Mountain Lifestyle

Bathing
Several days ago a room with a stove and private bathroom opened up so Geshe La let me move over. The room is really cozy, and having a stove is great. So far I only use it for reheating leftovers, but still its nice to have hot food to eat. The bathroom is not what I expected. At the other room the bathrooms down the hall had a western toilet and shower. It’s nice to have a private bathroom that I can keep as clean as I want, but it’s a squat toilet, and there’s no shower – just a water tap about chest level. The water pressure isn’t too good, so it takes about 15 minutes to fill my bucket with warm water. I’m quite familiar with bucket baths, since for the first 11 or 12 years of life, that’s how I always bathed. In Vietnam people bathe the same way so adjusting to it wasn’t hard.

Toilets
Squat toilets aren’t so bad, especially if it’s your own. Squatting is supposed to be the natural way we relieve ourselves. Coming from the US, I’m obviously more used to sit down toilets, but luckily, growing up Viet, I’m used to this too. The flush on my toilet doesn’t work, so instead there’s a small bucket next to the toilet that I used to pour water down the toilet. It works the same way flush toilets except manually. It’s just the public squat toilets that SUCK for women that I had. Because men don’t have to squat to use them, public squats are disgusting. Every time I have no choice but to use them, I’m reminded about how even cleanliness is a luxury we often take for granted in the West.

Laundry
Laundry is completely hand-washed. I would have expected that people here would avoid wearing jeans since it’s so hard to wash by hand and takes so long to dry, but that’s what most of the young locals wear when they’re not working. In some places families hire servants or maids, but here in Dharamsala, with such a small community, everything is do-it-yourself when it comes to housework.

Plastic
In an effort to be more environmentally conscious, Dharamsala does not use plastic bags. So when I go to the market and buy a kilo of mangos, they are put into a recycled paper of aluminum bag. But these paper bags are not the typical brown bag we have at home. Literally it’s someone’s job to make bags from old newspapers or aluminum. There are also cotton fiber bags that people buy and reuse. Or some people just bring a backpack along and carry groceries in that. Even take out food is packed in these kinds of bags. The other night I went out for vegetable byriani. I asked the waiter if he could pack it. The leftover rice came back in a bag that was made out of a giant Clif bar wrapper and tied with a rubber band.

After seeing that kind of thing I couldn’t help but remember seeing a mass of plastic take-out containers that pile up the company’s kitchen trashcan, or how much we consume, even as a small office. Then I’d think about all the thousands of offices and businesses in the US and how much they probably consume, or throw away. I get a sinking feeling knowing how much we take from the planet and how little we replenish.

Living in this kind of simplicity is really nice. I think more often in this kind of living situation people only take what they actually need and use.