Breaking speed

Yesterday I walked up a path I've walked so many times to my friends' place in a village area outside of Hetauda. He's built a home and there are 12 girls living there - who otherwise would have been at risk of being trafficked to India.

Instead, they are living and working together, studying, planting rice and cooking, creating and maintaining a beautiful, peaceful home. I so enjoy visiting them whenever I have the opportunity.

After being a guest in a country where it is considered an honor both to be a guest, as well as to provide comforts to your guest, I have to say that it's a nice change of pace to visit a home where they're willing to put me straight to work.

The girls were drying rice in the day sun, rice that had just been harvested from the field. We pulled up our pant legs, sifting huge piles of rice with our feet. Spreading it into thin layers on the ground. It was easy work, physical, tangible, satisfying, joyful.

They then put me to work weeding the vegetable garden. My hands in the dirt, I looked at the young women around me. Everyone pitching in. Silence balanced with laughter. Broken occasionally by song. We would work until we needed a break. Then sit on the wall, entertaining those crouched down. Until we returned to the dirt.

Our movements slow...this is not work that can be sped through. But with so many people, it goes quickly. And easily.

There are so many from the West in Nepal who are trying to change the speed here. Trying to impose their ways of doing things. Trying to make people think in a different way. Trying to propose that their development is "the" development.

But just as much as speed, humans need stillness and slowness. Just as much as the individual, we need the group. Just as much as noise, we need silence. Without one, how can we have the other?

Without the East, how can we have the West?

And why do we try so desperately to change the other....to be convinced that we are right?

Maybe there is a place for work that isn't organized. Where people come and go as they are able. And break out into song. Work that is intentional and human...and not "outcome" oriented. But that is present to the world around.

Maybe we need to still be walking through the rice every once in a while. Feeling the grains stick to our feet. Watching the husks dry in the sun. Slowly, slowly...taking in what is happening.