What a change!  Our pre-novitiate team spent a few January days building a Jesuit residence at Tipling.  Now nine months later, we find the buildings tastefully completed, along with a few “temporary” additions: a chapel and kitchen-dining room, made of wood beams and metal roofing sheets.  Fathers Norbert D’Souza and Tek Paudel have organized parishioners into Small Christian Communities. 

Several community leaders have spent a week in Kathmandu, learning the basics of their ministry of faith building.  They now meet the communities regularly for prayer and teaching.  Tek and Norbert move from community to community for visits.  The priests cover three villages, Namsa, the main center, as well as Labdung and Machet, further up the slope.  These are Tamang villages.  A little lower is the blacksmith quarter, unfortunately set apart.  This group is also growing in faith. 

I chose a long route to reach Tipling.  We boarded a bus in Kathmandu, and after creeping through urban traffic jams, got onto a highway for a seventy kilometer run to Trisuli Bazaar, low in the Trisuli River Valley.  We offered Mass while lunch was cooked, and after a good meal started a long climb.  Br. Irenius, our house Minister, caught a bus to Deurali, where he arranged accommodation for our large group of twenty-two.  He saved the day, for we walked the last hour in darkness!  Over the next two days Irenius’ pace grew steadily slower as his left knee became more and more painful.  I’d chosen a now disused route, so the trails were rough. 

On the fourth morning we reached the main trail.  I could then send the young men off to Tipling, while I helped Irenius down to the road head.  That involved a slow limp downhill, a night in a lodge, and then more downhill.  While Irenius continued home by bus, I turned back uphill.  After an interesting overnight stay with a Christian family, I finally dragged myself into our Tipling mission, again in the dark.  A bath with solar heated water revived me and I settled in with the Jesuits.  Norbert had moved the youngsters into families in the three villages.  I had a large tent all to myself.  We then had five days to enjoy liturgies, visits and games.  Many students had returned home for the holiday, and arranged a very competitive volleyball tournament. 

Our Tipling contact began in the mid-1980’s when Fr. Cap Miller spent months there in language studies and anthropological research.  Dr. Tom Fricke, Ph.D., (Tom E. Fricke, Himalayan Households: Tamang Demography and Domestic Processes. Columbia University Press, 1994) had introduced Cap to the village.  Cap kept up his contacts, especially with villagers who moved to Kathmandu to find work.  This community has grown and now has its own St. Ignatius of Loyola Parish on Kathmandu’s northern outskirts.  Jesuits have manned the mission since May 2011 (Fr. Jomon Jose, S.J. “The Tipling Mission,” Yearbook of the Society of Jesus, 2013, pp.129-133).  

Tek and I joined the opening session of a three day prayer meeting for various Christian congregations.  Some people walked a day or two to join the revival.  These churches date back to the 1980’s when there was concerted evangelical preaching up and down the valley.  Catholics are welcome to share faith with other congregations. 

Our last day at the Good Shepherd Mission ended with a mutton and rice meal, and a lot of tribal dancing – concentric line dances with our men from the plains using their steps, and the Tamangs other steps.  The music fitted both!  We were off in the early morning to hike all day to Gyang Sang, a staging point for mule trains.  Kind pre-novices returned to help me over the last half hour walking in darkness along rough rock slides. 

The morning quickly got us to the base of the hill at Khimtang Phedi where we piled into the back of a truck.  About forty people bounced over the rough road for four hours.  I was happy to leave the truck for a half hour’s walk down to Dhading Besi Bazaar.  A police check post had to be avoided for it is wisely against the law to carry passengers in open truck boxes.  A good meal and a chartered bus got us home to Kamal Niwas.       

So we continue through these months of discernment, asking for signs that these youngsters are suitable, or not, to be Jesuits in Nepal.  They have now seen life in our most challenging hill mission.  Hopefully in January we can give them a taste of mission life on Nepal’s south eastern plains.  Meanwhile we continue to improve Nepali and English skills and to enjoy good community life, praying that we all be open to the Spirit.