A Tibetan party is a lot like one in the US, except for the hunks of yak meat, the long knives, and the duck heads.
We got invited to join the headmaster and the teachers for dinner on our last night in Bomei. We had been working at their elementary school for about 10 days, and while the teachers were initially skeptical about our project, by the end, they were excited and grateful.
When we first arrived and told the teachers that we would be patching and painting their walls, fixing their broken windows, and adding additional lights and electrical outlets to their rooms, they could not believe their good fortune. When we told them that they'd have to move out of their rooms until the work was done, they became a little more wary.
It's not like they had a lot of choices about where to go. The village of Bomei has fewer than 25 houses, and nothing like a hotel. Our group of volunteers had to commandeer the common room of the school cook's house for our sleeping space. When that wasn't big enough for all eight of us, the cook set up two tents on the flat roof of his mud house, and four of us slept there.
(It was exciting for me to sleep under the stars, and seeing the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon was spectacular. But when the temperature dipped below freezing at night, I began to think that there was something to be said for living indoors.)
The teachers apartments were spartan; one front room with a cast-iron stove used for both heating and cooking, and one unheated back room for sleeping. But their alternatives, when we forced them out, were the students' classrooms or the outdoor covered walkways that connected the rooms. So for most of the time we were there, the classrooms became dormitories, the students became workers, and the walkways were piled with desks, clothes cupboards, and makeshift beds.
Their current rooms were tragically grim. Years of cooking had left the floors and shelves stained with yak grease. The walls, made from stacked logs, were plastered with old newspapers to keep out the wind and the cold during the snowy mountain winters. But they were livable, and for better or worse, they had been the teacher's homes for years. We stormed in like typical thick-headed contractors, and immediately began tearing things apart.
Removing the 'wallpaper" was the biggest mess. Once the rooms had been emptied of belongings, we got to work soaking the newspaper and scraping it off with putty knives. This made an unbelievable mess; after the paper left the walls it caked up the floors with instant papier-mache. Everything smelled like a wet sheep. But the teachers seemed reconciled to the disaster, and soon became willing accomplices to the destruction.
The worst room we had to deal with was not at the school, but at the clinic next door. The clinic had only one doctor but four apartments. One room was used for treating patients and another one was the doctor's living space. One extra room was being used by migrant construction workers, and the last room was, for all intents and purposes, a chicken coop.
The doctor had about a dozen hens wandering the grounds pecking at grains of rice. They were occasionally penned up in a crate about the size of a large steamer trunk, but more often, they just wandered in and out of this last apartment. Unlike cats, or even dogs, chickens have no reservations about using their living space as a toilet. Working in this room was more like working in a latrine, except that in this village, the latrines were much worse.
Once we got the rooms all scraped down, the patching and painting began. There is always something very refreshing about painting, and the feeling was especially strong here. After coating the ceilings, walls, and floors, we even painted the outside window trim and doors. The teachers took advantage of having their furniture out in the open and, starting with our bright red, blue, yellow, and white paint, mixed subtle pastels for brushing on their desks, tables, and chairs. It was a striking transformation.
The teachers were very young and enthusiastic. They were all in their 20's, even the headmaster was only 23, and this was the first job for most of them. Teachers in China get assigned to their schools by the government; being stuck in Bomei could not have been a choice posting. But they were making the best of it, and there was a strong feeling of camaraderie in the group.
On our last day in town, the teachers invited us to eat dinner with them. I was not expecting anything tasty. The food in the village was extremely limited; most of what we had been eating was what we brought with us when we arrived. But their hospitality was sincere, and we were eager to get to know them better.
To my surprise, the meal the teachers prepared for us was spectacular. I never figured out how the they managed to cook so much food, in so little time, with so few resources. Until about 24 hours before the party, their rooms were still under construction and they had all been living like refugees. And even under the best of circumstances, cooking on a woodstove is a challenge.
When we sat down in the headmaster's back room, they brought us plate after plate of food. There were six platters of yak, four plates of duck, about two dozen pita-like flat breads, and eight bowls of a local wild vegetable root, related to ginseng. There were also several plates of standard Chinese snacks, like small, individually wrapped cookies, peanuts, sunflower seeds, and chewy penny candies.
For some reason, yak is prepared by cutting the animal into uniformly sized cubes of meat and bone, with no regard for the original anatomy. There doesn't seem to be any concept of yak ribs, or yak steak, or yak chops; just 3 inch cubes of boiled flesh and bone. You grab a hunk, and either chew it like a corn dog, or, in more polite company, slice off pieces of meat with a knife.
All of the volunteers had Swiss Army knives ready for the occasion, but the Tibetans outclassed us with their dinner cutlery. Their knives were beautifully decorated, with carved bone handles and hammered brass sheaths. By tradition, they carry them all the time; when not being used to cut yak meat, they would be quite handy for self defense. If you were foolish enough to show up at airport security with one of these, you'd find yourself in Guantanamo before you had the chance to say "ceremonial".
The ducks looked like they had been roasted, and their anatomy was more clearly respected. As far as I could see, the whole duck was there - minus the feathers - with the heads and bills poking prominently from the plate. The wild vegetable was not much bigger than a pea, and tasted kind of like a potato, but much sweeter. It was served swimming in a bowl of hot butter and topped with sugar. You had to eat it quickly because once the butter cooled off and solidified, your potatoes got trapped like Shackleton's "Endurance" in the arctic ice.
We also had lots of beer. Once the bottles of started pouring, the food became almost an afterthought. To encourage as much beer consumption as possible, we played "Rock, Paper, Scissors" as a drinking game.
Despite being drunk, or perhaps because of it, we played the game in an assortment of four languages. Each person took turns standing and challenging in turn all of the other guests. When you lost to your opponent, you downed a glass of beer. There were 15 people in the room, so when you were the challenger, and your luck on the round was especially bad, you might end up drinking 14 glasses of beer. My luck was not good.
By the end of the evening, the fact that we and the Tibetan teachers had no language in common hardly seemed to matter. We had been working together for over a week, forming tentative bonds. Our night of eating a drinking brought us even closer; it was a perfect way to cap off our 10 day experiment in cooperation. I'm thinking about writing to Kofi Annan and suggesting that the United Nations organize a few keg parties.
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