Hello Everyone!
It's nearing the end of our first week in Rebkong. At the core of the city are market streets, selling Nirvana T-shirts and other clothes, fruit, slabs of meat, homeware etc. Walking from one end to the next you can smell apples and peaches, laundry coming out the side of the building, exhaust, urine, and the steam from dumplings in brown baskets. Just off the main street there's a hospital where elderly people sit on benches with IV's hooked into the top of their hands and motorcycles parked in front of the examination room windows. Beside that is a tailor shop were two women sit beside an old, Singer-style sewing machine between walls of fabric. There are barber shops, stands selling watches, and shops run by monks that sell prayer beads and neon-backlit images of Lamas. The market-economy seems to be the heart of Rebkong.
Several of us are working in a metalsmith's shop just outside of the city core. We're practising on copper slabs, pounding out designs either borrowed or created. A highlight for me was watching the men melt some sort of lead-alloy in a cast iron pot over a fire by turning up the air flow under the fire to make it burn hotter and using a blow torch on the top of the lead chunks. It looked like silver butter melting. When it was liquefied I was able to scoop it up with a long ladle and roll it around like a bead before one of the metal smiths poured it into a sand mold he had created in a pile of sand.
In the shop and the apartment above, where we're working, two little girls decorate our faces with stickers and laugh hilariously after saying "hello! Hello!" to us. The younger of the two, who's about four-years-old, always wears a red, plaid hat that matches her skirt. It covers her short hair, which is kept that way until little girls are old enough to care for their hair themselves.
Tomorrow the majority of the group will go on an excursion overnight to a nunnery, but several of us will stay to focus on our work here. I'm looking forward to spending more time in the village and with my family here. Last night my two younger host sisters walked me to Tiffany and Tauska's (the father insisted), and after the visit there (the house features a courtyard filled with plants and a giant, two-story golden Buddha in the altar room) my sisters and I sang, danced, and giggled all the way home under the stars. Since they don't speak English and I don't speak Tibetan, our interactions are based on smiling, hand gestures, and imitating each other, but that hasn't stopped us from getting to know and love each other.
lol,
Berkley