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Taking off my boots to enter the meditation hall at the Kopan Monastery.
I hate to start off a blog post with redundancy but I got sick in Nepal, again. On the bright side I had a pretty productive week at work and half of my weekend was spared from some food-related plague so I’ll just talk about those much happier, pre-sickness topics.
Just your friendly neighborhood cows as I walk to work.
I started off the week editing the Request for Applications document for grants offered to shelters in the districts Hamro Samman is serving. After finishing up, I asked Carolyn if there were any additional pressing work she needed completed and I’m now working on creating a document about Nepal’s obligations if it were to adopt the Palermo Protocol. It’s one thing to read these international agreements, but having to consider how to implement some of the broad language in a way that is realistic for a developing country and also consistent with international standards is another matter entirely. I feel fairly challenged in this assignment so I hope I will be able to create a valuable finished product before my time in Nepal comes to an end in August.
I was also invited to attend an Ihi Ceremony. This is a tradition within Newar culture in which, young girls are "married" to Vishnu, their god, as a ritual for fertility, protection from spirits, and so they never become widows because, even if their earthly husband dies, they are always married to Vishnu. It has been an honor to be so included by the Hamro Samman team (unfortunately the aforementioned sickness stopped me from attending).
Speaking of weddings, saw a procession marching through the streets to send off these newlyweds.
My host family’s neighbors were also in the midst of a five day ceremony which started at dawn each morning and last well beyond dusk. My host family didn’t describe much of what the ceremony entailed only that it was “house worship” and they would ask the neighbors to turn the speakers down. Wanting to get away from some of the noise for a while, I ventured off on Saturday to the Kopan Monastery. I started on foot but quickly realized the trek would take me longer than Google estimated and decided to taxi up the winding slopes of the Kathmandu Valley. The road was certainly less paved than most places in the city I had been and as we went up higher you could feel the air clearing and the noise pollution dying down. Passing fields, cows, and the occasional Buddhist monk, I finally could see the monastery.
A peak of one of Kopan's monasteries as I headed up the mountain.
Kopan is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery that opens its doors to foreigners to teach them about Buddhism and offers different retreats. While I did not get the chance to stay too long, I did have the opportunity to walk through the monastery’s beautiful gardens and Tibetan temple. The gardens had these gorgeous, intricate statues. 
The meditation hall was a masterpiece in itself.
Every wall had a series of thangka, which are colorful paintings with painstakingly detailed symmetry and patterns depicting Buddhist and Hindu symbology. The back of the temple had an immense display of statues (including a 15 foot statute of Lama Tsong Khapa, the founder of the Gelug tradition of Tibetan Buddhism), flowers, and paintings, many of which were lit with candles or even LED lights.
It truly was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
