For six days I lived with the Namgay family in a twelve-house village an hour's walk from a seven-mile dirt road off a small paved road four hours from Thimphu, the capital. The Namgays had never seen a TV, an airplane, or for that matter a live American before and were as curious about me as I was about them. I had dinner with a different family every night, the same basic good food that I ate gladly with one hand as my legs ached from sitting cross-legged on the floor. (My other hand fanned the flies from my food.) Wild marijuana grows everywhere, but villagers feed it to their pigs after boiling it. The sounds were incredible: women singing in the fields as they harvested wheat, the murmur of monks chanting, the squeal of children playing, all without the haze of electronic noise I have unfortunately come to take for granted.
On the other hand, all was not paradisiacal. Animals and people excreted just outside the house and the family cooked inside on an open fire. The combination of smoke and flies was the worst I have seen anywhere. All the kids had diarrhea and runny noses, and most had some kind of skin infection.
One night Karma Jigme, my interpreter, woke with bad chest pains at 3 a.m. I gave him aspirin though he said the pain was probably caused by an evil spirit. Yet the village seems to work as a place to live. Namgay, with his club foot, his hunchbacked son Kinley, his dwarf-like daughter Bangum, would be lost or socially savaged in most Western societies, but these sweet people belong in these mountains with their all-encompassing Buddhist beliefs.
