Dale's dispatches from Kalmykia
Friday, May 12, 2006
Installment 10: Buddha, cell phones and a lama at lunch
As we get ready to leave Elista on May 25, this last installment will record some more impressions from our Fulbright adventure - the last installment, because our next stop is just to be tourists in St. Petersburg, which won't be new to many of you.
Buddhist Temple
Natalia arranged for us to visit the head of the new temple. He is an American Kalmyk who decided to become a monk and went to India. There he married a woman from Tibet, so was defrocked, but a special arrangement was made since he was a lama. So he was chosen at the age of 20 to be the head of the congregation here (but his wife and child are in New Jersey, where he goes for visits). He learned on the job and oversaw the construction of one temple on the steppes in 1996 and then the new one in the center of the city that was built by volunteers and church support in eight months. After this visit, I went to a special service at 9 o'clock on a Friday morning. The large sanctuary was full (about 1,000 people?), some of us on low benches and some on the floor. Eight Tibetan monks sitting in the center chanted almost continuously. Periodically, there were emotional accents from bells and gongs and prayerful bows from the congregation. The three-story-high statue of Buddha - a slimmed-down and youthful version with red lips but the traditional enigmatic smile - looked out over us. The only other sounds were the occasional interruptions of cell phones. I had to leave at 11, and when I got out to the lobby I was confronted by a thousand pairs of shoes - mostly black. It was quite a challenge to find my own black pair.
People to people
Victory Day in the Great Patriotic War, May 9, is the focus of many celebrations - a parade through town to lay flowers and hear speeches at the memorials; horse races at the hippodrome; and many personal memories about grandparents who were killed in the war. Before May 9 I talked with my class about my memories of the Cuban Missile crisis, and they told stories they have heard from Russian relatives who were as terrified as I was that war might break out again (one had a relative who was on stand-by to be sent to war but didn't know where).
At one family dinner, the host toasted the United States, thanking us for helping Russia and the allies defeat Hitler. And in returning the toast, I thanked Russia for turning back Hitler's invasion of their country and thus saving America and all the allies from the Nazis. It is on occasions like that that one feels the reservoir of good will among ordinary people that transcends the rhetoric of leaders.
People know us - We smile when taxi drivers and vendors in market stalls identify us as Americanskys and say they have seen us on the local TV channel. But we keep meeting new people as we give more talks at various branches of Moscow universities that have sprung up in town. The other day as I was walking to the market to get flowers to take (along with chocolates) to our dinner host that night, a young woman came up to me and asked if I were a foreigner. When I said yes, she asked if she could walk with me to practice her English because she was teaching English in an elementary school and wanted to improve. As we get to know people at the university and they hear about my talks on civil rights and the women's movement, they talk more openly about politics in Russia. Some of it is discouraging, because they want more openness and more economic progress, both, and they want it quickly, but they worry that Russians will prefer dictators. I have told them about the critical New Yorker article titled "Planet Kirsan," which they haven't heard about. And almost every day we get some new insights, some very funny. The high school girls I am meeting with to help them prepare for interviews for U.S. exchange programs laughed and laughed when I showed them a picture of our Piedmont [California] house and told them it was taken in winter. ("That's winter???")
They were equally amazed when I said Don and I had gone to see the Elista professional soccer team play. I was about the only women there, because women don't watch soccer (too many bad words, apparently, though since I don't speak Russian, I was oblivious). And when I told them that in the U.S. women and girls play soccer, they were truly stunned at the thought.
Lama at lunch
On May 9 we were invited to a colleague's sisters' apartment for a family reunion lunch. As we took the bus, Bossia mentioned that one of the guests would be one of the lamas from the temple - not the man we had visited with Natalia, so not the head, but one of the monks. A big man with a shaven head and a red robe wrapped around him, he sat next to me at lunch. He started the lunch with a chant. His story was amazing - translated by Bossia. He came from a poor family in Tibet and at 15 became a monk. His only education has been from the other monks. He escaped from Tibet by walking for three months to Nepal (if he had had money he could have hired a guide and made the trip more quickly). Then he was sent by the church to Kalmykia in 1998, assigned to a village, where he learned Russian by immersion. Now he is studying at night school here because he realizes that he has "missed out." He wants to learn English in the U.S., also by immersion, but says the church won't send him, since this wouldn't fill the church's needs. The next day he was leaving for India to arrange with eight artists to return with him to Elista to work for a year painting the walls of the new temple.
During the conversation, I couldn't have been more surprised to hear a cell phone ring and suddenly see him reach under his robe to pull out and converse on his cell phone.
This Fulbright semester has been full of wonderful surprises. We look forward to staying connected to the global view of the world and sharing more of our impressions when we are back in California.
Best regards,
Dale Rogers Marshall
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