Quite a view from the top of 3210 meters at Poon Hill. Worth the 45 minute 430 am hike thanks to a pretty sunrise and Nepali tea ladies up top (60rp black tea/70rp milk tea). It starts with a few hundred people, so plan on staying an extra hour or two after everyone else leaves. Peace is worth the wait.
my very own packing guide to light and stress-free living in not-so-developed countries:
chances are, if you forgot it, you can get it for cheap at the local market, on a side street, from a bike vendor.
bring only what you need, carry-on is the only way to go (check your airline for weight restrictions) –at least on your way there, don’t expect hot showers, be flexible, leave time for serendipity, and take in every moment. it goes quickly.
travel hiatus. my favorite kind.
we’re in nepal and india for the next four months, volunteering for VCD Nepal, Pencils of Promise, shooting a lot, playing a lot, and testing out olfactory fatigue.
india has gotten more expensive, but really, the dollar is just not what it used to be. not even since last spring. good thing we’re in nepal now, where spending twelve dollars tonight seemed like an extravaganza. great meals for a dollar or two. hotels for less than ten a night. had some delicious masala tea at the kathmandu guest house. saw a breathtaking view of the himalayas on the flight in (travel tip#1: sit on the left side of the plane flying eastward, right westward).
i’m looking forward to hanging out in the mountains, rolling around a bit in greens and blues, shooting what makes me happiest, being encompassed by a new culture, and potentially learning to not gag while eating lentils every meal.
more to come.
updates here and from two points of view at sojourner cafe.
Microfinancing changes lives. For the women involved, their parents, their daughters, sons, their towns. They create governments, strive for freedom, build houses, battle healthcare, encourage education, and instill hope. It happens for so little.
Join Kiva (it’s just a loan). Read Banker to the Poor, Three Cups of Tea, Infidel. It’s so easy. Join the Women’s Crusade. Invest in The Girl Effect.
by Pico Iyer
“Dream — nothing!” is one of the many things I’ve heard the 14th Dalai Lama say to large audiences that seem to startle the unprepared. Just before I began an onstage conversation with him at New York Town’s Hall this spring, he told me, “If I had magical powers, I’d never need an operation!” and broke into guffaws as he thought of the three-hour gallbladder operation he’d been through last October, weeks after being in hospital for another ailment. For a Buddhist, after all, our power lies nowhere but ourselves.
We can’t change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world — and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment. The point of life, in the view of the Dalai Lama, is happiness, and that lies within our grasp, our untapped potential, with every breath.
Easy for him to say, you might scoff. He’s a monk, he meditates for four hours as soon as he wakes up and he’s believed by his flock to be an incarnation of a god. Yet when you think back on his circumstances, you recall that he was made ruler of a large and fractious nation when he was only 4 years old. He was facing a civil war of sorts in Lhasa when he was just 11, and when he was 15, he was made full political leader and had to start protecting his country against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, leaders of the world’s largest (and sometimes least tractable) nation.
This spring marked the completion of half a century for him in exile, trying to guide and serve 6 million Tibetans he hasn’t seen in 50 years, and to rally 150,000 or so exiled Tibetans who have in most cases never seen Tibet. This isn’t an obvious recipe for producing a vividly contagious optimism.
Yet in 35 years of talking to the Dalai Lama, and covering him everywhere from Zurich to Hiroshima, as a non-Buddhist, skeptical journalist, I’ve found him to be as deeply confident, and therefore sunny, as anyone I’ve met. And I’ve begun to think that his almost visible glow does not come from any mysterious or unique source. Indeed, mysteries and rumors of his own uniqueness are two of the things that cause him most instantly to erupt into warm laughter. The Dalai Lama I’ve seen is a realist (which is what makes his optimism the more impressive and persuasive). And he’s as practical as the man he calls his “boss.”
The Buddha generally presented himself as more physician than metaphysician: if an arrow is sticking out of your side, he famously said, don’t argue about where it came from or who made it; just pull it out. You make your way to happiness not by fretting about it or trafficking in New Age affirmations, but simply by finding the cause of your suffering, and then attending to it, as any doctor (of mind or body) might do.
The first words the Dalai Lama said when he came into exile, I learned not long ago, were “Now we are free.” He had just lost his homeland, his seeming destiny, contact with the people he had been chosen to rule; he had been forced to undergo a harrowing flight for 14 days across the highest mountains in the world. But his first instinct — the result of training and teaching, no doubt, as much as of temperament — was to look at what he could do better. Now.
