Lessons from a Tiny Outpost in Nepal

Look — it's fantastic: a carpenter in Israel two thousand years ago is crucified, and that fixes everything, everywhere, for everybody.

Do I really believe that?

I have been obsessing on that question, and I have not come up with a "yes" or "no" answer. Instead, like that carpenter, I've come up with a story.

Years ago I was a teacher in a tiny little outpost in Nepal. It wasn't really a village, but let's call it one. There was no electricity. No running water. No one had a radio. No planes flew overhead. It took me five days to walk there from the nearest dirt road. There were only a few inhabited houses in a rough scrape of yellow dirt on a tongue-shaped plateau hanging seven thousand feet in the air.

On three sides, the earth dropped steeply down through thousands of feet of zigzagging trail. First you passed pines and rocks. Rhododendron blazed up crimson in spring. As you climbed down through the thickets, careful not to get lost on woodcutter trails that meandered into mazes of brush, you heard peacocks. Their lovelorn cry rippled curtains of monsoon rain. You drank from waterfalls so pristine their beauty made you regret all of civilization. Above you, gray langur monkeys shot the breeze. (Their faces and hands are black because Hanuman, the monkey god, burned his face and hands while rescuing Sita from the fires of the Ten-Headed Demon.) At the base was the crashing white water and the foam of the Dudh Kosi, the river of milk. There is also the river of gold and the river of the dawn.

On the fourth side, behind the village, the earth rose in folds like bunched-up carpet. This ridge blocked the sun. We always had an early sunset. Kids gathered firewood up there. Jackals ate one of them. His father wandered around, very sad, for days. People called out, "Hey! I heard a jackal ate your kid. I'm really sorry." He shrugged.

The wildcats stole chickens. This happened even as you watched. You knew you were watching five chickens and you'd not see a darn thing — they were that fast — and suddenly there were four chickens, and traces of cat paws and chicken wings were littered in the dust. The cats were the same golden color as the ripe grain out of which they materialized.

During the day, I sometimes heard clack, clack, clack; a weaver weaving homespun. I heard a single bird song. This was a wagtail, a small, gray, white, and black bird that patrolled the stream and ate bugs. There were days that bird's song was the loudest, most significantly patterned sound I heard all day.

Wind. Rain. Every night, the jackals, yelping.

Occasionally, someone would go down to the center of the settlement and start hollering for all she was worth. I theorized that this might be a form of mental illness unique to this village or a religious ritual. After I'd been in the village for months, I heard, way off in the distant hills, another person hollering back. Previously, I had not been acclimatized enough to hear the other half of the conversation.

I slipped a lunghi — a tube of cloth — over my head, dropped my clothes to the ground, and, wrapped in the lunghi, walked into the stream. One day I washed my underwear before washing myself, and placed my underwear on a rock. By the time I was finished bathing, my underwear had frozen to the rock. I chipped it free with my Swiss Army knife.

For about a month in late winter, we could buy tangerines in the market. They were the best tangerines, ever, anywhere. I ate the peels. I can't say that the peels tasted good. I can say that I was hungry. The days became milder and winter lost its grip. The old harvest's crops had been eaten, but the new season's crops were not yet in. Spring's wild berries, fruiting from snow, tantalized my tongue, but did not fill my stomach. I collected unidentified leaves along the path. My test: if they looked benign, I ate them. My neighbors warned, "Miss, that stuff is poisonous!" I ate them anyway. I survived.

I had a favorite student. He was dyslexic, like me. One Friday he gave me a marble; a rare gift in that village. I still have that marble in my backpack. Monday he did not show up for class. "Stomach ache." Dysentery. He was dead.

In the United States, my brother became fatally ill. Within thirty-six hours of sleeping on a clay floor under a wattle roof where mice ran along unfinished rafters peeling bark, I was in the United States.

I saw people so fat that they took up the space that two or even three Nepalis take up. People complained of headaches, took aspirin, and were well. Homes were outfitted with curtains and wallpaper and picture frames and slip covers and bed sheets. A room in the United States had more to protect it from mere air than my students, who were often as not barefoot, with just their one ragged garment between them and wind and sun and snow and rain, day in, day out. People here threw away more manufactured objects in a given day than most of my villagers would touch in a year.

I kept adding up all they had that most people in most places during most times in history never had--calories, choices, warmth in the cold, the ability to read, access to information. They could vote; they could drive; they could drink water from a tap; they could close a door and be alone on the other side of that closed door.

I didn't want them to be better people. I didn't want them to accept Jesus. I didn't want them to box their old clothes and canned food and bandages and send that package anywhere. I just wanted them to be grateful.

The car moved on.

My brother died. I flew back to Nepal.

There is a story that Peace Corps volunteers tell each other. Often an old-timer will tell this to a new trainee. I don't know if it is true. A Peace Corps volunteer comes back to the United States and goes mad in the cereal aisle of the supermarket.

I did not want to go mad. I wanted to be a good sister to my brother and daughter to my parents, and so I flew back to the United States when my brother was dying. I wanted to be a good teacher to Laxmi and Raj Kumar, and so I flew back to Nepal.

I feared that I could not hold those two worlds in my mind without going mad. I did not even try. I said to myself: "When you are in this village, no place else exists. Once you leave, this village does not exist."

I have had moments when I was as sure as I've ever been sure of anything that Jesus Christ is true man and true God, that he lived and died for you and me and that faith in him is all that is necessary.

Those have not been moments of bliss. They terrify. My certainty that God suffered and died for me defies everything that I mime believing in order to survive consensus reality. Belief in Jesus Christ violently wrenches me out of what I've come to nestle into as moorings.

And yet I do believe. At this moment, as I run my sharpened pencil down the inventory of things I believe and find plausible and things I find fantastic and too painful even to contemplate, I believe that Jesus Christ is God who became man and died for me and offers all humanity salvation from our sins.

I don't believe this because it makes any sense in a world where rape and murder and war crimes and child abuse are rampant. I am like a receiving clerk checking off a bill of lading against all my expectations of what a convincing deity should be and do.

That receiving clerk finds this story pretty outlandish, and, frankly, full of holes. But, even at this moment, when I inhabit my inner receiving clerk, I know that Nepal is there. While walking down modern streets in modern cities, against my attempts to forget her, to sequester her behind an impenetrable ghetto wall in my mind for no better reason than my own cognitive convenience--I remember Nepal.

I remember hungry peasants who gave me their food, expecting nothing in return. I remember vivid joy and vitality in the faces of my students, filthy and barefoot though they were. I remember moonlight on that massive curtain of ice and rock, Nuptse Ridge.

I remember the deafening silence and the blinding azure sky that became louder and more overpowering the higher I went.

I know that that other reality exists. I know because I was there.

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© Danusha V. Goska

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