Travels

He was finally getting some rest, after so many nights, weeks, months spent hiding in the woods, resisting the ruthless killers trying to take everything he’d worked for so hard all his life. Being on the run, he’d had to rely on the pity of other villagers, even steal from some who wouldn’t help him. Those had come to believe the propaganda: that he’s nothing but a bandit. Lying on the soft hay in the barn above the manger, the man was dressed in underpants and a cotton shirt and a woolen vest on top of that. He’d taken off his trousers for a bit of comfort. He’d kept his rifle right next to him. Always prepared.
Just as he’s about to fall asleep, he heard a rustling sound. Someone was sneaking around in the barn. He grabbed his rifle and held his breath. The door in front of him smashed open and a ‘Militia’ (the Romanian ‘Police’ during Communist times) man rushed in. The intruder fell dead with a bullet in his head. A second Militia man burst inside and was wounded. Not waiting to see if there were others, he ran out the door towards the forest. Shouts erupted behind him. No shots yet, they were still surprised that they’d finally found him. A few more meters before the safety of the forest. That’s when a burst from an automatic cut out his legs from behind. He fell on his knees. His shooter came close:
- See, Misu, you wouldn’t yield. Now you die.
- Yes, I die, but you’ll die too.
He tried to stab his killer with the bayonet, but the Militia man stepped aside and avoided it. Still on his knees, he could hear the captain of the Securitate (the Communist Romania’s secret service) approaching silently, pulling out a gun. He did not hear the shots that entered his head from point blank.
Nicolae, the murdered man’s son, was only 4 years old, but he would never forget this scene (‘I can’t remember what I did two days ago, but this I can’t forget’, he says as we drive towards the corner in the Apuseni Moutains where his father had lived and been killed). Standing next to his father’s body he didn’t quite know what to do, say or think. Or feel. What do you know of death when you’re only four? A Militia man asked him:
- Are you sorry about him?
- Of course I am, he’s my father.
The Militia man emptied his pockets of small copper coins in the child’s hands and told him to run off to his mother. Nicolae was later that day brought back to his father’s corpse and told to watch over the dead body together with one of his uncles (one of his father’s brothers). They spent the whole night guarding the body so it wouldn’t be eaten by animals. In the morning, the Securitate and Militia people returned with 4 other villagers from the hamlet. They dug a shallow hole next to the body. One of the peasants swung his hoe into the body’s chest and dragged him in the hole (‘I don’t know why he did that, maybe he hated him for some reason’ – Nicolae, a 62-year old man now, remembers as we watch the body being dug out – ‘I do remember asking him, although I was only 4: Why did you not do that when he was still alive?’).

Nicolae (Misu) Selagea, the famous anti-Communist partisan (or bandit according to some) from the Apuseni Mountains, was dead and buried.

On the second of September 2009, exactly 59 years from the day Misu Selagea was shot, Nicolae Selagea’s old Dacia labours up the steep hill. There is unreal beauty all around us as we climb nearer and nearer on narrow and steep mountain roads to the small hamlet on Dealu Capsei. I keep thinking the three of us (Nicolae, his brother Gheorghe – who was a foetus in his mother’s womb when his father had died, and myself) will end up pushing the old car up the slope quite soon. We leave the car on top of the hill and walk across bucolic pastures, nearer and nearer the place where Misu Selagea was cornered 59 years ago. A little old lady and the guys from IICR (The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania) are waiting for us by the side of a narrow dirt road winding through house-dotted hills.
- This is where my mother-in-law used to tell me: Misu was buried here. It was long ago, I was young, and I had just come here to live with my husband and his family, but I still remember. It was here, near this tree. He is a legend around here. She is old and frail, and she says that she can barely leave the house now. She did want to be there when we dig out the partisan though, and see him receive a proper burial.
The IICCR guys don’t waste any time: Ghita sees a portion of the land that seems to be a little sunk and says he thinks that’s where the hole had been dug. Paul pulls out of the backpack four steel rods, sticks them in the ground and connects them with rope, forming a rectangle the size of a grave. Horatiu picks up a pick axe and starts digging, while Paul shovels the dirt out. Alex had set up his camera and films everything. In the meantime, Ghita starts interviewing the dead man’s son and another old man who was a child when he witnessed the murder. I switch frantically from helping with the dig to taking photos, to witnessing the interviews. Two hours and one and a half metres downwards later, we’re starting to doubt we’re digging in the right place. Everybody had said Misu had been buried in a very shallow hole. No matter, half a metre more before starting on another hole. That’s when Paul picks something up from the earth he’s almost shoveled away. It looks like a yellowish rock to me.
- We’ve found him, he says. These are his fingers.
They turned out to be Misu Selagea’s toes. Things were somewhat swifter from this point on. Phone calls were made to the Police, to the Coronary’s office, to the District Attorney, to Marius Oprea, the Institute’s president and founder. Gendarmes were summoned to spend the night and guard the grave until it could be completely unearthed the following day. We leave Misu in the same awkward position he had been buried 59 years ago, sprawling on his back, with his head bunched forward, resting on the vertical wall of his grave (the hole had been too small, so his head had been leaning on the side of the grave). A yellowish skull full of holes; two-three bullets fired from close range.
- He can finally rest, he can finally have a proper Christian burial, Nicolae tells me. I thought about coming here and digging for him myself very often, but during Communist times, they kept telling me to stay away from this place. After his father was killed, neither Nicolae nor his other 5 siblings continued to live in the hamlet of Ancaiesti. Their mother could not manage to raise them on her own, so they grew up in orphanages.
- As I grew up, and especially after I’d made a home of my own and brought my mother to live with me, I used to try to talk to her about my father and what had happened. She would avoid the topic.
The reason for her silence, Ghita had told me earlier, was that she had unwittingly betrayed her own husband: ‘According to the Securitate records, they used to frequently take her to their offices to interrogate her and beat her. She finally agreed to tell them when Misu turns up when they promised they wouldn’t kill him. So when he came home, she ran to Misu’s cousin – Iosif – who was a Securitate informant – and told him her man had come home. Iosif ran to town and alerted the Militia and they came to get him’.
Nicolae knows about his father’s cousin; not about his mother. Some things are better left buried. He’s an old man who’s carried a burden for over 5 decades. Not anymore; he’s already arranged with the priest to bury his father’s remains as soon as he gets them back from the Police.
As we drive back the mountain on the bumpy roads, Marius Oprea explains what his institute does: ‘We restore people’s forbidden memories. These are things people were afraid to talk about, let alone do something about. We restore dignity and Christian rest to people who fought for their rights and were murdered like animals in return’.

