The Post Where Some Orphans and I Kill a Goat

I know, the title of this post makes you want to cancel your hairdresser appointment and call your friends to tell them about "some crazy bear guy," but please, read the post below this one first. For the sake of the children.

Ok, right, so... It's been a week since I posted last. Not quite sure where to begin, so I'll just jump into what should have started as a weekend recap. Right. Here we go!!!!

Friday, September 29, 2006. We escape the orphanage!!!! This weekend marked the beginning of Desai, which is the Hindu version of Christmas, without the presents but with a heavy measure of animal sacrifices. Ah Desai, where the streets literally run red with the blood of ritual sacrifice, and people are warm and twice as nice!! I was a little disappointed that we didn't receive any Desai carolers ("Oh Silent Night (Of Praying that the Rat Goddess Doesn't Devour Our Souls")) or fruit cakes, but maybe next year...

Jason and I accompanied Hildi (whose name I have officially spelled 5 different ways since meeting her) to Thamell, which is more or less the tourist district of Kathmandu. Tons of western faces, Europeans in those three-quarters pants they're so fond of, and trekking guides. Oh, the trekking guides, as far as the eye can see. Four or five on every street corner, each promising to take you to the peak of Everest for only $500, hawking cheap hotel rates and "first-rate" climbing gear, often of course mislabeled (The Nerf Face, Mountawn HardDrive, Patagiardia).

We checked into a reasonable hostel (only $4 a night! shoestring budget does not exist here!) and headed down to the military fairgrounds to watch a ceremony officially blessing the beginning of Desai. Things were running slow, so we wandered the streets for a little bit; Jason was beseiged by holy men offering the tika (see post from last week re:Jason's tika concerns), Hildi was chased away from a ring of snake charmers by a man with a python around his neck, and I just dodged trekking guides. Since most trekking guides refuse to take no for an answer (or 15 nos for that matter), I made a game out of the whole process by seeing how outlandish of an excuse I could give for why I didn't need one. My favorites included "I'm sorry but the rest of my family was devoured by a group of cannibal trekking guides," and "How dare you! My father lost his arms and his spleen while trekking! Begone!" Jason did not approve, of course.

The ceremony was pretty interesting, and extremely hot. Since King Gyanendra was dethroned in April and no longer controls the Neapli armed forces, this marked the first Desai in nearly 300 years that the king did not preside over the ceremony. The royal marching band played the national anthemn, and then a commanding officer led the army in what turned out to be a literal wave of gunfire; rifles went off in a Baum Stadium wave around the length of the field in a U, followed by several volleys that came out of opposite sides of the parade grounds. The finale came with about 15 cannons being fired into the air while the band played again. Really cool stuff, even if we had a hard time seeing through the crowd and the fence (commoners are not allowed inside, and foreigners? ha!); very reminiscent of Independence Day celebrations from when I was but a little bear, save for the animal slaughter that would follow.

We shopped around for the rest of the afternoon at the various touristy places in Thamell. There's an official North Face dealer there (please don't hate me Dacus family), so we stocked up on gear. I got two pairs of really lightweight trekking pants, a sleeping bag, and a waist pack: less than $200!!! I love this country, its official. More snake charmers on the street below, and I managed to leave my camcorder in the North Face store "by accident." We ate dinner at a little cafe we'd discovered earlier in the day that was run by some Nepali guys, a Canadian girl, and a Vietnamese teenager. The Loss Time Cafe toyed with my heart by offering chicken spaghetti on its menu, but alas! They lied, they lied!!!! I settled for fried rice with mutton and a glass of wine. Can somebody please tell me what mutton is anyway?

I managed to get myself lost in the dark on the way back to the hostel when Jason and Hildi ducked into a shop, so for those of you who plan on visiting Southeast Asia in the near future, I give more subtle advice: DO NOT GET LOST IN THE DARK BY YOURSELF IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY. I wandered alone in the dark for a while, looking for familiar streets (which isn't easy in a country where none of them are labeled) and praying that I not get mugged and stabbed in a gutter in Nepal because it would be really expensive to mail my body back the staes for burial (and it would probably be covered in pee and foreign postage by the time it got home). I managed to flag down a rickshaw driver and get him to take me to the only landmark I could remember: Club Lava, a joint down the street from the hostel which I later learned is actually a gay bar. Beautiful. So I'm being carted around the dark alleys of Thamell by a ricksaw driver who thinks I'm gay, and really, REALLY wants to sell me weed. The driver kept asking me if I wanted some hash, so I tried the old Ray Ellen "the only thing I smoke is chicken on my George Foreman" joke; no laughter. I finally told the guy I was a music video director and I was filming at Club Lava that night, and no, I'm not gay. More offers for hash. Sweet.

Upon arriving back at the hostel, I found Jason and Hildi hanging out, divying up my few possessions and devising a story of how I ran away to join a band of gypsies. Turncoats... I had a coke with a Dutch tourist in the hostel's restaurant before we went out for the night. Being that it was Hildi's birthday (23, yesss!!!!), we took her out to a really cool bar (at her request Mom) that played Oasis for at least an hour. Hildi called two of her friends she'd met, a sociologist from Cameroon and Edam, from Ghana. Sociologist and Edam took us to a Nepali casino, where I played slot machines and watched drunken Indian tourists dance with each other to the live music by the buffet. Nepali and Indian men loooooove to dance with each other, and by dancing, I mean of the interpretive sort. As in acting out each and every lyric of each song with each other. Erin, Ashley, I'm thinking of you and Long Black Veil.

