THE ANSWER IS 12
TAI12 #245 Over the Hump...
(Dusty Desperation in
Dhangahell)
03/24/2023 – Day 1,119
out of China
202/101 – Nepal
Greetings Fake Media
Followers,
Welcome to the Show...
3/24/2020
The
past few weeks have been abnormal at best. Nepal has a national student union
group whose elections dismantle classes at several universities across the
country. More on that later.
Today
marks a bit of a milestone for my time in exile. I have survived 2/3 of my
project. The heat has been settling in across Southwest Nepal ever since I
returned from our Midyear Conference in Kathmandu last month.
Happy New Year (Pt. 3)
4/14/2020
नयाँ वर्षको शुŕ¤ŕ¤•ामना Naya Barsha Ko Subhakamana! That is “Happy New Year”
in Nepali. They use a different calendar here, and today, Baishakh 1, marks the
beginning of 2080.
It has been a struggle to get much writing done as
indicated by the fact that I’d originally planned to publish this three weeks
ago today to mark having hit the two-thirds mark of my stay in Nepal. The 100F
heat coupled with power cuts doesn’t help.
I do finally have great news to report: I landed a job
back home in Shenyang! An international school on the southside of town has hired
me to teach some undetermined high school English subjects this fall. As long
as there are no hiccups with trying to sort my paperwork in time from Dhangadhi,
everything should fall into place. I will be able to confront Chairman Wife about
her two-and-a-half years of silence and see my favorite fat cat, Wookie.
With an August 1 start date on my contract, this means
that I will find myself severely pressed for time during the approximately four
weeks I’ll have in WLOTUS. A drive to Indiana and then Ohio to attended the 23rd
Gathering of the Juggalos will consume more than a quarter of my stay. If they
don’t have one hell of a lineup planned, I might return my ticket and car pass.
My Return to WLOTUS
8/2021 – 2/2022
The
pandemic continued to drag on. I had become a certified teacher in a state that
is increasingly making life miserable for teachers who aren’t down with the
extreme paranoia of right-wing religious zealots content to liken themselves to
the Nazis when it comes to banning books. In another bid to upgrade my resume,
I enrolled in a 180-hour TEFL and a 60-hour IELTS preparation course. This
leaves me pretty well overqualified for any ESL/EFL/TEFL/TESOL gig that doesn’t
require a PhD.
Custer
County’s unemployment office provided me much-needed and appreciated assistance
in signing up for the pandemic unemployment assistance. Chairman Wife had lost
the job she’d held since we’d moved to China. Stuck in a fantasyland where
people didn’t believe in a virus or the preventative methods to counter it, I
couldn’t risk working amongst the ignorant masses. The PUA might have saved our
butts.
Nothing
lasts forever, and our Trump lackey excuse for a governor withdrew Fucklahoma
from the program a month early, because fuck people in need.
Desperation
drove me to some interesting positions. I became a mystery/secret shopper.
Signing on as a substitute teacher confirmed my thoughts on whether or not I
could ever teach in WLOTUS. I have the utmost respect for the educators in
those trenches who take the learning process seriously by treating their
students with respect and not hiding information/history from their wards just
because we have a lot of embarrassing and uncomfortable periods in our past
which many refuse to face. I couldn’t do it. The election of the current
miscreant for the state’s superintendent backed up my realization that our
educators are going to face an increasingly uphill battle as the conservative
religious takeover of our system continues.
The program
I’d originally, and temporarily, left China for was getting back on its feet,
albeit slowly at first. They offered me a position as a professor teaching
virtually at the Qufu Normal University in Qufu, Shandong Province, China.
Waking at hours normally meant for going to sleep after a fun night out took
some getting used to. With classes wrapping up around 7 or 8 a.m., many of my
days during this time started with a late-morning nap.
They
signed me for a second semester. I went into 2022 with high hopes. The program
planned on going back to in-person teaching. Qufu is not close to Shenyang, but
at least it’s in the right country. About this time, the omicron variant was
taking its world cruise and ended my chance to get into China. Another virtual
semester was in my immediate future.
One
very odd conversation took place via text messages with less than a week before
my new classes were to begin. My new handler at the university sent my
schedule. I thanked him and said that the change in class times would work well
to my advantage. The spring semester had me starting between 6 and 8 p.m. and
ending between 1 and 3 a.m. He sent a confused response. Nobody had bothered to
inform him that they weren’t bringing me over.