And both him and his team consider all this is worth it, in spite of death threats from ‘anonymous’ sources (since he founded the institute, Marius’ wife was beaten up twice as a ‘warning’. She and their four-year old son don’t live in Romania anymore) or attempts at intimidating him; last of which when Marius was waiting for me at the train station in Simeria: a man walked up from behind him, tapped him on the shoulder and snarled: ‘I hope you die soon’.

I’ve published more photos from the area and the dig itself on http://www.photoblog.com/hidoshi. All the photos starting from the 1st to 4 September are from this event

The man sitting on the floor on my left offers me a samosa wrapped in oily newspaper. I manage to extend my arm to take it – just.
- Ah, sir, thank you, sir! (I speak like them now, like the Tamils, wobbling my head from side to side and with a nasal, quick accent plastered on my English words. I would not be able to get rid of it for about 2-3 weeks after leaving India)
- You’re welcome, sir!
Why, oh, why, didn’t we book sleeper tickets in advance? I’m trying to find a spot, a square centimeter on my body that is not sweating like Hitler in the cauldron. I’m also trying to find a limb that is not numb from being squeezed on all sides but one by equally sweaty men. No success. I’m still not desperate enough to stretch my legs in front of me. That’s boogie land, the puddley stinky scary space between the two squat toilets.
I look over my shoulder and exchange a wave with Nick the Puppy. He’s managed to squeeze himself on one of the luggage racks. It’s not one of those luggage racks above the seats, perpendicular to the length of the train car. No, it’s one of those 15-cm-wide (only) racks that follow the length of the carriage. The Puppy’s right leg and arm half dangle over the side of the rack. He’s wearing a very strained smile as he waves at me. I’m sure some of the old bags stuffed on the rack at his head contain smelly food.
Now we know why these train cars are called chicken class. I also gain some respect for the activists who fight against the battery farms. Those chickens too must feel like a g-string squeezed between sweaty buttocks. At least I’m not about to end up in the lead role in a McChicken show.
10 more hours of this. I wonder how long before I break and stretch among the puddles. After all, we’ve only been on this train for 15 minutes or so. Truth is – hand on heart – we did not expect it to be so bad. Forget all those photos we’d seen of Indian train travel, with men hanging out the windows, taking a nap on the carriage roof, brushing their teeth on the front of the engine; they must be sick jokes. It could never happen to us. Well, it’s true; it’s not quite as bad in the South of India it seems: nobody is traveling on the outside of the train, catching the wind in their hair. Although I’m starting to wonder if that wouldn’t have been better. More convenient, I would say, having the wind in your hair than the stench of piss and…hm, the other one.
Two hours on and the space between toilets doesn’t look so unappealing anymore. Ah, but to stretch my aching legs without having to cause a ripple in the squatting ocean of train-traveling humanity on the floor…That’s when it dawns on me: I have a thermal mat and a sleeping bag. Don’t ask me why anyone in their right mind would bring these in a 40-degree Celsius oven of a train, but it’s better being covered in your own sweat than in everybody’s piss, is it not?
The last thing I see just before I fall asleep, after stretching the mat in boogie land and squeezing myself in the sleeping bag, is a pair of brown dirty bare feet coming out of the toilet and dripping some yellowish-brownish liquid on me as they step over my cocoon self. Yiiiiuukkk, zzzzzzzzzzzz!
Bang!
Bang! Bang!
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Come in? Mummy, I don’t wanna wake up? Kill that woodcutter? No, I must be dreaming…
Bang, bang, bang! I’m not bloody sleeping; someone is banging on the toilet door. I open my eyes. A little old lady in a colourful, impeccably clean sari is banging desperately on the toilet door to my left.
Bang, bang, bang! For Shiva’s sake, lady, I wanna sleep, can’t you go pee in the right-hand toilet? I’m sure it’s free. Just let that poor shmuck in the left-hand toilet nurse his bloody diarrhea.
I am wide awake now; I see a couple of big guys approaching the toilet, rolling up their sleeves (South Indian men are usually quite small. Not these two). They start banging on the door too; is the wood really starting to crack or am I still partly in Dreamland? No answer from inside the toilet, no ‘fuck off and let me take a dump, you bastards’ as you’d expect. Which actually is starting to turn my sleepiness into suspicion: something’s going on.
The door finally cracks open and a small, thin guy with a voluptuous moustache steps out, dripping (of course)…hm…liquid on my sleeping bag. One of the rolled-sleeves bodyguards (A) grabs him by the shirt’s lapels and bangs him hard against the end of the carriage. The other (B) slips inside the toilet. He comes out holding the old lady’s wallet. He’d found it stashed behind the squat toilet’s metal pissing-guard. He hands the wallet to the old woman and as a continuation of the same motion he smashes his fist into the thief’s chest. The air leaves the small-mustachioed guy’s lungs in a rush accompanied by a wimp. Which bodyguard A seems to interpret as an invitation to slap the brains out of his head. Bodyguard B kicks at the thief’s knee and I’m literally surprised it doesn’t snap. The thief – probably sincerely regretting now stealing the old lady’s wallet and the few pieces of gold jewelry from a baby in the carriage (these weren’t found) – screams and wriggles only to be lifted off his feet by bodyguard A and smashed again against the wall at the end of the carriage. Bodyguard B realizes he’s standing on something soft. He looks down at me, then at his own feet, makes sure he’s standing on my mat and sleeping bag and not my legs, smiles and gives me a head wobble. I give him one back, pull my legs and sit on my ass. Then he gets back to reminding the small guy why thieving is a bad idea. Ten minutes later, the two policemen who pick him up at the next stop continue the education with the help of short wooden police batons, while our train moves slowly away with its cargo of sweaty, stinky, sleepy, squeezed battery chickens.

