My Kathmandu

For a couple of years, I volunteered at WSU with their international students' conversation class. Meeting new students every week was fascinating, I loved hearing about their home countries, families, and culture. I remember one gal I met had very good English so we had a great conversation. I don't remember where she was from, because she didn't want to talk about her home. The summer before, she had been to Kathmandu (in Nepal), and she was planning to return as soon as possible. She glowingly told me of her favorite hangouts, the music, the art, the culture. She'd fallen in love with it. (And maybe a handsome local, I guessed).

After my freshman year in college, I spent a summer in Colombia with a missions team. We visited Bogota, Medellin, and the Choco (jungle), but our home base (and my favorite city) was Cali.

The statue of Christo Rey with outstretched arms overlooked the city in the valley. Downtown, street musicians filled the air with a tropicales or reggae beat. I loved the artisan fair, Tostadas Con Todo, and Mimo's chocolate-covered ice cream cones.

The weather was perfect. A missionaries' house even had a permanently open 8-foot square skylight covered with iron bars, because there would never be a time when you wouldn't want a nice fresh breeze, and it would never be too hot or too cold. The skylight was over a tiled area with a drain, so the rain would only water the plants they kept there, and then wash away.

Even people who lived in the poorer sections of the city, in the houses stacked on the sides of the foothills, managed to emerge from their concrete shacks in perfectly clean and pressed clothing. So many men were short, dark, and handsome.

We had a problem with our passports, and got turned away before stepping onto our plane at the airport. Riding with my teammates and our luggage back to the missionaries' home in the back of a pickup, I didn't care. So what if we were stuck in the country for a few more days? I hadn't been ready to leave anyway.

"I know what you mean," I told my conversation partner. "Cali, Colombia was my Kathmandu."