Having
this rug pulled out from under my feet would leave me in Funklahoma and keep me
out of China for an unknown amount of time to come. While I was stewing in yet
another new pandemic low, my searches for a job had turned up an international
school in Guangzhou that was willing to fly me over for a two-year contract.
Guangzhou is even farther south than Qufu. In what would be the last live
conversation we would have, Chairman Wife told me not to take the gig. While
some of the larger cities were slowly reopening and bringing in foreign
employees, domestic travel still represented a nightmare of lockdowns and
quarantines. The chances of us seeing each other were incredibly slim. If any
of that changed during my two years there, then I’d still be locked into a
contract way down south. She advised me to wait until I could come home to
Shenyang. Outside a couple of voice messages and a few text messages, that
would be the last I heard from her.
That
looks like a decently miserable spot in which to end this pandemic recap.
(To be concluded…)
Drowning Out 2022
and
Tepidly Welcoming 2023
December 30, 2022 – January 6, 2023
I rang in the new year in
Kathmandu, because my handlers refused to allow anyone in our program to leave
the country during our universities’ semester breaks.
Tracy’s
(Fellow in Pokhara) daughter had flown in for Christmas, so it was up to Amy
(Fellow in Chitwan) and I to drink Kathmandu dry. Our favorite person from the
Nomad, Koshis, took us out to Thamel to hit a couple of joints on New Year’s
Eve. We sent our middle fingers flying to 2022 at Plan B. I’m still waiting for
my first kiss of the year.
On my final
day in town, I wandered down to Thamel, Kathmandu’s notorious foreigner
playground. It delighted me to no end to have lunch with an old friend I
haven’t seen in three years. By old friend, I mean Niulanshan, my favorite
cheaper brand of baijiu, China’s notoriously delicious firewater.
A Quick Bit of Kidnapping
January 8 Sunday
Most every person I meet
in Dhangadhi owns a school of some sort and wants me to teach their tiny
terrors for free. Ramji, my main NELTA connection, wanted to meet so that we
could sign the certificates for the participants of December’s workshop which
hadn’t been printed in time. We agreed to meet at Niko Restaurant for lunch and
to sign the certificates. He offered to pick me up, but I told him that I was
going for a bike ride to do some shopping.
He somehow outwitted me.
He didn't even eat and then suggested a drive to the mountains to our north.
This allowed us to pass through Attariya, a small town outside of Dhangadhi
that is hosting our next NELTA workshop. The drive took us to an old bridge
across a gorge in the foothills of the mountains. Plenty of vendors have set up
shop there to sell snacks, water and tobacco to folks visiting the out of
service bridge for selfies and Tik-Toks. We didn’t exit his vehicle. We simply
turned around and headed south.
He deviated on the return
trip and stopped at Bhat-Bhateni on our way back which destroyed my made-up
shopping excuse.
He hadn't brought the
certificates, so we had to drop by his school he founded and serves as its
current principal. Still too wet to sign, he sent me off with a teacher who
showed me every single room in the four-story building. She introduced me to
every person we met. All of the teachers were there grading tests. I even met
the accounting, custodial and canteen staff. Guess how many names I can recall. That’s right, zero. It
ended with him inviting me to his school's big function when the spring
semester gets underway for his 1,200 PreK-10 students. He hopes to add grades
11 and 12 soon.
I explained to him that
this wouldn't be possible, because it would look like I was doing work at his private
school. Every other jackass with an education company who wants a piece of my
ass would be able to point to that event as evidence of my willing to slut
myself out.
Mountainous Cancellations
March 5 Sunday
None
of the plans made for my five-day excursion into the mountains to deliver a trio
of NELTA workshops to educators who lack the means to come down to one of our
events closer to Dhangadhi even matter. My Nepali boss just dropped the bomb on
me that they have aborted the entire plan. When I asked for a reason, he
answered that the Embassy doesn’t believe the roads to be safe enough and that
the hotels aren’t nice enough. One of the reasons they chose me for this gig
was thanks to my experience roughing it. I am an unhappy ninja who requires
heavy doses of booze and additives to calm the fuck down.
Holy Holi!
March 6 Monday
Last
Monday, some of my English for Language Teaching students criticized the pace
of my teaching. They feared that we wouldn’t get through their text by the end
of the semester. Nothing more was said on Tuesday. Then they took off the rest
of the week to play volleyball, ping pong, soccer, badminton, cricket, and some
games I’ve never before seen.