The stench is almost deadly. I am not sure how I can describe it: it’s not carrion, but neither is it exactly sewage. Different than carrion, worse than sewage. Black shiny pigs wallow in the black murky water – really really black, darker than burned engine oil, but pretty much the same consistency -, showing only their eyes (and not even them when they dive for some morsel of whatever they’re looking for in there) and the line of their backs, like sharks without fins. A few metres away, two squatting women cook chapatti’s on a little stove by the open sewer. Next to them, the jasmine garland seller kneads the heavenly perfumed immaculate white flowers on a piece of string, and will add the new garland to the pile on his stall for women to buy and thread through their hair.
We call this the Shit Street. And I love it, just as I have come to love the dusty endless bus journeys to go anywhere, the filth lying everywhere, the sacred cows that act the town’s garbage disposals and are the main cause of traffic jams, the total lack of toilet paper, the inhumanly spicy but also delicious food that occasionally makes you throw it out from both ends (sometimes at the same time). I love all these unconditionally and with ever-renewed fascination, like the little quirks we find endearing and insightful in a lover, like the journey of world-discovery in a 3-year old. A journey where experiences are met not with judgments or classifications steeped in duality (this is bad, this is good, that’s horrible, that’s pleasant), but with ever-revealing questions leading to answers that transcend the barrier between inside and outside, self and others, past, present and future. An experience that feeds constantly on and of itself. Words to describe this feeling play hide and seek with me; I rely on the hope that those of you who are reading this have experienced being in love: you will understand.
‘Being in India is like being in love’, Sarah Moore said once. Now, 7 years later, I can’t remember Sarah anymore, nor do I recall what she looked like, how she spoke; I do remember she was a very nice, good-natured girl, but I hated her that day, because I should have said that. That was exactly what I was feeling, what I was thinking, but it hadn’t left my lips, it had left hers. Thought thief. Feeling thief. Epiphany thief.
Hm, what else do I love? The heat and the mosquitoes, the amazingly colourful saris women wear, the friendliness of the people and the feeling that I’m famous, a small-town movie star everybody greets, chats with, stares after. Even when having to take a piss in the gutter, right in the centre of town – just like any other local but with hundreds of curious eyes prying. I love the calmness of the little boy who smilingly picks up his books from the dust after they fell of his bike (I know I would probably have sworn for half an hour) and the innocence of the tailor across the street from the office who – upon inviting Lucy to have lunch with his family – has just spent half of his monthly income to buy chicken just for her, probably depriving his own family of the meat quota for that month. And how about the man who’s invited me to his house for a whole weekend just because for some reason I’ve managed to remember his long and complicated name – Subhramaniam – after having just met him. Most of all, I love Latif’s (in the photo above) gentle, friendly, dignified face, the unafraid, unflinching look on him who is only a tea-maker but could be a movie star. I treasure the perfect friendship connection that we have formed although there are only about 10 words that we can actually share with one another in English or Tamil. He works hard – I see him packing up and closing his little stand by the street around 11 every night; but he’s always there, ready, at 5 the next morning. His hands are calloused and the nerves in them have probably become quite insensitive from handling the hot glasses of chai all day, and his head is so strong he can break bricks on it (it’s not a trick, as Tim’s bump and near fainting after trying himself can bear witness). Latif is the embodiment of India for me: hard-working, courageous, friendly, genuine, exotic, resilient, innocent, and yet at the same time contradictory, as testified by his infrequent, unexpected and violent bouts of drinking.
The innocence – in him and in India (and in scores of places I’ve seen in so-called third world countries) is what I love most, the ability to make do with little, to be content with subsistence means: never call a poor man in such a place poor as long as he can provide for his family from one day to the next. I’ve seen it also in villages in Romania and I long for it in my life too; don’t tell me you’re not tired of wanting more each day, of never being satisfied, of being discontent with things that spell ‘richness’ for countless others!
It’s the loss of this innocence that all of us who feel trapped in the rush of modernity deplore and nostalgically long for. We complain that these places where it still exists are changing, are becoming more and more like our world and thus losing their ‘authenticity’. Complaining the loss of this authenticity in such places though is nothing but hypocrisy. And I’m the first to reveal it in myself. It’s all very nice to be nostalgic for the simple life when we have the alternative. And although we do have the alternative, all we do is wish, complain and be nostalgic. How many of us have the internal resources, the true wish to live the simple, ‘authentic’ life? I personally know one, ONE person in the whole of urban and possibly rural Romania too who doesn’t own nor want a mobile phone. We only really love and admire such a lifestyle as tourists, as comfortable observers. It is – I believe – completely unfair of people who do not anymore live with the question: How can I feed my family tomorrow? permanently etched in their brains to wish upon others the permanence of this question. After all, that question is what gives the innocence in this situation, is it not? The absence of choice, of alternatives forces us to make the best of the only situation open to us. It makes us more creative in exploiting opportunity, less judgmental, and more likely to be content with what circumstance provides us. Whereas in our self-sufficient, consumerist and comfort-oriented world we get so flooded with choices that we miss the opportunities too. Opportunities of everything: happiness, inner peace, contentment, beauty awareness etc. But we do have the choice. And, as it should be, it’s entirely up to us to make it.

