How Ethan lost his cool...

This blog is going to have a couple of parts.  The first is of a few pictures I’ve taken recently.

 

A neat tree with red flowers.  I forget the name.

My first attempt at pizza in my mud oven.  Very yummy.

The meat version...with pepperoni and bacon bits

This was taken on a holiday called Holi.  People come and rub red and yellow powder on your face.  People also have water fights on Holi.



The beginning of my garden.  It still needs work and to be planted.

I also went to Pokara recently and did some rock climbing as well as checked out a waterfall and a cave. 

Getting excited to put on climbing shoes

climbing one of the shorter climbs

A fellow volunteer climbing

A fellow puppy who followed us up and then just looked cute

Tara climbing

Devi Falls, the falls flow into a cave just under where this picture is taken

Tara at Devi Falls

A wishing well... you throw money in and if it lands on the little statue in the middle then your wish comes true.  If it doesn't then I guess you just keep chucking money in...who collects the money I wonder?

Devi Falls as seen from the cave they flow into.  I'd like to follow that stream someday.  There is a temple inside the cave as well.

A little zoomed out, but still looking at the falls

 

 

All were wonderful, but something else happened while I was in Pokara… I lost my cool.  Here’s the story:

I think I tend to have a pretty cool head when it comes to intense circumstances, but I lost it last week.  Recently I have been going out with a Nepali woman which has been fun and very different experience.  She lives in Pokara and I was visiting for her birthday.  The night before her birthday we went for a walk by the lakeshore.  We stopped and sat down for a bit near the shore and were just chatting and minding our own business when two intoxicated Nepali men approached us.  They stopped and offered to sell me drugs which I politely declined and then they asked if the girl I was with was Nepali or European.  I thought that if I said Nepali they might take it poorly because Nepali men are for the most part complete idiots.  So I said, “European.”  They were skeptical and said they didn’t believe me.  One took out a light to see her face better.  At this point my friend, Tara, spoke to them in Nepali.  She basically just asked them to leave and said that we weren’t looking for trouble.  Then they got a little huffy and asked, “Why did he say you were European?”  And she said, “Never mind, we’re going to go.”

She went to stand up, and one of the guys grabbed her by the arm and forced her back down and said, “Sit down.”  Here’s where I lost my mind.  I just completely stopped thinking.  I found myself on my feet though I don’t remember standing, and I grabbed his arm and told him to let go of her.  He did not do so immediately, so I grabbed his shirt or neck, and I vividly remember screaming, “I’m going to fucking kill you!!”  At this point his friend maneuvered behind me and punched me in the side of the head.  After that everything is just snapshots.  I remember my friend yelling to stop.  As I battled one of them I turned and saw the other grab my friend by the hair and then kick her in the face.  As I turned to get to her I was hit from behind again, and as I reeled from that blow I saw my friend on the ground holding her face and then she was again kicked in the face.  These guys were real heroes…

I was whacked about the head a few more times and somehow she ended up next to me with my arm around her, and we were getting out of there.  I’d like to think I did something amazing and heroic to get her to her feet, but I can’t remember.  Most likely I was stumbling around and she got out by herself.  She’s pretty feisty.  At this point my brain returned.  I turned around, saw them, and thought, “I’m going to go back and actually kill them.”  But my brain was back and my friend was still next to me holding her face.  After she was kicked twice I figured there was some serious damage, so my priorities realigned back into the realm of reasonable. 

We continued to hightail it to a safe place by a restaurant and luckily they took off the other way.  Here I had us sit and assess the damage, and figure out what to do next.  Her lip was cut and swelling and she had a small cut on the side of her face, but luckily the guy was too uncoordinated to do much damage.  My shirt had been ripped in half, my necklace lost, and I had a big scratch across my chest from one of the gentlemen’s nails.  My friend was hesitant to talk call her friends or the police because she thought it might just cause more trouble than it is worth.  In Nepali culture dating is rare as arranged marriages are still the “in” thing, so she could have lost some face.  Also, she thought (correctly) that all of her Nepali friends would give us a good lecture about going out past like 7 at night.  Luckily this lecture was saved for another day.  Anyways, I was not about to force her to call her friends, but we did go to a restaurant near her house for some ice.  The people there know her, and immediately called the police and all her friends for which I am grateful.  Of course, no one was able to do anything as we didn’t get a good look at the guys or anything, but it was really important to have support from friends and family at that time.

Well now I know my limits as far as keeping my head goes…don’t touch someone I care about without their permission.  A cute sentiment for sure, but I’ll have to work on that if anything happens like that again.  Obviously, there are probably a million ways that could have turned out better if I had kept my cool.  Every situation is a learning opportunity and this is certainly no exception.  Before this happened I had very little respect for most Nepali men, but now I hate them.  95% percent of the male population here is useless and too full of their own awesomeness to do anyone any good.  The ones who aren’t total fucking idiots are the exact opposite: super awesome, but they are so, so few.  For example there has been a little tension at my house here because I’ve had to talk with one of the long term guests about the way he was treating my host mom and sister.  He doesn’t like me now, but I could care less.  And just on the way back from Pokara I was climbing the stairs up the cliff side to get to my village and who should I catch up to, but a drunken young man on his way to a wedding.  He decided that we were best friends and pestered me almost the whole way up.  I could tell he was feeling the booze and heat so I set a pretty quick pace up the stairs the whole time thinking, “I really want to throw this kid over the cliff.  What a waste of oxygen.”  Because I was skipping all the normal rest stops he became pretty tired and unstable and almost threw himself over the cliff when he tripped which would have been a blessing.  It was good for a laugh.  Anyways, Nepal is chocked full of males like this.  Young or old, they don’t work, they don’t look for work, but they do drink a lot and do a lot of sitting.

Obviously, take this with a grain of salt because I’m still super angry about the whole incident.  I’m sure there are more reasonable men here; I just haven’t met them…and neither have any of the other volunteers who serve here.