It was the end of December and I was coming back to Birganj from Rajbiraj. I’d celebrated Christmas for the second time in Rajbiraj and was thinking that this would be the last time I’d be there, the last time I’d make the trip I’d made perhaps ten times before.
Last year’s Christmas was, well, difficult. We had the Ghost-of-Boyfriend-Past haunting us as well as the unpleasant work of dealing with the house dog dying of rabies.
The mood was somber and the days were foggy. Late night calls were made to Kathmandu and long silences stood for explanations. The dog died the morning I left.
This year, however, Rajbiraj was a little more joyous. This was, at least as PCVs, our last Christmas away from home. There was nearly a dozen of us there and we filled our friends’ deraa, sleeping two to a bed, two to the floor, and maybe five or so on the floor of the kitchen.
We bought two chickens, ate them. Tony made his yeast wine and we partook. And the night of Christmas Kara organized a burning program on the roof of the house.
I think I understand a little better how a lynch mob operates. Once the fire was burning strong with relics of things best forgotten smoking strongly in the wet, cold night, we ran out of things to burn.
Suddenly a chair was in the fire. I went down to Laurel’s room and found knick-knacks to feed the fire. Soon books and clothing found their way in the fire. A moment of clarity is all that saved Kara’s entire catalog of underwear from the blaze.
I was planning on going back to Birganj the day after Christmas, but it turned out that a Maoist bandha has closed entire district.
Luckily these things get communicated quickly among the buses going to and fro and I was saved from spending a night in Simra or Patalayia or in some other god-forsaken town outside of Parsa district, in one of the poorer places on the East-West Highway, known for little else besides growing problems proportionate to the Maoist one.
But I made it back to Birganj without incident. I’ve always loved using public transportation in Nepal. I think it’s the best way to meet people, learn the language, and see this beautiful country.
The ride was uneventful, but I started to look at things a bit more teary-eyed, since my days as a PCV in Nepal are coming to and end. I can’t help but forcing myself to look at the scenery blurring by my window and saying, The last time, the last time!
Back in Birganj, I was about to leave for Kathmandu the day before New Year’s. According to Peace Corps’ policy on vacation, I can’t take vacation during my final three months in country, which means that if I wanted to use those last nine days I’d earned, I had to do it before January 7, 2004.
So I’d planned to fly to Kathmandu and spend the New Year’s with friends. I was going to get things right this year. I had succeeded in my Thanksgiving (Kolkata at the Consulate’s) and in Rajbiraj (no break-ups or dead puppies) and I was going to get New Year’s right this year.
My previous New Year’s was spent at Luke and Rob’s place in Birganj. The sun hadn’t made an appearance in a week and the humid cold was permeating everything.
The fog was beautiful and I fell in love with the winter, gray Birganj just as reluctantly as I’d fallen in love with the summer, hellish Birganj.
We’d gotten pizzas from a hotel in town and ate those together while sharing a bottle of wine and whiskey, toasting the New Year with each pour.
I remember at some point in the evening, having to wander through the midnight rain in search of a corkscrew to open the wine. It was raining, cold, and beautiful. The streets were deserted and I felt like I was alone, like the city was mine.
The dogs were in warmer places, far from the streets. We sat in a circle, trying to play one of Luke’s board games, one called Naughty Monkeys, all thinking about what we should have been doing on New Year’s Eve.
It was the day before New Year’s Eve 2004 and I was checking my email after visiting a school. I got an email from the Peace Corps’ office saying that I needed to call immediately.
When I called I was forwarded to talk to to the #2 in the Peace Corps office, a woman with a title like “Senior Training Coordinator.” I thought it was about her upcoming visit to Birganj.
It’s about your blog,
she said and my stomach sank, We’re a little concerned about some of the things you’re writing.
I immediately remembered the story of a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa who”d been sent home because of what his personal website.
They said that Al-Qaeda could use it to track down Peace Corps volunteers in Samoa,
he told me, I told them if Al-Queida wanted to, they’d just come to the island and ask where the Peace Corps volunteers lived.
He’d left the country 72 hours after being contacted.
I had three months left in Nepal. I wanted to finish my work and leave knowing that I hadn’t failed in any way. So I agreed, perhaps too quickly, that I would suspend publishing to my website publicly until I finished my remaining three months.
Then I could say whatever I wanted, granted it wasn’t libelous, which I’m not worried about since the Peace Corps office was concerned about the truthful things I was publishing.
Seems that people coming in the soon-to-arrive intake had been chatting and reading web journals of volunteers and were concerned about the security situation.
This phone call had occurred exactly two weeks after I’d written a post titled Bombs Over Birganj about something like half a dozen bombs in the Birganj area (where I live) and a massive attack by the Maoists on my airport, which was by any account a failed attack.
Two people had called Peace Corps’ Washington, DC, office and said they weren’t coming based on this and stuff they”d read in chat rooms about the situation in Nepal. I was a thorn in the recruiting office’s side.
When I got to Kathmandu I knew things were going to be different this year. We gathered at the Hotel Ambassador on New Year’s Even, ordered pizzas, and brought in wine from a store down the road.
Kathmandu was cold, but the staff built us a bonfire in the hotel’s garden that we gathered around, telling stories, meeting the Nepali friends that we’d met in the past year.
That’s what made this year different. I wasn’t a solitary bideshi walking through the dirty, foreign streets of Birganj in search of a corkscrew. I was just a guy with a kaleidoscope of friends enjoying the fleetingness of the moment.
Since Thanksgiving, my days were filled with lasts. My last impromptu Thanksgiving with curries. My last Christmas with second-hand gifts. My last New Year’s Eve with more than a dozen close friends.
Nothing about finishing my Peace Corps service frightens me, except that in leaving Peace Corps I”m parting ways with some of greatest people that I’ve come to call close friends.
At our close-of-service conference in late January, I was rushing around in the computer lab at the office trying to get together materials and curriculum for a training in Dharan.
Kara was sitting at a computer and I went by before I left, since I wouldn’t have time to go out that night and I was leaving bright and early the next morning for Biratnagar and from there Dharan.
I said, See you later,
but for a moment neither of us really knew when.
There was a pause, looking at one another, really, for the first time in two years, uncertain of what would come next.
