Since November I have been volunteering my time in Lumbini, a town in rural Nepal best known as the birthplace of Sakyamuni Buddha.
Usually this takes the form of teaching English or computer literacy at the local schools, or trying to fix their computer lab, or trying to get another play together. Occasionally I take walks, too!
This is a walk I turned into a story, kind of. The actual "Monastic Zone", as it's called, is the site of the old Lumbini Garden, where the actual birth took place. Different countries bid on plots of land in order to build temples there, and now I hear it referred to as "Buddhist Disneyland", which results in a curious dissonance.
This is an incredibly holy place, but also very commercial (not that it's alone in that). It's also a segment of land all the villagers were kicked off of in order to make room for all the new temples, in a pretty poor area. And beneath all that, there are perhaps still remnants of what it was before anyone else happened, which is a malarial swamp. I don't mean to imply anyone gets malaria here anymore, of course. There hasn't been an outbreak for a long time. How are the places we live in built? Not really my place to talk about. I just took a walk.
Play here: Lumbini!