Following
those three days, we have three days of national holidays to kick off this
week. I wasn’t actually certain that today would be a holiday until I visited
an empty campus this afternoon.
March 7 Tuesday
My
morning began with a phone call from…I’m not actually sure who it was, but he
knew me. It might have been one of the NELTA guys, although I’m not sure how he
got my number. Whoever he was, he wanted me to attend some Holi celebration
this afternoon or evening. A strange thing happened while he was talking to me,
another call came in. I asked the first guy to hold while I checked the other
line. The first guy hung up as I dealt with the student who had called. He
didn’t call back, and I don’t usually carry any talk credit on my, so I
couldn’t return his call.
The
day dragged on with no end in sight, as most days here. As the afternoon
churned on, I grabbed my bike and took off on a ride. Seeing thousands of
Nepalis walking the streets covered in a rainbow of brightly colored powder
couldn’t help but remind of mingling among the Faygo and confetti-coated masses
at the end of an Insane Clown Posse concert. A turn down a side street took me
outside of what constitutes our town and into the countryside in less than two
minutes.
Music
blared from every few houses as people danced in their yards in circles, all
covered in powder. Mostly loose chickens, cows, dogs, and goats paid them no
heed as they went about napping in the heat or foraging for morsels in whatever
confines they were subjected to, be it pens, coops or short lengths of rope
tied around their necks to various objects. My ride south soon hit a near
impasse at the construction site for a bridge over the local version of the Rio
Grande (except that south bank is also Nepali, but it’s pretty damn close to
the border, so you get what I’m putting down).
Back
to Main Street I peddled as surprised exclamations sometimes erupted from those
I passed. Few shops sold the stockpiles of white Holi 2023 t-shirts they’d been
hocking for days. Many of them had odd logos such as one with Nike’s Swoosh
that said, “Holi Let Pla It.” It felt strange to see so many people wandering
the streets with so few businesses open.
Main
Street’s western terminus occurs when it hits the Mahakali Highway, a stretch
of road that begins at the Indian border on the southern edge of town and ends
325km north at another spot on the border below the Lesser Himalayas. The city blocked
off the northbound lanes to hold a party. A truck decked out with a large
speaker system sat across the road. People covered in a rainbow of powders
danced and milled about the road. I peddled my ass out of there before anyone
could hit me with a handful of color.
KMC Exorcism
March 7 Tuesday
I
make it a point to put in an appearance in my makeshift office a few minutes
before each of my classes. A handful of professors usually lounge around on the
pair of distressed loveseats in this room I share with the head of the
department. These seats are often pulled out to use for special events in the
school’s seminar room or on outdoor stages for cultural events, the school’s
birthday and sporting events.
Walking into the room today, I had to push through
nearly two dozen students surrounding a bed that looked like a hospital gurney,
except that this had no wheels and was constructed with a frame of 2”x2”
boards. A green sheet covered the thin, narrow mattress. A pillow case of the
same shade of green encased a flat pillow.
A female student was lying on this strange bed that
has never before graced my office. She began writhing and moaning a little bit.
A couple other students were engaged with holding her down. Her infrequent
sounds landed somewhere between mild retardation and a milder orgasm.
Asking the students about her condition only confused
matters for me.
“Ghosts,” several kids replied when I asked what was
wrong with her.
A male student directed me to check her temperature. I
placed one hand on her forehead and the other on my own. I was warmer than her.
“Our campus have many ghosts,” two students explained.
I pulled out my phone and offered to call Madan, my
ambulance driver/ride and used rum provider to get her to a hospital.
Just then, a much older professor entered the office
with a handful of leaves. He instructed a student to pour a glass of water from
the ever-present plastic pitcher of tepid water floating around my office.
Professor Leaf dipped his greenery into the glass, parted the students in front
of him and shook the leaves over the girl. Her moaning and movements increased
for a minute. A student rushed into the room with a larger leaf which she
unfolded to reveal a pile of ashes. The professor dipped a couple of fingers
into the ashes and rubbed them on the patient’s forehead.
I asked if there was anything I could do to help, but
my services were turned down. Several of my students from my ELT class had
dropped in to see what had happened to me as we were now five minutes into our
period. My office was empty by the time I returned from class.
March 8 Wednesday (Update)
The elderly professor walked into my office the next
morning as I was preparing for class. I asked him about the sickly student. He
said that she’d had a fever and that an ambulance had come for her. I find this
interesting, since I never heard any sirens from my classroom which sits four
doors down from my office. Classrooms on the ground floor all have doors that
open to the outside. They must have carried her away from the building to the
campus entrance to get her to that ambulance.