A guy I know told me not too long ago that the ultimate truth is like a mathematical formula: an unchangeable, completely objective law. We were talking about religion(s), the ultimate truth being the (right) path to God. According to him, Christianity is the right formula to reaching the Almighty, and more specifically still, Orthodox Christianity. Ok, as a concession, all other types/sects/forms of Christianity are formulae that come very close to the right one, but they are still not the perfect axiom. All the others, unfortunately, are mathematical dead ends, fake formulae that provide no valid results. I found it hard to believe my ears. I cannot imagine how someone can believe such utter crap. More so because he had met people belonging to other religions, and he probably has friends who are Muslim, or Hindu or Buddhist etc. Once you’ve met a human being and you end up discovering they feel the same way you do, they want similar things – a happy life and security for their families -, and they are hurt by similar things, how can you consider them inferior for some stupid dogmatic reason?
Believing in inflexible absolutes is a denial of the wonderful variety of uniqueness represented by human beings. Yes, there may very well be a unique truth, but we will always perceive it through the filter of the very specific blend of experiences, feelings, beliefs, thoughts, values, physical attributes etc. that make up an individuality. No matter how hard we may try to avoid it, ‘I’ will always be the axis mundi of the universe, the point of reference, the point of entry to understanding the world around. Keeping the mathematical analogy, I see the ultimate truth more like a result, say 1 or what was the ultimate numerical truth in ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, 42? Regardless, one absolute, but so many ways to reach it: 43-1, 41+1, one can find other math operations that will provide the result 42. Endless ways to obtain the same result, some more difficult and complex than others, but all ending up in the same place anyway. The result is always there for all to reach, the paths are endless, it is always up to the individual to pick one and travel it all the way to the destination. After all, the success or failure of any path lies with the traveler, not the path itself. In martial arts, nobody can say which style is the best, the most efficient, but we can easily verify which practitioner is the best.
I uploaded the image above because I believe it’s a brilliant metaphor for this personalization of a path. The most efficient way to make a theory work is to internalize it, to adapt it to whoever is using it. I think this is exactly what the author of the painting has done: he has appropriated a theory, a religion, a way of life, by making Mary and Jesus black, by making the message African to make sense and to speak it’s meaning to an African soul, to an African mode of understanding. Absolutely wonderful! It’s what the Chinese have done economically, and my!, how well it works, doesn’t it. The painting, by the way, was on the wall of an orphanage in Accra. Reverend Cephas, who runs the orphanage, founded it some year ago in order to provide shelter to orphans. At the moment, he looks after 26 children, who are sheltered, fed, given an education, and more importantly, loved.

If you can magnify the photo, you'll see the guy on the board is also known as 'Prophet OP'

“The Holy Bible tells us Jesus will come again. And when he does, do you really want him to sleep in a shed with some stinky animals? Don’t you think he deserves more comfort? Don’t you think it’s our responsibility to make sure his second coming is one of glory? Are you so cheap as to not want to endow the house of the Lord?”

This was not on some TV channel though. I’m not making it up either. It was in Romania some time ago, at a conference that had been organized by some charismatic church that had just arrived in the country and was trying to get a foothold. The conference was complete with beautiful young men and women dressed in immaculate clothes, singing like angels, with amazing miracles performed on stage with much talent and gusto (I especially and amusedly remember a little old lady who got on stage limping and groaning in pain and left jumping around like an Olympic athlete), and with the inevitable money basket being passed around for the audience to show off their generosity towards the second coming of our Lord Jesus. I think the aim was for the Lord to be born again and sleep in a 5-star hotel this time, with servants doing his manicure and a chauffeur driving him around in a Rolls Royce. Miracles and sin dispensations done through the rolled down window of the limousine. Surrounded by his modern day apostles, all these pastors that get fat and rich thanks to the collection box. After all, they work so hard to make the second coming a comfortable one, why not enjoy some of the benefits?
Speaking of apostles, I met quite a few of them in Ghana. Also two prophets, a couple of archbishops, three or four miracle workers. I must have walked past a couple of popes and maybe even some Messiahs, but was probably too much of a sinner to recognize them. All the others were really quite vociferous about their holiness after all, so easy to notice. It seems to me that the poorer a country is, the higher its population of holy men. A lot of them quite wealthy and powerful by the way. Like the pastor/apostle/prophet/archbishop (who can remember what title he had?) who – on national Ghanaian TV – performed the holy miracle of resurrection. Oh, yes, they brought a dead body on the set and he turned it into a live body. Tearful and grateful and ecstatic about having been brought back to the sufferings of this world. While the audience clapped and cheered and spoke in tongues in rapturous awe. National TV. I now know what I want my family to do with my body once I’m dead; no point in spending money on a casket, just buy a plane ticket to Accra and maybe take me to a make-up artist first so I look good on the screen. The holy miracle maker, I found out later, has a few houses, half a dozen nice cars, countless mistresses, and probably one or two bank accounts in a little European mountainous country. That’s probably all thanks to the upgrade from the collection box in the church to national TV.
On the subject of collection boxes, my good Ghanaian friend, Eric, quit the church he was going to because they had bored a hole in the bottom of the box, so that if you could only afford to donate coins, they fell through on the floor and everybody saw what a cheap bastard you were and how you were trying to cheat Messiah out of a 5-star heaven on earth (There’s probably quite a few hotels that go by this name in Dubai and some other places like it). Another Ghanaian friend – Adwoa – pops to mind when it comes to the holiness of these pastors: she was raped by the pastor from her family’s church when she was about 14 or 15. Oh, her parents knew, a lot of other people from the congregation knew, I think even the pastor’s wife knew. Nothing happened. She healed and moved on. The pastor had his moment of virgin fun, and moved on too. On to greater heights in box collection collecting, in mistresses gathering, in sermons delivering and holiness posturing. It seems not only politicians are above the law.