He could bring democratic and modern reforms to the Tibetan people that he might not so easily have done in old Tibet. He and his compatriots could learn from Western science and other religions, and give something back to them. He could create a new, improved Tibet — global and contemporary — outside Tibet. The very condition that most of us would see as loss, severance and confinement, he saw as possibility.
Not all Tibetans can be quite so sanguine and far-sighted, of course, and in terms of a resolution of Tibet’s political predicament with China, the Dalai Lama has made no visible progress in 50 years. Beijing is only coming down harder and harder on Tibet, as he frankly admits. But when I watch him around the world, I see that he’s visiting other countries and traditions in part to offer concrete, practical tips for happiness, or inner health, the way any physician might when making a house call. Think in terms of enemies, he suggests, and the only loser is yourself.
Concentrate on external wealth, he said at Town Hall, and at some point you realize it has limits — and you’re still feeling discontented. Take his word as law, he constantly implies, and you’re doing him — as well as yourself — a disservice, as you do when assuming that any physician is infallible, or can protect his patients from death in the end.
None of these are Buddhist laws as such — though in his case they arise from Buddhist teaching — any more than the law of universal gravitation is Christian, just because it happened to be formulated by Isaac Newton (who said, “God created everything by number, weight and measure”). I’ve been spending time for 18 years in a Benedictine monastery, and the monks I know there have likewise found out how to be delighted by the smallest birthday cake. Happiness is not pleasure, they know, and unhappiness, as the Buddhists say, is not the same as suffering. Suffering — in the sense of old age, sickness and death — is the law of life; unhappiness is just the position we choose — or can not choose — to bring to it.
Not long ago, I was traveling with the Dalai Lama across Japan and another journalist came into our bullet-train compartment for an interview. “Your Holiness,” he said, “you have seen so much sorrow and loss in your life. Your people have been killed and your country has been occupied. You have had to worry about the welfare of Tibet every day since you were four years old. How can you always remain so happy and smiling?”
”My profession,” said the Dalai Lama instantly, as if he hardly had to think about it. His answer could mean many things, but one of the better things it meant to me was that that kind of happiness is within the reach of almost anyone. We can work on it as we work on our backhands, our soufflés or our muscles in the gym. True happiness, in that sense, doesn’t mean trying to acquire things, so much as letting go of things (our illusions and attachments). It’s only the clouds of short-sightedness or ignorance, the teachers from the Dalai Lama’s tradition suggest, that prevent us from seeing that our essential nature, whether we’re Buddhist or not, is blue sky.
by Adam B. Ellick
CHIKAR, Pakistan — The lone hospital in this Kashmiri mountain town was on the eve of hosting one of the year’s biggest social gatherings, a health fair for several hundred villagers, and Todd Shea was not happy.
The hospital’s founder, Mr. Shea, an American who resembles a football coach more than a health worker, was outraged because one of the employees had failed to purchase enough hygiene kits — freebies the villagers had come to expect at the fair.
“This is a problem, and there is a solution,” Mr. Shea, strident but good-natured, yelled to a staffer on the phone from the field. “Let’s see how good you are. I know there are kits lurking in the walls. I guarantee you that if I come there, I will find them. You know me!”
Seven hours later, at midnight, the employee returned from a nearby city with a sheepish smile and 100 kits he had managed to round up. Mr. Shea hugged him, “I believe in you,” he said.
If Mr. Shea, 42, had a résumé, it would by his own admission reveal far more experience as a cocaine addict than as a medical professional. But with his take-charge demeanor, he has transformed primary health care here in this mountain town in Kashmir, where government services are mostly invisible.
“Others are more qualified, but I’m the one who’s here,” he said.
Most recently, he has focused on the millions of people who have been uprooted by the army’s campaign against the Taliban, in the northwest.
But it is here that Mr. Shea spends his time and learned years ago that, as far as health care is concerned, every day is a crisis for Pakistanis.
He arrived as a volunteer rescue worker immediately after the 2005 earthquake that killed 80,000 Pakistanis. Overwhelmed by the community’s long-term needs Mr. Shea never left, and in 2006 he set up a nonprofit charity hospital called Comprehensive Disaster Relief Services, or C.D.R.S.
Humanitarian aid flooded the region in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, but the tide of aid and government support ebbed within months, leaving 25,000 wounded residents without doctors, medical supplies and an actual health outpost. That is, life returned to normal.