The Most Special Specialist
March 11 Saturday
Upon
completing the ninth episode of my weekly college radio show, Professor
Bone’s Musical Scrapyard, I ran into Professor Bhuwam, KMC’s lone professor
of journalism. The fact that he handles the program on his own harkens back to
my days when I did my degree at SWOSU under Dr. J. Bhuwam expressed gratitude
for me taking time out of Nepal’s single-day weekend to come in to make my
weekly contribution.
When
I asked about our broken website (radiokmc.com), he explained that the lone
person capable of repairing our station’s equipment has been hospitalized in
Kathmandu for some time now. He should be released later this month and will
visit us to put our gear in working order. I have no clue what the problem is,
nor do I understand why only one person in all of Nepal can correct it.
KMC Exorcism Pt. II
March 15 Wednesday
Whether
or not it was the same student, I don’t know, but I once again walked into my
office to find a young woman writhing on the wood-framed bed gurney they never
removed. Girls and guys held her down and she moaned and struggled. A professor
I didn’t know told me that she had fainted, as she often does. This time they
had decided to trust modern medicine and reassured me that an ambulance was on
the way.
Electoral Dysfunction
March 20 Monday
I asked two professors last week about the upcoming
Free Student Union (FSU) elections and whether or not they were going to affect
our schedule. "No," both replied. I walked to my building at the rear
of the campus today to find the place desolate with the exception of a large,
heated meeting taking place in the seminar room next to my office (I guess it's
truly mine, since they removed Packhera's name plate off of his desk after his
suicide on Thursday).
The groundskeeper had padlocked my classroom. Two men
sitting outside the seminar room between my office and classroom wondered at my
actions. One wore a KMC pin on the lapel of his jacket, so I asked him about
our classes. He responded that that because of the elections, KMC cancelled
classes today and tomorrow to prepare for them and Wednesday to hold them.
We might even get off Thursday while they tally the
votes.
Returning home, I just solved one Dhangadhi mystery. A
man opened my gate and blew a whistle. I'd heard this from down the street but
didn't know what was going on. I went to my door, and the man just waved me
away and closed the gate. A farm tractor pulling a trailer was on the street.
They were collecting trash. People don’t set their garbage out, hence the
whistle, but 4 p.m. feels like an odd time to conduct their pickups.
March 21 Tuesday
Thunder
exploded throughout the night, heralding a heavy downfall of rain that
frequently took the power with it. When my house’s battery kicks in, the
ceiling fan speeds up and becomes very noisy. When the power returns, the
inverter connected to the battery kicks out a loud metallic pop. All three of
these sound sources conspired to keep me from completing a healthy night’s
slumber. The waterworks wouldn’t cease until 4 p.m.
Taking
advantage of the cool weather left behind, I donned my Ariats and Stetson for
what will surely be the last time in this country and stomped my way to the KG
Hospital along the highway to refill my prescriptions. The long walk left me
with a bladder ready to pop from the coffee I had downed during my lazy day of
trying to write.
The receptionist pointed me to the hospital’s unisex
toilet. Fear has rarely hit me as hard it did in this restroom. The door set
into the bare concrete wall barely opened, forcing me to squeeze through it.
The size of a porta-potty, the space had a crusty toilet with a rectangular
hole above it. The swarm of mosquitos drew my thoughts to wonder what manner of
flesh they’d feasted upon before finding my buffet. Standing as tall as I do, I
could peer over the ledge at the base of the hole in the wall. People with no
regard for sanitary conditions had tossed piles of blood and pus-crusted gauze
up there along with other pieces of medical funk I couldn’t discern.
I
convinced a different doctor to refill my meds and got the hell out of there to
begin the long hike home.
March 22 Wednesday
My
local program supervisor from the Embassy has called me several times after
earthquakes, a small flood and a large protest happened in Dhangadhi. For the
first time during my time here, he emailed all three in the program a
preventative message about the upcoming university elections for Nepal’s Free
Student Union. The FSU is a nationwide student union. At least thirteen of
sixty-two schools had to postpone their elections due to students protesting
and padlocking gates and buildings on their campuses. This peaked my interests.
A
trio of visits to KMC starting at noon to check out the FSU election between job
and newspaper interviews took up a decent portion of my day. My first walk down
Campus Marg took place shortly after noon. Two groups of regular police in
their blue uniforms lingered close to where my narrow street meets Campus Marg.
