Rocking the House

Without any public fanfare, a significant event has been going on now for 4 days here in Thimphu: a Christian youth fellowship conference, involving teenagers from all over western Bhutan. Ratna, our housekeeper, has tried to get us to go, and on Wednesday evening we set off after she gets off work at the other house, around 4:30. We walk straight up the mountain from our house, into a steeply pitched neighborhood that is under construction and so is an odd blend of tin-roof shacks with matting for walls, new 8-unit cement apartment houses, paved and unpaved roads, ditches full of skinny waterpipes with attachments running off every which way as new residences take their share of the water, and a few small grocery shops. One of the topmost houses is a light-yellow apartment building, the 4th floor attic of which is the Christian meeting house - of course, nothing on the outside indicates this. We are greeted on the porch by people whose faces have become a little familiar to us from the previous meeting or from encountering them on the street, and three flights up we take off our shoes on the exterior balcony and leave them there.

Even on the third floor, the pounding and the rock-beat are loud, and as we climb the last flight to the small doors that lead into the attic, a wave of humid heat, sweaty air, and packed humanity pours down on us. Inside, the lighting comes from green corrugated fiberglass laid over the skylights, giving everything a kind of underwater glow, and it must be 100 degrees inside with 110 percent humidity: condensation is pouring down from the low acoustic-tile ceiling, and probably a hundred teenagers are rocking to a beat from a three-piece band: drumset, electric guitar, and tamborine. The song (and indeed, everything we hear tonight) is in Nepali, so I don't get most of it, but it involves some hallelujahs and lots of shouted responses, and the kids are packed in tightly, jumping up and down to the beat. It's a youth dance not unlike those in our church, with grownups and younger kids on the outside of the room, sitting close to the fans and trying to breathe.

After a while the band takes a break, to get some fresh air and water. The kids sit down, covering the entire floor of the space, and teens wearing "Worship Team" or "Volunteer" badges walk among them, handing out bottles of Sprite or water to share. Brother Simon preaches from Ephesians (I am told) vigorously, with lots of Amens and Hallelujahs to punctuate his Nepali address. We stay about an hour and then head down into the fresh air. Ratna is disappointed we are leaving so soon - she has dug in to stay all night if necessary, and these kids have been at the revival since early morning until late at night, for 3 days straight with another day to go.

Out in the yard, in a small shack with a big woodfire at the back of it, a group of people is making dinner in the largest pots I have ever, ever seen. There is one huge pot of yellow dal, another of curry, another of Indian-style aloo (potatoes), and one of white rice. Here's the picture from that - everyone cheerfully working to feed the hundreds who are upstairs or on their way. The next day I hear from Ratna that before dinner everyone, including herself, was "slain in the Spirit" stretched out on the floor in religious ecstasy. I don't know what our kids would have thought of that, I'm kind of glad they missed it.