Contrasts.
So much has been happening this week. At the stupa or main temple the Nyingma molam  (prayer festival) has been taking place and it has been just beautiful walking around the stupa after work a admiring the butter sculpture, water bowl and flower offerings. Last evening, just after sunset I was sitting quietly doing some prayer recitation when a crowd of monks and nuns stated to gather with butter lamps. They started o sing praises to the lamas and the three high lams were being escorted around the Bodhi tree, amidst clouds of woody smelling incense, on the marble walkway scattered with rose petals to the sound of conch shells and Tibetan horns. I forgot it was the last night of their 10 day prayer festival. And it was fantastic to just sit there and have this beautiful scene appear before my eyes.  Wow! just doesn’t cut it. My heart seemed to expand beyond into the crowd and fill with stillness and joy. I do love the stupa, Bodhi tree and grounds. This week a few of us have also been lucky enough to receive teachings from Lama Zopa Rinpoche and his Holiness the Karmapa also started a 3 day teaching today. There is also a Buddhist cultural program taking place on a make shift stage in the middle of town. I was wandering home last night around 8.30pm past the beggars, drunk Indian young guys still celebrating Saraswati day, monks, taxis, tractors and rickshaws trying to avoid the cows, goats, chickens and dogs along with their shit when like a mirage on a beautiful stage decorated in gold cloth with colour lights, were Thailand dancers in traditional costume, with gold headdresses and full makeup.  Wow! just doesn’t cut it. Amazing in such muck there can be such breathtaking beauty. I have to laugh at the unbelievable daily surprises and contrasts of this town. Also there is a relic of the Buddha himself on display for 3 days. And the chief minister of Bihar will come to receive a blessing too.  Now here is a different take on mixing religion and politics.

Now what else; the women at the vocational training centre are just great. Now that they are getting used to me we are having some laughs over doing hair updoos and backcombing or attempting to make g-mail accounts and more excel sheets. The morning I had to show them e-mail I had one girl just flatly refuse to join in, she wanted nothing to do with e-mails. She was not shy, but did not speak English so not knowing what was going on with her I left her to do the excel sheet homework and continued in broken English to show the girls e-mail. One hour later I asked her again and this time she agreed to try. The other girls left and her and her friend stayed to open their g-mail accounts and send each other e-mails. Well it was like watching paint dry, they were so unsure of themselves and every step had to be discussed and talked about between them before they pushed a key. Oh so much patience I had to muster up but in the end it was really good time invested with them. Once they figure out what was going on and had a personal e-mail with their own secret password they were smiling from ear to ear, quite proud that they had conquered their fear of technology. (They reminded me the fear I once had in the university library when I saw all those books in one place and had to use the filing system to find a particular book. I was so overwhelmed, scared and felt so stupid I left in tears). Anyway, Sunita explain in broken English that she did not want to do e-mail because since her father was only a farmer she could not or should not learn internet. She was holding back because of her caste and because she honestly thought she could not manage to learn, turns out I was also the first western person she had ever talked to. Very humbling, to say the least and so satisfying to see her confident.

The office this week has also been very busy, still data entry for all the school half yearly reports but also a new project to write up. Rajesh the director is planning a, savings program for men and an expansion of the micro financing for women. So we have been exchanging ideas on how this will all work, projecting figures and also researching where the funding to set this up can come from. So this has been very educational for me and Rajesh seems happy to have someone do the proposal for him.  I do not know much about micro financing but it seems to be doing gangbusters here in Bodhgaya. Ecoles de La Terre has had 100% of it’s women borrowers repay their loans and more women want to take out loans. So it works well, the women are happy and the interest earned goes right back into covering expenses and funding new loans. I do have a bit of an ethical dilemma though. Even though EDLT charges far less than the government recommended 2% per month on a loan and gives back approx. 0.5 % of the interest earned as a reward for good credit, micro financing still profits from the hard work of the very poor and usually it is the women. Women are always the ones who get paid less for their work and in the home their work goes unnoticed and not appreciated. Even countries do not count women’s work in the home to their national GDP and in developing countries that includes farm labour and cottage industries as well as work in the home. So  that’s my grip, can micro financing charge maybe 0.5% per month and take that wee bit longer to grow and sustain the NGO, please!