Ok, so I'm in a Nepali casino, random, awkward... We leave the casino, Jason obviously up waaaay past his bedtime, and go to some sort of trekking bar called the Tom and Jerry. Hildi is demanding cocktails, but I'm not even paying attention: the walls are covered in tshirts of expedition teams that have peaked Everest and come back to celebrate in the bar, and some of the shirts are 60 years old! Fascinating stuff, I think I even found a couple with Rob Hall's signarature on them (go read Into Thin Air, then you'll understand). It was like looking at artifacts in a climbing museum, except most museums don't serve alcohol or number dancing Ghana muslims amongst their patrons.

On Saturday, we went to the Durbar Square in Kathmandu (there are like 3 Durbar Squares in the Kathmandu Valley, each one being a temple/tourist district with really intricate architecture -- I'll post photos soon) in the hopes of seeing some of the sacrifices, but we found out they don't start until Sunday. Crap. So we took pictures of Hindus, I shot some videos of people offering tikas to the monkey god and another six-armed demon, and watched women feed the largest flock of pigeons I have ever seen. Holy men are littering the streets at this point, leagues and leagues of them offering tikas and flowers and blessings, and they all want Jason. We pack up and head back to CWC around noon, and the mini-bus ride back is miserable since I am now carrying a shopping back with North Face gear and a sleeping bag in it, as well as the second pack I bought. I am not a smart shopper.

Sunday morning, I'm suffering from a severe sinus infection I came down with over the weekend, bad enough that I'm having trouble seeing, but I have to get up: today is sacrifice day!!! Here's what you've been waiting for friends, the Goat!!!! It's Desai tradition apparently that Hindus sacrifice a goat on the Sunday of Desai, and while we are a Christian orphanage, several of the children are Hindi and desire to take part in the festivities. So Rina buys us a goat and leaves it locked up in the storage room downstairs all weekend. I saunter downstairs with my video camera, all confident because I'm a bloody American and I've seen the first three seasons of the Sopranos! I can handle goat death!!!

Wrong. Incorrecto. The opposite of courage. The goat is tied to the front gate, and he knows exactly what's going on. Nepali children are used to killing chickens for dinner, so the kids are unaware that anything extraordinary is happening here; they're here to see me and Jason in our moment of despair. And despair it is. Birendra and Rajesh (pronounced Rah-jeece), two of the older boys who happen to be my favorites, are saddled with the job of actually killing Mr. Goat. Rajesh, who doesn't eat red meat, is noticeably uncomfortable. Birendra sharpens his knife and plays up the whole butcher role for the camera, obviously trying to freak Jason out by talking about the best way to deliver a killing stroke, and warning me to "watch out for the spray." The boys wrestle the goat down and pin his head on a rock; the goat is madly bleating like itwas being forced to sit through a Murder She Wrote-a-thon with it's grandparents on a Friday night. Annnnd.....

I'll spare you the gore. It was gross. Really, really gross. The boys collect a full bucket of goat blood, the animal still kicking away. I try to pretend I'm not bothered by cutting away from the carnage to film Jason's reaction; face covered, walking in circles, telling me how much he hates me. I'm good for about 4 minutes before the goat smell hits me. I start to sway a little bit and switch the camera off, feeling the impending blackout. Things start getting hazy and purple, my head gets heavy, and I stagger away, almost puking, almost screaming, almost passing out. But I don't. I stumble into a flower bed and find a way to sit down that doesn't involve pitching face forward into a brick wall. I make Jason film me hiding from the goat under the shade of the building, just for posterity and journalistic integrity. I'm a coward. And goat meat sucks.

Jason heads back into the house to drink water and pray, but the boys convince me to come back and watch the skinning. The goat's already been beheaded, but Birendra is now reinflating its lungs by blowing in a straw down its esophagus. GROSS!!!!! They shave the goat with boiling water and some of the metallic cups we drink out of, and gut it. The younger boys talk me into eating some of the lesser, not so well known goat parts with them for good luck: the tail for agility and wisdom, a lung for compassion, and the penis for..."stamina." That's right. I flew to Nepal, bought a sleeping bag, worked in an orphanage, and ate a roasted goat penis. My grandchildren will be so proud of Pappy Bear some day...

So all in all, a pretty typical Nepali weekend. Some dal bhaat with goat meat (Jason hates it, I'm too sick by this point to care), snake charmers, Desai, and drug dealer/rickshaw pilots. Pretty standard fare I should say. Ah, but the twist... There's always a twist... That majestic goat phallus that I partook of? Improperly cooked, but of course. I spend all day Monday in bed with horrendus diarrhea, cursing goats and reproductive organs and Desai. And the power goes out. For three days. And because the power is out, our water pump stops working, so we have no water; or at least no cold water, because everything in our emergency tanks has to be run through the solar heater. Nobody tells me this of course, and just when my goat disease finishes its course, I decide to take a shower. A shower in boiling hot water. Dinner that night? Goat meat again. I go to bed early, reading The Fellowship of the Rings by candlelight.

And they all lived happily ever after, even the goat, who though dead, achieved a measure of suitable revenge in my intestines. I love Nepal!!!!!