Take me to America

I see the longing desperation in each mother's eyes when she asks me, "will you take my child with you to America." I fumble to form coherent sentences in Nepali. "I am a simple teacher," I say. "I cannot get your child a visa; that is the job of the American Embassy." I see their eyes turn glassy before they look down at the ground. "What about my husband?" They sometimes ask. I give the same reply. The mothers walk away, but still smile at me when I walk to school, only to ask me the same question a week later.

"Where are you from?" friendly strangers ask on buses, dirt paths, in shops and restaurants. "I am from America," I say knowing what will follow. "Oh! The United States! Will you take me to America?" (silence) "Nepal is beautiful isn't it?"

My host mother tells me stories of what it was like to be married at the age of 13, leave her parent's home, and drop out of school to work in the fields. She too dreams of America. "We will start a farm," she says. "I will cook and clean for your parents as they go old. We will sell vegetables grown without chemicals. Buba will teach math, Sabita will be a doctor, Sirjana and Samjana will be business women while Sankalpa and Saugat finish college."

I think back to the village where my host father and host mother grew up, a three hour walk from the nearest bus stop. I see families living peacefully side-by-side in the houses their grandparents built by hand from mud and cow dung. I see fields and fields of rice, corn, potatoes, cabbage, spinach, apple trees, orange trees, and guava trees as far as the eye can stretch. "This is the way my grandmother lived and her grandmother lived and her grandmother's grandmother lived," my 94-year-old hajuraamaa says with a toothless smile. There was something so beautiful and organic about the village, given that every meal was a result of a relatives' hard work—anything needed to live either came from the earth or the diligence of the villagers' hands. "When the school came, it changed everything," my grandmother explains. "Our children were no longer here to help in the fields, and they began to dream of leaving our village for the city to find work."

I listen in silence, afraid that I will witness "what happens to a dream differed," the innocent notion that simply by coming to America all dreams will come true. I think back to my family's history, their sacrifices, and how such deep tragedy and desperation brought my grandparents to this country. I re-read the words of Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and Bill McKibbin, questioning the price of industrialization and consumerism. I watch the world news on a ten-inch TV screen in Nepal and start to cry when I see that people are still murdered because of their skin color. I am haunted by Harper Lee when I sleep—along with a thousand Americans asking themselves "where do I belong? America is the land of the free for who? And at what cost?"

My experiences abroad make me question everything—what the presences of schools have done to communities around the world, what will happen if humans continue to turn their back on their relationship with the natural world, and how the price of freedom seems to equate to a t-shirt on the clearance rack at Walmart that no one will ever buy, sewn by the hands of a 13-year-old girl in a developing country longing for a better life.

So sometimes I ask myself, would I trade my life of education and shopping malls for a simple yet arduous existence, planting and harvesting rice, living in a hand-made house, at one with the landscape that generation upon generation of my ancestors had called home? If I had been born in Nepal, would I too beg to ask, "Take me to America?"