You Don’t Have to Be Here
RABIN KNEW I WAS AFRAID to light the kerosene stove. His patient instructions accompanied open-mouthed delight at my ineptitude. This ten-year-old Nepali, wearing only limp cotton shorts, loved being my teacher in the tiny village where my Peace Corps training took place. My homework was to practice lighting the stove so when I set off to my post in Biratnagar a month later, I could boil water and not die of giardia (or so I said; one doesn’t die of giardia, it turns out). Rabin knelt by the smudged brass canister, pointing. Here you pump. Here you adjust the flow of gas. Here you hold the match, until poof! A ball of fire. His elegant hands exploded in my face to make sure I understood. That explosion was what I feared.
After several pantomimes, Rabin asked if I was ready. I nodded. Rabin’s aunt, watching, serenely threaded the buds of decapitated marigolds onto mala necklaces. Other family members gathered to watch, too. I smelled acrid kerosene.
“Now,” Rabin said, “where are those matches?”
We looked. His two-year-old cousin sat nearby, playing with the box labeled Safety Matches.
I often wondered, during my time in Nepal, why more injuries did not happen in a place so riddled with danger. Back home, children were admonished not to play with fire; preteen Nepali girls used it to prepare meals for the whole family. Six-year-olds in the United States were not allowed to walk to school alone; here, they were charged with carrying younger siblings through dense rickshaw traffic in the bazaar. A preschool-aged boy, who in my homeland might be responsible for a sippy cup, shepherded the family’s 1000-pound water buffalo in from the fields in Nepal. Out bus windows, I often saw such a boy reclined along the animal’s spine, a switch dangling unused over the beast’s massive flank. Perhaps we Americans were obsessed with safety.
I JOINED THE PEACE CORPS as a way out of my safe white middle-class existence, one that, at the age of twenty-one, struck me as so insulated as to be numbing. I had taken French, painting, Native American anthropology, and literature courses in college, but I still felt exiled in a hostile world of big box stores, other people’s happiness, and keg parties to which I was not invited. Few people my age seemed to feel this sense of peril, and by the end of my senior year, I felt utterly cut off from my Frisbee-toting peers. Moving abroad was an antidote to anesthetization.
Knowing almost nothing about Nepal except what information the Peace Corps had