In Pakistan, less than one percent of the national budget is devoted to the health of its citizens, and the nation’s health care crisis is especially acute in remote communities. “It’s frustrating and sad that’s the way it is,” Mr. Shea said. “But if I screamed from the mountaintop, it wouldn’t change a thing.”
So he does what he can. His hospital, with 38 employees and nearly $200,000 in financing from Americans and Unicef, highlights not only the needs of Pakistan’s rural health system but also a glaring vulnerability for a government trying to brand itself an alternative to the Taliban.
“The Taliban terrorize people, but they put forth logical arguments about the state’s failures,” said Shandana Khan, the chief operating officer of the Rural Support Program Network.
“It’s very common to see primary health care facilities without doctors, or medicines,” she added. “Doctors don’t want to be posted there. Or they’ll sign up and get paid, but sit in cities and no one monitors them.”
Chikar is only 85 miles from the capital, Islamabad, but it takes six hours up a switchback road to reach the hospital. Here, the government provides only 10 percent of the community’s medicine needs. C.D.R.S. picks up the rest.
Last year Mr. Shea recruited a doctor by doubling his government salary and offering him the only private room in the 20-room hospital, which he rents for $250 a month. Mr. Shea himself sleeps on a mattress in a room he shares with staff members.
“The things you see here are only because of C.D.R.S.,” said the doctor, Rizwan Shabir, 27, who had come from a practice in Muzaffarabad, a city of 300,000. “Frankly, without Todd, there would be no proper medicine, and patients would be dead.”
Still, C.D.R.S. is more makeshift than miracle. On a recent morning, Dr. Shabir treated 140 patients in five hours. Without blood-testing laboratories, he diagnoses common illnesses like hepatitis and tuberculosis through clinical evaluations.
Outside of Chikar, C.D.R.S. supplements 10 other regional government health outposts by paying salaries and purchasing medicines. Over all, it treats about 100,000 patients annually, and 70 percent are women and children.
With the global economic crisis, Mr. Shea says he fears that his group’s $200,000 annual budget may be difficult to raise for 2010. So he has proposed a community insurance program that would require a contribution of 31 cents per person per month, which would net $20,000 a month. He estimates that 65 percent of the town can afford it, and he hopes the government and private donors will pick up the rest.
Mr. Shea is an unlikely person to reform Chikar’s decades of medical neglect. When he was 12, his mother died of a Valium overdose. By 18, he was addicted to crack cocaine.
In 1992, he moved from his native Maryland to Nashville to pursue a music career, he said, and spent the next decade playing in bars and restaurants around the country. At one point, he was forced to sell his own blood plasma for $40 a week to pay the bills.
He moved to New York City in 1998, and had a gig booked at CBGB, the famed music club, on Sept. 12, 2001. As he watched the World Trade Center burn and fall, he said, he promptly emptied his band van and used it over the next week to ferry meals to firefighters at Ground Zero.
He soon became addicted to rescue efforts, and volunteered in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. It was his first time overseas. After Hurricane Katrina, he said, he volunteered with another rescue organization. Then the earthquake hit Pakistan, and he left for a country he knew nothing about.
Once in Chikar, he met a local M.B.A. student, Afzel Makhdoom, who had just dragged his aunt out from under the rubble of his home. As soon as he could scrape together the money, Mr. Shea hired him.
“I had never met an American before,” said Mr. Makhdoom, now 24. “My first impression was: They just want to kill Muslims; it’s an invasion, and they’ll never go back home. But now we want to keep this American here.”
[video: The Improbable American]
Imagine photographing every member of your community. How long would it take? Days? Weeks? Years? It wouldn’t be easy. Which is why Peter Feldstein is one of the few people — if not the sole person — to have done it. In 1984, he set up a small studio in his town of Oxford, Iowa (population 676), and, with a fat red marker, made a sign that said “Free Pictures.” He taped it to a storefront on Augusta Avenue, Oxford’s main street, and waited.
Twenty years later, Feldstein did it again. While many of Oxford’s residents had moved or passed away, a great number were still there. And this time they did more than just pose for a photograph; they shared their life stories with writer Stephen G. Bloom. The photographs and stories have been compiled in a book called The Oxford Project, recent winner of ALA’s Alex Award and recipient of the Gold Medal in the Independent Publisher’s Outstanding Books of the Year for Most Original Concept.
“Oxford’s still the kind of place,” reads the introduction, “where drivers don’t put on their turn signals because everyone knows where everyone else is going. Almost everyone’s phone number starts with the same prefix (828). Dinner and supper are two different meals. Everybody knows what a mudroom is — and has one. The word elevator more commonly refers to a device that raises and lowers grain, not people.”