They were stationed there with their riot gear in a big pile in case their
brothers and sisters in blue needed back in the unlikely event that my students
broke out into a riot. I wish they were than interesting.
Numbering
at least a thousand, students milled around all over the road where it ends at
KMC’s gate before making a turn to the right down a rocky dirt road. Amongst
the masses, more than one hundred students queued in a line. This, the police
carefully controlled as students showed their IDs one at a time to gain
admittance to the campus to vote.
Movement
through the masses proved difficult as clusters of students would surround me
the second that I halted my forward progression. Pelted with the usual barrage
of questions, “What’s you Insta,” “Where from,” and “Where you live,” I found
it difficult to evade them all. Numerous students asked to take selfies with
me; more just took pictures without asking.
Some
students had printed and laminated single sheet campaign posters for their
parties they hung from their necks. Others passed out flyers on colored paper.
Most of these went directly to the ground.
A
conversation with one of my students confused me. When asked if she had already
voted, she responded that she couldn’t. Her explanation about not being
registered didn’t make much sense.
My final
visit came after it had ended. The university’s gate remained shut and locked. A
contingency of police had stayed behind to guard the ballots throughout the night.
Students had left the street looking like a small garbage dump filled with campaign
materials, ice cream treat wrappers and miscellaneous food waste.
BYE THE NUMBERS:
· 17,887 – Confirmed COVID deaths in Oklahoma (February
24)
· 799,728 – Births
in Japan in 2022, a record low.
· 1.58 – Number, in
millions, of deaths in Japan in 2022, a record-high for post-war deaths.
· 1.5 – Number, in millions, of births in Japan in 1982.
· 38 – Rolls of toilet paper used per person annually in
Brazil.
· 49 – Rolls of toilet paper used per person annually in
China.
· 130 – Rolls of toilet paper used per person annually
in WLOTUS.
· 4 – Percentage of the world’s population in WLOTUS.
· 20 – Percentage of the world’s toilet paper products
used in WLOTUS.
· 955,261 – Income threshold, in dollars, to be in the
top 1% of Connecticut earners, the highest in the country.
· 336,866 – Income threshold, in dollars, to be in the
top 5
· of Oklahoma earners.
· 210,109 – Income threshold, in dollars, to be in the
top 5% of Oklahoma earners.
· 374,712 – Income threshold, in dollars, to be in the
top 1% of West Virginia earners, the lowest in the country.
· 183,973 – Income threshold, in dollars, to be in the
top 5% of West Virginia earners.
· 1,000 – Arrests made as of March 6 of the domestic
terrorists who stormed the America’s Capitol.
· 52 – South Korea’s limit on weekly working hours (40
hours with 12 paid overtime) set in 2018.
· 1,915 – Average hours worked in 2021 by Koreans.
· 1,767 – Average hours worked in 2021 by Americans.
· 1,716 – Average hours worked in 2021 by OECD
countries.
· 35,000 – Amount, in kilograms, of waste the Nepal Army
hopes to remove from four of its mountains, including Everest.
· 300 – Estimated number of corpses on Everest.
· 0.6 – Percentage of people in Seoul who paid their bus
fares with cash in 2021.
· 21.6 – Percentage of payments made in cash nationwide
in Korea in 2021.
UPS&DOWNS:
UPS:
· Aware of the difficulty
I face in Korea and China in finding shoes my size, I brought eight pairs to
Nepal to get me through my ten months.
· It was good to see
Tennessee Republicans finally take action on gun violence, too bad it was only
on their Democratic colleagues protesting their lack of action on gun violence.
Oh well, thoughts and prayers until the next mass shooting and the ones after
that.
DOWNS:
· Of the eight pairs of
shoes I brought, I should have included more than two pairs of sandals in order
to better navigate the many months of hot and muggy weather. Also, my Keenes
are now more super glue than shoes.
peace,
samiam NEARING
aka: Reverend samiam, Nut ‘n Bone, professa kimchi killa, Richard
Lichman, Captain Beer, Dunkin' Doze Nuts, Testicles, Tiny Dick, and The Cowboy from Hell!
*Legal crapola: Unless otherwise
noted, all material in this and every issue of TAI12 are the property of George Samuel Nearing and his multiple
personalities. Nothing contained herein
may be reproduced in any way, shape, form, or fashion without requesting and receiving permission in
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