First impressions of my new home:

I have arrived in the Himalayas after 2 days of traveling. I have never seen such poverty in my life. The disparity is impossible to understand unless you visit.

In the taxi on the way to my hostel, I passed a multi-story building with all the windows burnt out of it in a fire. Yet it still harbored men at work, sitting in the windowless and wall-less conferences room on the 2nd floor, climbing the charred stairs to their offices. No repairs seemed made. Goats are tied up wherever they fit, even if on in front of one’s store, with a mire of hay and animal waste mixing together right there on the shopkeepers front stoop.

Dust, cigarette smoke and power lines hang in the air like a bad feeling. Cars, motorcyclists, trucks and buses — all mostly 2 decades old or more — fill what’s left of the air with beeping horns as they all power through streets as narrow as two arms lengths. The city echoes with the noise. A child walks alongside my open window, fingers latched to the sill, begging in a soft raspy voice, “excuse me ma’am, please? Excuse me,” all the way to my lodgings, where he remains in the doorway, repeating his entreaties while I check in.

There is only one communal bathroom at my hostel. The two showers don’t have doors or curtains, so I locked the main door & kept the entire place to myself when I showered off the sand from the camels and dunes in Qatar (my layover on the way here).

And yet, this is normal life here. These people light up as I pass by in my taxi. A lovely mother, walking behind her husband, children in hand, breaks into the warmest smile when our eyes meet. She is wearing a full length kurta in the 86°F sun. I wonder if she is my age.

The desk receptionist at my friend’s hotel insists on calling me a taxi to take me to my own place across the city, at no charge. My own hosts smile warmly and offer me everything they can to make me comfortable. So far, everyone whose service I have employed has dealt honestly with me, even as we hardly understand each others languages. They seem generous and kind. As I weave my own path through the chaotic streets, I feel strangely at peace.