Himalayan wisdom and volunteer season

The previous week-end, as it was football time in Europe, I asked Thadhol, the only boy in the Kopan escapade, if he would watch the finale. ‘Watching football is boring, I prefer reading books’, said he while stroking the black kitten.

If you don’t believe it, Lisa was still here to witness this sample of Himalayan wisdom from the mouth of a child.

The 3^{rd July Lisa had to fly back to India to arrive on time at Dharamsala for the Dalai Lama’s 73rd birthday, the jealous grannies and the psycho junkies.}

Like in a swap Hannah Fox arrived in the morning of the same day, a 20 years old Welsh Londoner who is here for the second time. Reading geography, plus volunteering she also wants to study the identity of Tibetan in exile (bis repetita, but Lisa reads socio-anthropology). Let’s see…

3rd July was pleasant because water was back at the tap.

I can tell you that in this previous two weeks I’ve completed my taming about the value and respect of water, such a luxury it is!

Waking up at night to collect the rainfall teach you to take care of it like a baby, to keep it clean.

Outside this "South" world, in the "North" World it is just a bill, a tree hiding the jungle of an industrialized management of water which take place between fiction-ads and fictionalised reality. And when you think water is so important (or strategic…) in this competitive world that is managed as if it was oil… my precious…

Hannah Fox – doesn’t it sound a heroin’s name? - is the first of four volunteers to arrive this week. For a whole month the flat will be full of people, let’s see…

Meanwhile I dreamt of walking in Tibet, freely riding a horse, meeting with nomads along their summer settlement very high with their yaks herd… but such a simple thing is just forbidden by a dictatorial China where tourism is part of a strictly controlled economy even (shutdown these even to journalist in disregard of its own pledge)… that’s where Maoism meets liberalism, where the future China is already a model. So, please, stop greedily bet on it.

And 49 Tibetans - including a majority of monks - walked towards their native land. So near from it on a Nepalese motorway, the police came to arrest them. Most of them cried. Exile is a cage in oubliettes. An eternal poison. The vulture for ever eating their soul. Irony of a western culture meeting a Himalayan one.