Being the Entertainment

On this past trip we went to some pretty remote places. It always amazes me, while traveling around the sub-continent, how people have chosen to live in some of the most remote and difficult places. The set up their villages in the middle of deserts, in nearly barren valleys, and some villages seem to barely cling to the sides of mountains. These places prove very difficult for national infrastructure to reach, and therefore, many villages go without electricity, roads, indoor plumbing, and most shocking of all – any kind of digital entertainment. That’s right, no T.V., no movies, and sometimes even no radio.

So, when two white people walk into one of these villages, village life stops, and all focus is on the living, breathing entertainment that has just entered their world. To the western eye we may seem to be the most normal looking and acting people, but let me try to envision for you what we look like to the 12-year-old villager living in a remote place. Top 10 most entertaining things about two white American men (as recounted to their friends the next day):

10) They were so huge! One of them must have been 9 feet tall!
9) Their skin was so white! One of them was so white it hurt my eyes looking at him (sorry K)! And then they pulled up the sleeves of their shirts… and that skin was even whiter!
8) They slept outside in a tent. Don’t they know that you can get eaten by bears if you sleep outside? (Most South Asians seem to think their countries are crawling with bears.)
7) Then they went down to the freezing cold river and swam in it? That’s a good way to catch a cold.
6) And they washed their bodies with soap. Right in the river! Totally unnecessary.
5) Do you know what they ate? They ate just potatoes and some kind of meat with gravy. They didn’t eat any rice! How can you go to sleep without eating any rice!?! They must have been poor white people.
4) They had a horse with them. It was the oldest, slowest, and most stubborn horse our village has ever seen!
3) One of them had orange hair. No, I promise you it was totally orange!
2) Both of them had hair growing on their chins! What do they think they are--goats?
1) They had hair on their arms! All over their arms hair was growing just like it grows on our heads. The funniest thing was that when you pulled the hair on their arms… they acted like it hurt!