I am in my fourth year of living in South Asia. It truly is an incredible place. It’s full of rich history and exotic beauty. For an outsider, each day must seem like an adventure with all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and chaotic randomness. For me it is simply home. It is the place where I wake up every morning and do my normal routines…shower, dress, eat breakfast, etc. Then I’m off to work. Yes, I go to work, not in a car, but a cycle rickshaw or auto rickshaw, sometimes by the metro or a taxi. That’s how the average "Arjun" or "Rahul" does it too. The random chaos you perceive actually has order and rhythm to it. Life does move at a slower pace and it takes more energy to get the simplest thing done. At the end of the day you collapse in a heap and are thankful if you accomplished one thing during the day. Life here is its own art form with formal greetings and lots of tea drinking. There’s something sacred about it. Something I cannot yet explain.
There’s something else which pervades this land…brokenness. It was its brokenness that partially drew me here. I wanted to help, to offer my skills. In turn I have been broken. My friend says living here is like being put through a meat grinder. That’s a good description of how I feel some days. But most days I am finding it easier to live here broken. It’s in brokenness that I can relate to the people.
Life here is not split up into the secular and the sacred. I’ve been trying to share my journey here as an educator simply from my professional experience. In doing so I have not been able to capture and share life here. From this post forward I am committed to share the whole story…the whole me…where there aren’t lines separating beauty and brokenness, but where they come together to make collage of truth.