In Romania, popular ‘wisdom’ (in such instances, in my opinion, a bit retarded, although usually amazingly astute) has a saying to excuse such behaviour from religious figures: “Do not what the priest does, but what he says”. I’m thinking maybe it was a priest who first said this. Or maybe those who first came up with this thought gem were right. Maybe I’m not the one to judge. I do know one thing though: I would not expect to try and teach my best friend Nae how to fix his motorcycle when I can barely change a light bulb. If I had a harem, I doubt people would get a spiritual insight from me talking to them about the benefits of sexual abstinence. If I weighed 300 Kilos, I would not open a fitness centre and give dietary advice. You get the point. If you do not, please make a transfer of 1000 Dollars to my bank account and I’ll guarantee you eternal happiness in the afterlife. For an additional seed of 50 dollars a month, I’ll also throw in a bonus of rivers of milk, honey, 15-year old single-malt whiskey and 100 virgins.

210 available phone lines.
We are glued to the TV screen, watching in fascination and awe.
“This is bloody addictive”, Greg says.
“I concur”. Ok, I do not usually talk like this. Not to Greg: he’s a bit simple.
“I can’t believe this is possible. Do people really fall for this?”
“I don’t know, but he’s good, isn’t he?”
“No shit, he’s amazing. It’s completely unbelievable”
The man on the TV screen is studiously animated. He moves around the stage, his hands punctuating certain words, his face becoming alive with the feelings his words convey. He is a portrait of empathy and trustfulness.
“My brothers, my sisters, I understand you, it’s hard to know a loved one is suffering. It’s hard to find out that your mother, or father, or daughter or son, has some horrible disease. It breaks your heart. I understand you. I understand the despair, the feeling of helplessness, of terrible pain”. There is a choir in the background, singing softly. Its members sway from side to side to the rhythm.
“I was once there. The day came when the doctor gave my wife, Matilda, and I the result of the tests. They were positive. Our sweet little daughter, Elizabeth, had breast cancer. Our only daughter, our 16-year old angel. We were desperate, we felt helpless, we were in terrible pain. There is nothing worse as a parent than seeing their child in pain, knowing that they will endure horrible pain”. His face is pain itself, he wrings his hands in despair.
“We didn’t know what to do. We were lost. And then salvation came. I told my wife, Melanie (yes, I haven’t made a mistake, his wife’s name had actually changed in the last 3 minutes), salvation is in the hands of the Lord. We have to rely on him. And so we planted a seed into TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network – a.n.), and we waited for the Lord’s work. For it is written in the Bible that the seed that you saw will return to you a hundredfold”. Hallelujah, the choir members start shouting, throwing their hands in the air, hallelujah.
“A week later we tested out daughter again. It was negative, the cancer had gone. Through the glory of God Almighty, and through our faith, our seed had returned a hundredfold” The choir members are enraptured. And so is he.
45 busy phone lines. 165 available phone lines.
“There are many of you out there in this situation. You don’t know what to do, how to take the pain away from your loved ones. There is hope, brothers. There is hope, sisters. Your children don’t have to suffer. Just pick up the phone and saw a onetime seed of 1000 dollars or a monthly seed of 50 dollars into the fruitful soil of the TBN, and your wishes will come true”
114 busy phone lines. 96 available phone lines.
“Glory onto God. The Lord will take away your pain, he will quench your suffering. The Lord is just, and merciful” Hallelujah, hallelujah, the choir is in a frenzy.
169 busy phone lines. 41 available phone lines.
“Give, brothers, give, sisters. Give and you shall be given. God will cover you in His eternal light. For it is written”
193 busy phone lines. 17 available phone lines.
210 busy phone lines. 0 available phone lines.
‘Victory! God has touched you. Your seed is sown. The Lord has accepted your gift. You shall be redeemed. Victory! The Glory of God is eternal!” The choir members are shouting and dancing and waving their hands in the air and crying. And then they start a beautiful serene hymn to the glory of god and the generosity of the human beings about to be saved through selfless renunciation.

We’re watching this in Jamaica. I have no idea if Jamaicans themselves donate thousands of dollars so that God solves their problems (after all, the phone lines are for the USA and Canada. On the other hand, the national phone code for Jamaica is +1, just like the countries above). Greg and I are speechless; all phone lines have been busy for the past 5-10 minutes. We try to calculate how much money that means for TBN. We are unsuccessful, but we end up watching 2 or 3 more speeches, from other such pastors. They’re all equally convincing and therefore similarly successful in busying the phone lines. While we just can’t believe our eyes and our ears. Who buys into this? How can someone expect to make sure their children get off drogs or that their sick relative gets healed from a nasty disease or that they’ll get rid of debt, by giving money to some American TV station? How vulnerable does one need to be in order to arrive at such a level of gullibility? Do these pastors believe in what they’re preaching or is this a brilliant, elaborate way of taking advantage of people who need help most? I can’t imagine someone like Bill Gates phoning up TBN to get a helping hand through the financial crisis…Is God eagerly watching TV to determine who’s going to get help first based on the promptness of a phone call? I am yet unsure as to whether this whole thing is diabolical, amusing, dangerous or misguided. It certainly is a lesson about human beings’ systems of beliefs.

I will continue with this next week(with similar stories from Romania and Ghana), as some people have started complaining I’ve begun writing entries that are too long. so stay tuned to the God Channel.

