Keeping Their Record

What can I say about my journey? I want to write, but every time I sit down to describe my experiences I just can't quite get it out. Yesterday I sat down to write about the little Chinese woman in the Malaysian  post office who was so kind to me. But how do I describe her tiny voice and Chinese accent, how she batted my hands away and insisted on repacking my boxes so I would get a better rate and, when the weight was just a tenth of a gram over, she ignored it and wrote that it weighed just 5kgs instead.

How can I explain the things I've seen and been a part of when they are such tiny moments every day. So many tiny moments and I don't know if you would "get" them--or if I can even describe why they are so profound.

And also, there is this sense that the outward journey isn't the importent part. That as great and amazing and wonderful (and sometimes terrible, uncomfortable and frightening,) as it all is that these things are only ephemeral and that the really importent journey is that which is occuring  within myself. I've compared my journal with that of the other bloggers and worried that I wasn't giving enough detail to the outward features of my journey. What exactly it was like to spend ten hours on a government bus from jodhpur to jaisalmer.  How I sat with five other people on a metal bench made for three and how a kind man tried to kill me by forcing me to eat uncounted bananas.

How I sat next to an old man with a little girl, no more than eight or nine years old man who I thought was his daughter until I noticed the toe rings, anklets and gold bangles of a bride. She had the mehendi, too. How I camped in the desert with the Raika, in the center of 200 men and was never hassled (but they prayed outside my tent at 4AM every morning under the full moon.

How my driver in South India took care of me like a daughter. Or how I lived for a month in a hotel in the family's apartment, taking my meals with them and helping their daughter with her homework. Why haven't I been able to put these stories into words? I'm so afraid their record will be lost.