The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on March 04, 2020, 10:45:04 pm ---Good insight, Katherine. It's easy to go back to his early work since "The Candyland Diaries" is broadcast every year during the holidays. His self-deprecating voice seemed to be fully developed even back then.
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Somewhere on my shelves I have Me Talk Pretty One Day, which is more recent than "The Candyland Diaries" but still 20 years old and, I think, pre-New Yorker. I think I own 2-3 Sedaris collections. For some reason I never read his essays there, much as I enjoy them in the New Yorker.
--- Quote --- I was sitting on the comfy divan when three men came in. Two of them were dark haired and another one had blondish hair and was very fair. He seemed to be mentoring the other two. He was strutting around with lots of energy in contrast to the rest of us, who were conserving our energy. He was saying things about the porters and guides. He said the porters earned a maximum of $7 a day, and that accommodations in the teahouses was more than that, even if they shared. So the porters, and oftentimes the guides, lodged in caves. He was very vocal about giving the porters more benefits and rights but still at the same time, was very full of himself. I observed a lot of alpinists during that trip and found the same thing over and over.
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Wait, so did the blond guy sleep inside and the dark-haired men slept in caves? How expensive was the teahouse? Could the blond guy have reasonably thrown in the extra to get them space inside?
I've probably told you this, but I once interviewed a woman who lived in Nepal for a while, outside of areas usually seen by foreign travelers. She said it was the worst experience of her life and for many years she vowed never to go back. But she had come to terms with it somewhat.
OK, I had to just look it up and refresh my memory. Here's the part of the story -- the whole thing was about the benefits of going outside your comfort zone -- involving her:
Last year, Molly O’Reilly of Mora, Minn., arranged to live in Nepal for six months to further her education as a hospice social worker. O’Reilly was a seasoned traveler, and Nepal is known as a beautiful tourist destination. But experiencing Nepal as a resident was a shock. She saw violence, cruelty, chaos, corruption, danger. People with serious diseases receiving inadequate treatment. Child-labor sweatshops and sex trafficking.
“I thought I was prepared, but I was not,” said O’Reilly, who turns 50 in December. “It was not scary going there, but once I got there, I thought, what have I gotten into? I felt like I had walked off a cliff.”
She drank tainted water that had been sold as purified, ingesting a debilitating parasite. She was bedridden, couldn’t eat and lost 40 pounds. She returned to the United States a month early, where she received an antibiotic not offered in Nepal and quickly returned to health.
“When I came home, I hated it there [in Nepal]. I didn’t have a positive word to say about it. I said I would never go back.”
Since then, her outlook has softened.
The experience was unpleasant, but leaving a comfort zone “is how we learn; it is how we grow,” O’Reilly said. “I would do it again, because it makes us stronger, wiser.”
Front-Ranger:
To clarify, the three men I saw at the teahouse, the blond guy was Conrad Aker and one of the dark haired men was Sam Elias, whose memories are in the very last paragraph of the story. I don't know who the other man was, but he was also a climber, one of the elite who stay in the teahouses. Anker was educating them about the plight of porters and kitchen help, young Nepali men who trudge up the mountain with packs that weigh up to 100 lbs. At the end of the trip, my guide insisted I pay the porters only about $22 each. When his back was turned, I gave each of them $20 more in American dollars (about $60 each Nepali). They were much happier!!
Nepal is one of the poorest nations, which doesn't register if you are on the Khumbu trail, but even there, the workers don't earn much. It also has a very harsh climate, and about 20 to 25% of children don't make it to age two. Trafficking is a big problem. A book I read, The Little Princes of Nepal, details this. Nepal is where many people come together, and there is much conflict and exploitation. The Sherpas, people of the East, came from Tibet and China over the Himalayan passes. Others come from India and Malaysia. Regarding this person Molly, I think working in a hospice anywhere you would see a lot of disease and death. Tainted water is very common. There are no water treatment plants! At my hotel in Kathmandu, there was a contraption on the roof with several trays of sand. The water trickled through that and was called good (I have a UV water purifier). Despite that and avoiding raw produce, I got diarrhea several times to the point where it was no big deal. A friend of mine has a nonprofit company that installs water filters in Nepal, on reservations, etc. People in America just don't know how good we have it enjoying clean water that doesn't make us sick.
Front-Ranger:
Here's a short interview Anker did about the Everest situation:
https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/is-it-ethical-to-climb-everest-conrad-ankers-take-20151023/
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on March 04, 2020, 10:45:04 pm ---The following article, "The Altitude Sickness" by Nick Paumgarten is eerie to me
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That was a fascinating article.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on March 04, 2020, 10:45:04 pm ---Good insight, Katherine. It's easy to go back to his early work since "The Candyland Diaries" is broadcast every year during the holidays. His self-deprecating voice seemed to be fully developed even back then.
--- End quote ---
I believe it's The Santaland Diaries.
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