A Road into Retirement

In the first days of June 2011, my wife and I left home for the opening ceremony of the new school in Nepal. The 7,000-mile flight from Chicago to Kathmandu took thirty-five hours. I felt bad for my wife flying with me in the economy class and having long layovers between flights. Eventually on day three we arrived in Kathmandu. My poetic wife stated in her diary: “On arrival it felt like we had taken a shovel and dug our way straight through the earth’s core to the Kathmandu airport.” The next morning after breakfast Sagar and his wife surprised us with a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a well-organized sightseeing tour which included all the highlights of the capital. He also presented us with a detailed schedule for our six-day visit. We spent a fascinating day visiting holy sites of Hinduism and Buddhism. 80% of Nepal’s population follows the Hindu belief system and 11% are Buddhists. Some joke that Nepal has three religions – Hinduism, Buddhism and Tourism. We visited the riverbanks of the sacred Bagmati River with the open-air cremation pedestals called ghats next to Nepal’s most important Hindu Temple ‘Pashupatinath,’ Nepal’s largest stupa, ‘Boudanath,’ with Buddha’s “all-seeing” eyes gazing out of a huge white dome, the center of Tibetan Buddhism and finally a Thanka painting school. The third program site was the “Monkey Temple,” a Buddhist model stupa on a green hilltop. The wooded park was alive with swinging monkeys. The next day, a Sunday, together with Sagar and his wife we boarded a helicopter from Kathmandu Airport to the village in the Himalayan foothills, a half-hour flight paid for by the school community. It was a roller coaster flight climbing out of the Kathmandu valley, passing up over hill-crests and in and out of valleys. Flying along, all of a sudden we spotted hundreds of students in pink uniforms lined up along the roads leading out of the village to our landing site in a field nestled amongst corn and rice patches. The aerial view of the huge crowds in school uniforms and the large new pink school building moved, impressed and overwhelmed us. We learned later that not only the students from the school village, but also locals from several surrounding villages, had come for the festivities. The principal and teachers were at the landing site to greet us. My wife and I were led through an alley flanked by students handing us bunches of flower blossoms. Children, students, adults - the village population at large - everybody wanted to put a Khata (a yellow-golden silk scarf for a guest of honor) around our necks. Others put flower wreaths on our heads – when we arrived at our seats we had 20, 30, 40… shawls around our necks! On our arrival at the school, the children sang a welcome song in English composed for me. Children performed dances, members of the school community gave speeches, they held a ceremony revealing the honoring plaque dedicated to the sponsor, decorated me with a topi, a Nepali traditional cap, and put a bright red spot, called a tika, on my forehead. Finally we cut the ribbon inaugurating and opening the school, and they handed me a beautiful wooden carved frame containing a certificate of appreciation, finishing with a tour through the classrooms across three floors.