I sprain my ankle just before I enter his compound, after jumping over a rock. My companions, two young guys who have just convinced me to take this short detour to meet their ‘black saint’, start and jump to my rescue. I am a guy, ha ha, I can’t show pain, but it hurts like hell. I hope this little accident is not me paying up for some bad karma. It is a pretty good coincidence though, is it not, just before meeting ‘our baba, the black saint of Changu Narayan’. This is how my companions convinced me to climb this hill when I was walking through their village five minutes ago .
“He not Nepalese, he from Calcutta, India, but he live here 40 years”, they tell me eagerly.
“Really?”
“Yes, you come meet him, no money. Visit, free, you chat with baba.” Of course, this makes me think that I will have to chip in some. Damn this suspiciousness; I can’t even get rid of it when I’m about to meet an Oriental spiritual master. “Baba no like money. American man give baba 5000 dollar to buy teeth. Baba build school for village (and indeed we walk past the small, brightly painted building). Baba still no teeth”. Well, at least I’m starting to believe I’m not being pulled into this for money. But I am starting to wonder whether spraining my ankle is punishment for these thoughts.
Near the saint’s kutthi (traditional little hut) towers a huge Shiva trident, a shrine to a few gods I don’t recognize (although one of them could be Hanuman), and an enormous 500-year old tree that seems to be a shrine to Ganesh: you can see the human-bodied elephant-headed god carved in the trunk, hanging from its branches, hiding in the gigantic shadow. First thing I notice when I enter the little hut is that my companions have not lied – Baba has no teeth. What he does have are jet black clothes, jet black matted hair and a bright, amused tinkle in his eyes. There is a semi-circle of visitors in front of baba, and I find a spot on one side, a little to the left and in front of the holy man. No shoes allowed, so we’re all barefoot and someone hasn’t washed their socks.
Baba’s gestures when he makes tea and passes a bong of grass around are like tiny prayers. Kali baba is an aghori baba, a yogi for whom formal ritual has no importance and for whom every little gesture or activity (even –say – going to the loo) is charged with spiritual meaning. He is all dressed in black because the aghori are worshippers of the goddess Kali, of Death as The Great Transformer. Some show their devotion by eating dead bodies. Kali baba is a vegetarian though, which I’m quite relieved to learn.
I am still waiting for something, some sign that this little old man with an impish face is a great spiritual master. What, no blessings buzzing around my head, no enlightenment descending over me, no all-pervading sense of inner peace, no visions of Hindu gods? Instead I become a centre of interest for everybody inside the hut: Where are you from? What language do you speak in Romania? What are you doing in Nepal? Do you like Nepal? It annoys me that answering all these questions I’ve been answering a million times since arriving in Nepal will cheat me out of my chance at answering my own question: is Kali baba for real or not? I manage to ask him some questions too and find out about his spiritual master (of whom there’s a photo on the wall), about his love for Nepal: ‘this country love me for 40 years’, his opinion about languages: ‘Romanian – mother language, English – mother language, French – mother language, all mother language’ (what is father language then?, I ask). ‘Sanskrit’, he replies interestingly. He shows me old dusty magazine pages with articles written about him; he behaves as if everything in the hut belongs to all of us present there. I have the feeling I could ask him for food and he would share just as he is sharing his tea and his marijuana. Not that I partake in the latter; it doesn’t really do anything for me, so am not interested. I actually leave when the smoke becomes more like fog inside the kutthi. I leave as I came, still without any visions of Hindu gods, nor sudden enlightenment, nor an all-pervading sense of inner peace, but with the same pain in my ankle. I also do not leave without guiltily (for some reason) dropping some money in the donation box he’s got on a pole in the centre of the hut. Not that he seems to care anyway.
I also do not leave without my question: is Kali baba for real or not? Just as I step out of the compound, I sprain my ankle again: the same ankle, in exactly the same place, just after jumping over the exact same rock as before. Only the pain is quite screamingly fiercer. This time, there’s nobody else to jump to my rescue. Or witness my embarrassment. So I swallow my scream and my pride and keep on limping towards the 17-century-old Changu Narayan, the most important Vishnu shrine in the whole of Nepal.

Him (that would be the seller, a blue-robed middle aged man with rotted teeth from the ubiquitous syrupy mint tea they drink litres of in Morocco): ‘No problem, no disturbance, if you buy, I win and you win, you don’t buy, I don’t lose and you don’t lose’. This after he has spread about 15 carpets and rugs all over the floor. ‘Please, it’s ok, you can step on them; their value will increase’
Radu and I: ‘They’re gorgeous, but we really don’t want to buy a carpet. We’re traveling light’. It’s true, I only have one small rucksack half of which contains my camera and lenses, and the other half one pair of trousers and one of shorts, 2 t-shirts, 3 underpants, an airplane toothbrush and paste, a pocketknife, a notebook and a travel guide. My tent, sleeping bag, a rain jacket and a camera tripod are all strapped quite creatively on the outside.
Him: ‘When families need money, they sell artifacts. Our shop is a collective of families who all send their crafts for sale. They get the money for their work and we earn our salaries. All these carpets and rugs are handmade and unique. Nothing is made in factory.’
Me: ‘That’s a nice concept. Who are these families?’
Him: ‘They’re from all over the Draa Valley. This carpet, for example, comes from a nomadic Touareg family, this one from a sedentary Berber, this one (the one I – secretly – like) is from a Touareg tribe of desert people who are nomadic in the summer and live in a house during wintertime’.
Me: ‘How can you tell?’ I really like this one, but it’s ok, I don’t need a carpet.
Him: ‘Well, first of all, it is weaved of camel hair, which is very resistant both in the desert and in a house in the village. It has two sides: on one the weaving is very tight and the hairs short, so you can place it in the tent and the sand doesn’t get through the weaving; the other side has longer hair and more patterns and is more colourful, and that’s how you put it in your house’.
Me: ‘Interesting, thanks, but I really don’t need a carpet’ I love this bloody carpet, but he says it’s 12,000 Dirrhams, which is about 1200 Euros, and I can’t carry it either. Damn, but it’s a cool carpet.
Radu: ‘If I didn’t live with my parents, I’d buy one. They’re cool things to have when you own your own house’
Him: ‘Ah, but you don’t need your own house. A carpet is something you have forever, it’s a good investment. We have a proverbial story in Morocco: you first need a saddle, then you need a horse’
Radu: ‘Ha, ha, ha, that’s funny, it’s exactly the other way around in Romania’
Him: ‘Ah, really? But here in Moro…’
Me: ‘I’ll buy it for 700’. At this point, I’m sort of not myself, you understand. It’s like I’m in a haze and I’m looking at myself from somewhere far away. Totally out of conscious control of my own actions.
Him: ‘1000’.
Me: ‘800’.
Him: ‘950’.
Me: ‘900’.
Him: ‘Done’.
Me: ‘Ok’. Shit, what have I done?
This is where the Universe starts sending me ‘Don’t do it!’ signs: first of all, Radu is an open-mouthed, big-eyed study in bewilderment. Then their POS can’t process my debit card. Then we get in the seller’s 20-year old Mercedes (a prestigious car in this part of Morocco) and go look for an ATM. Then the first three or four ATM’s don’t take my card. As grateful and attentive as I generally am to the Universe for most things in my life, I utterly and completely ignore It this time. I do manage to find an ATM that takes my card, and I do pay for the carpet. And I do, for the rest of my trip (almost two weeks), lug it around with me everywhere I go (and it’s so, so bloody inconvenient!).

