Appreciate What You Have!
~Learning from the children of Nepal~
written by Rika Hashimoto
In February of 1998, I took a six day trip to Nepal. The reason for going? I heard that a group of puppetry club students from Soka University, where I was studying, was going to Nepal to perform puppet shows for the children in Nepal. I had been wanting to see the Himalayan mountains first hand. But, I could not schedule my trip with them. So I went alone.
I was lucky to meet up with the puppetry club. We were staying at the same hotel. They were at the end of their puppet show tour of Nepal. I went with them to their last performance. It was at a public school located in a poor village in the hills on the outskirts of Katmandhu. The village was surrounded by beautiful fields of yellow wildflowers. And you could see the snow-capped Himalayan mountain range far in the distance. This was very different from the busy and polluted scenery of the city. The school was made up of two clay buildings. There was graffitti on the walls and we were told that the school had just gotten desks for the children to sit in. I found out that this school was one of the poorest in the city of Katmandhu.
As the children gathered for the puppet show, I talked to some of them. They were so curious. Their beautiful eyes were SO EAGER TO LEARN! They brought out their English books and proudly said the words they learned in class: "DOG!" "SNAKE!" " RABBIT!" "ONE!" "TWO!" "THREE!" ... They pushed against each other to be around this new stranger. They tried to touch my hands, my clothes, my hair... I asked them to teach me Nepalese.I pointed to the pictures of the animals in their book and they shouted them out in their language. They were laughing and giggling as I tried to say the words.
When the puppet show began, the children were suddenly entranced. All eyes were focused on what happened to the wolf and the pig in the play. The puppet club had learned Nepalese so that the children could understand the stories. Both children and adults were amazed by the puppet show. For many it was the first time they had seen anything like it. How it instilled magic in their eyes!!
After the puppet show and picture taking, I joined the puppeteers in a dialogue with the teachers of the school. The teachers expressed their desire for Nepal to become a great country like Japan--"Number 1 in education and economy!" They wanted Nepal to follow in the footsteps of Japan. The teachers did not know about the number of teenage suicide, school bullying and teenage apathy increasing daily in Japan. Children in Japan have every convenience of living they could wish for and more. But many of them are lost in apathy towards life. In stark contrast, the children I met in that small Nepali village were vibrant and filled with the spirit of life. You could see it in their beautiful, shining eyes. I felt that those children were the luckiest kids in the world to have such purity in their eyes, and to grow up amidst the vast fields of yellow wildflowers, with the snow-capped Himalyas in the distance.
I learned that we tend to get caught up in wishing for things that belong to others and forget to appreciate the things that are right under our feet. Then, we end up losing the things that are good for us.
