immersed in Nepal

 

Rachel in Nepal: the Overview

our granddaughter chose Nepal

for her college fall abroad immersion,

literally on the other side of the world from us,

I looked at a globe and figured

if I were to face the north, look straight down,

then raise my eyes about 40 degrees,

that's where she is physically,

I read her words and see her pictures

and imagine where she is psychically,

my spatial sense needs to know relationships,

I had to drive our sons to college

so that we would know where they were

through our traveling in a car

from here to there, from there to here,

and thus feel "place" in our bones,

I've sought the empathic leap into her heart,

as she has found and savored people, place, food, culture,

as she has joyed in the high mountains

and glacier-carved valleys within which nestle homes and lives,

as she has joyed in a wedding, 

in taking care of a child,

in learning the language,

in the toil of a farm--of rice and corn and cow,

in the thousands of years of the people there working to get it right,

from the tending of the body by growing, preparing, sharing the food,

to the tending of the soul through Hindu and Buddhist traditions,

additional lenses through which truths can release themselves to her,

what I most want to know is of the people and her connections with them,

her intensity of relationship with her host family and their worlds,

the way she has used her hard-won facility with Nepali

to get beyond the peripheral connection of the tourist

who can just dip into a world,

so that she actually knows of the reality of the effort and the joy

that a shared language allows us to find as we reach back and forth,

build understanding, and thus community,

of these people whose hearts are big enough

to let her in and let her change them, just as they change her,

what a wonder Rachel is,

and what a wonder Rachel finds in the fullness of the immersion.

by Henry H. Walker

November 26, ‘25