OK, I do have attenuating circumstances.
I really do.
First of all, standing in front of ‘La Caverne du Troc’ with a 10-kilo carpet in my hand and a totally incredulous look on my silly face, I haven’t had a shower, nor washed seriously in 7 days. Because of lack of water, I also haven’t taken a dump in 7 days. Also for the last 7 days I have been travelling with and slept next to two other unwashed companions, not to mention two miserable camels (or dromedaries or whatever those camels with only one hunchback are called), who’s really long romantic dreamy eyelashes didn’t make me at all feel better when they discovered that wiping their asses with their tales after taking a dump and flipping the waste upwards (on the rider that is) is a good way of getting rid of unwanted extra cargo. So, I have also walked 120 km in 7 days through the Moroccan desert and everything aches from the waist down (by the way, I paid for this too – 400 Euros).
Secondly, desert scenes in movies don’t prepare you for huge God-forsaken expanses of flat rocky terrain (which apparently forms a huge percentage of what a desert is). This meant walk, walk, walk, for 3-4 hours at a time, then stop and eat, then walk, walk, walk again (or in Radu’s case, ride, ride, ride and be covered, covered, covered in camel shit). And, because I was on foot and Radu riding and because the guide didn’t speak French that well and English not at all, the whole thing also meant long conversations with myself. Which I’m not very good at. They also don’t tell you that the desert is like a mirror and a cage at the same time: there’s nowhere to go and it’s always there to show you every single little annoying thing about yourself that you’re trying hard to hide from yourself. You also don’t expect the horrible wind that sweeps the desert continuously during daytime. A wind that blows sand everywhere you wouldn’t normally want any. And this is a reason I’m actually grateful I haven’t taken a dump for 7 days. Nor have I eaten much since I stumbled on the guide doing a big pooh behind a sand dune, then wiping himself with sand and going straight on to cooking our afternoon salad.
Thirdly, I have just realized I’ve somehow lost the SD card that contains all 500 or so photos I’ve taken in the desert (and this is where the dromedaries’ really long romantic dreamy eyelashes did make a difference, especially in the foreground of a reddish sunset).

In any case, thanks to the whole story, I do now really understand the concept of ‘barakah’ (an Arabic term meaning blessing, particularly spiritual gifts or protection transmitted from God. It is also described as “the greater good” derived from any act – Wikipedia). To explain, all throughout my journey in Morocco I had heard this term whenever people gave money to beggars or when they shared food with one another or when they helped their neighbours etc. I thought it meant something like ‘alms’. It is however, much more than this, I believe. The way I perceived it throughout my journey, it’s more like a natural, ‘tribal’ social welfare system. Wherever we went, the guide talked of the people we met as ‘brothers’; at least on a couple of occasions he mentioned that he would have a place to sleep or food to eat wherever he went in the South of Morocco, because he has ‘family’ everywhere. Mammado the Touareg, who travelled with us for a while, described it like this: ‘If I have a loaf of bread today and give you a little and him a little and him a little, then we all have a little. And tomorrow you will have a loaf of bread and we will all have a little again. You do not die of hunger here’. As the Wiki definition tells us, these acts are also blessings, both on the giver and on he or she who is given. I asked Mammado if this attitude applies to foreigners as well.
‘Of course’, he said. ‘If you’re in trouble, you will be helped, you will be fed and you will be given shelter’. However, those who have a lot are expected to share what they have with the rest too. And mostly, this category is made up of foreigners. It is perfectly normal for foreigners to be asked much bigger prices for things, because they can afford it. In Essaouira, I bought a small bottle of Argan oil from a shop where I had befriended the keeper, Nour-Eddhine. Because we were friends, I paid the asking price – 400 DHS I think. That was probably much more than the real value. I do not believe that fact meant he was less genuinely friendly, nor do I believe he subsequently invited us to his house, where he introduced us to his friends, shared his food with us and then assumed it natural for us to hang around and chat and learn Moroccan songs because he was feeling guilty at asking me for more money for something that a Moroccan would have paid. I think it’s a natural expectation on their part, based on this little cultural concept of ‘barakha’, that everybody shares what they have (by the way, do you also see a resemblance between this and Jesus’ teachings?). And the truth of the matter is that most foreigners undoubtedly have more to share – in terms of money or possessions – than these poor Moroccan Southerners. The irony here is this: every time we travel to a poorer place, those of us who come from a Western civilization type of culture love the friendliness, openness and generosity of the local people, but feel cheated and disturbed when they expect us to reciprocate.
I am being completely honest here: I still believe paying 900 Euros for a carpet was a very stupid thing to do on my part (as one of my friends put it: ‘If you can’t fly home on it, you paid too much’), and I still feel a little angry at myself and the seller, but at the same time I go back to what I wrote in my previous blog entry: I did not really NEED that money. It was not essential to me; yes, I had it because I had saved to buy a car, but a car is a luxury, not a necessity. That money would not have been used to cater for a need. Although it may be considered a paradox, it seems to be easier to be generous when you’re poor than when you have lots of things that are not essential for you.
And the greater good in my carpet-buying frenzy? Well, the guide, the seller, the guy who wrapped my carpet, the family who had made it, the other employees of the shop and the restaurant to which they took us afterwards to celebrate the transaction all had a cut, which they probably shared with others too. I still don’t own a car, and because of this I cycle to and from work every day so I’m getting healthier. I learned firsthand about this amazing concept (the best way to learn anything, isn’t it?), and I also have a cool carpet at home, not to mention a cool if personally unflattering story to tell.