What’s most amazing is how, 20 years later, many of the Oxford residents pose in exactly the same way. It’s proof that although they’ve changed physically, their habits are much the same. In both photos, Linda Cox stands with her feet together, her left hand holding her right wrist, head tilted slightly to the left. Carol Ann Hebl’s body is twice turned slightly to the right, as she holds two fingers with her right hand — which now has a wedding ring on it. Vince Grabin is still wearing a cowboy hat, and so are his brothers.
Read more and see the slideshow at NPR: The Oxford Project.
Jorge Colombo drew this week’s cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.
“I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself,” says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he’s checking his e-mail.
There’s a companion application, Brushes Viewer, that makes a video recapitulating each step of how Colombo composed the picture. (Watch how he drew this week’s cover below.) Colombo leans heavily on the Undo feature: “It looks like I draw everything with supernatural assurance and very fast—it gets rid of all the hesitations.”
Colombo’s phone drawing is very much in the tradition of a certain kind of New Yorker cover, and he doesn’t see the fact that it’s a virtual finger painting as such a big deal. “Imagine twenty years ago, writing about these people who are sending these letters on their computer.” But watching the video playback has made him aware that how he draws a picture can tell a story, and he’s hoping to build suspense as he builds up layers of color and shape.
And so are we: look for a new drawing by Colombo each week on newyorker.com.
Richard Avedon (1923–2004) revolutionized fashion photography starting in the post-World War II era and redefined the role of the fashion photographer. Anticipating many of the cultural cross-fertilizations that have occurred between high art, commercial art, fashion, advertising, and pop culture in the last twenty years, he created spirited, imaginative photographs that showed fashion and the modern woman in a new light. He shook up the chilly, static formulas of the fashion photograph and by 1950 was the most imitated American editorial photographer. Injecting a forthright, American energy into a business that had been dominated by Europeans, Avedon’s stylistic innovations continue to influence photographers around the world.
This exhibition will be the most comprehensive exploration to date of Avedon’s fashion photography during his long career at Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker, and beyond. The exhibition will feature more than 200 works by Richard Avedon, spanning his entire career, and will include vintage prints, contact sheets, magazine layouts, and archival material.
International Center of Photography / Avedon Fashion / May 15th – September 6th
Hear the curators in the New York Times audio slideshow: Through the Eyes of Richard Avedon.
All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came. -John F. Kennedy
Treat the Earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It was loaned to you by your children. -Kenyan Proverb
The first celebration of Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, was a raucously exuberant affair. In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic. People picnicked on the sidewalk; dead fish were dragged through midtown; and Governor Nelson Rockefeller rode a bicycle across Prospect Park. Students in Richmond, Virginia, handed out bags of dirt (to represent the “good earth”); demonstrators in Washington poured oil onto the sidewalk in front of the Interior Department (to protest recent oil spills); and in Bloomington, Indiana, women dressed as witches threw birth-control pills into the crowd (no one was quite sure why). All told, some twenty million Americans took part—far more than the man who thought up the occasion, Senator Gaylord Nelson, Democrat of Wisconsin, had expected. “That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day,” Nelson later said. “It organized itself.”
Richard Misrach. His photographs invoke beauty, the sublime, a certain grace found only by the ocean, through his lens.
He admits to retouching, but with a vision like his, it would be a waste not to share.
Certainly an inspiration.
by Anahad O’Connor
Pollen forecasters are predicting a heavy season this year, so allergy sufferers may be struggling to find relief.
For some, the neti pot, a nasal irrigator that resembles a small teapot, has become an alternative remedy. While it is not nearly as convenient as popping a pill or using a spray, several recent studies have found that nasal irrigation can reduce symptoms of allergies and other nasal problems.
One benefit is that irrigation can clear nasal passages without dryness or “rebound” congestion, which occurs when overuse of decongestants leads to dependence and irritated tissue.
In one independent study in 2008, researchers examined a group of children with severe allergies. They found that regular nasal irrigation with a mild saline solution significantly eased symptoms and helped reduce the need for steroid nasal sprays. A 2007 study at the University of Michigan looked at 121 adults with chronic nasal and sinus problems. Over two months, the scientists found that those treated with nasal irrigation reported greater improvements than those treated with a spray.
Other research, including an analysis of studies in the Cochrane database in 2007, found that it can be an inexpensive adjunct to medication: most neti pots are about $10.
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