“My child, she’s in the hospital, please, sir”, I read urgency in his voice, I see despair in his eyes, I feel his fidgeting thoughts through the calloused fingers gripping my arm. But I know how some Ghanaians can be, I know the games they can play.
“10 Cedis to buy her medicine, please, she’s only 6 months old. My baby…”, he runs around, from me to my colleague Nooshin, not quite crying, but not far from it. Pity and doubt and the inevitable question: ‘Am I being swindled?’
“Sir, I beg you, I need the medicine, don’t let my baby die of malaria”. I test him. I give him 2 Cedis; maybe he’ll go away. He would if he were a swindler, wouldn’t he? And if he isn’t, maybe he’ll try to get it somewhere else. He doesn’t.
“8 more, please, sir, my baby”. He goes to all of us in turn, he runs after the taxi just taking off with 3 of the others.
“Oh, my God, my poor baby” Such despair in his voice…If this is a scam, he is a fantastic actor. Someone else gives him 2 more Cedis.
“It’s remaining with 6, I beg you, sir”
He’s got the prescription note in his hands; I check it. I find inconsistencies: there seem to be different names on the prescription note and on the consultation receipt, the age is unclear, he said his daughter was in the 37 Military Hospital, but the prescription comes from the Trust Hospital. He’s got plausible explanations for all of them.
“Don’t let my baby die of malaria, I beg!”
He’s a small, oldish guy, his eyes seem pained, but I cannot tell for sure. Because I cannot really look into his face: I don’t want him to read my doubt, my mistrust and my guilt. Is he genuine? Is he a scam? – all the wrong questions race each other through my head. I give him the 6 Cedis in the end, and I get in the taxi.
I can’t stop thinking about him. And I realize something: it’s all about me. The issue in my head is not whether his daughter will be fine, the focus is not on this human being who might be in trouble, but on whether the whole story is fake or not. On whether my ego will be hurt by being tricked or tickled by a good deed.
“We should have given him a ride to the hospital; it’s on our bloody way”, I tell the others.
“We should have gone with him to the hospital and checked his daughter was fine”, Nooshin says.
And it hits me that if we had really cared, that’s what we would have done. The right thing would have been to go to the hospital with the man, buy the malaria drugs, check on his daughter, maybe give him a ride home afterwards. That, however, would have been inconvenient: we were tired, it was 10 o’clock in the evening and we had worked all day, we just wanted to get home, and 10 Cedis is nothing really, a mere 10 dollars. I realize that we’ve just taken the easy way out, nothing more: we’ve paid some money that we don’t really NEED and got rid of the problem. Such a typical Western condescending reaction to the suffering of others. It’s how we who belong to the Western cultural tradition solve such problems: we pay money, we buy ourselves out of someone else’s suffering, bribing our consciousness away. That’s why giving to charity is such a big ‘business’ in rich countries: it’s much easier to write a check for 10 or 50 or 100 dollars monthly (money that is entirely expendable) than to waste our time and energy doing something about a problem that we feel needs solving. We buy peace of mind, we purchase forgetfulness.
Or do we?
Almost 5 months since it happened and I am still wondering whether the whole thing was a scam or not. I still feel guilty in myself, and stupid, mistrustful, mean, small and shifty. Where is the peace of mind my 10 dollars should have bought? Where is the satisfaction of having helped a fellow human being in distress?
True charity, charity that is meaningful and worthwhile, is not giving out of surplus, out of something we have in excess, but out of something we ourselves really need. Helpfulness without self-sacrifice is close to uselessness. Those of us who live in rich countries or we have enough money that we do not need to dwell on the thought of what we are going to eat the following day will never find peace of mind or fulfillment by giving money. What we really need and are so reluctant to give is time and energy and attention. Real sacrifice for us is providing help not by giving money or things, but by renouncing our comfort zone in order to provide this help.

My good friend and teacher, Tim deWinter, runs an organization called ‘The Hummingbird Collective’; it comes with a story, but those who want to know it will have to wait until the organization has a website. In order to be a hummingbird, you can also donate money for various charitable actions, but most meaningful in my opinion, in order to become a member, you need to pledge to do something selfless; something that takes you out of your comfort zone, that you think may be difficult, unpleasant or sickening to you, but helpful to others. Such as volunteering to work in an old people’s home for one day a year, or in a children’s hospital, or in a mental institution. Or taking a homeless person to live in your house because you couldn’t let them freeze in the train station (like my mother did last winter for 3 months). The possibilities are endless, and the rewards, I think, might be astonishing for many.