time with family.

I was sitting there, eating goat curry and raita and paneer with hot chilies and perfect, perfect jasmine rice, and I thought to myself, "Damn, I will miss this."

It was my last evening to hang out with the Upreti family before I flit off to the California mountains. I painstakingly wrote out my mailing address in clear lettering, and urged them to write. And then all I could do was try to savor the next few hours.

I feel the same way many Peace Corps volunteers do, in that I've fallen in love with these people. Though now I have known them for almost six months, I still sometimes stare at them, transfixed by their coriander skin and glossy black hair and how small they all are. They are best described by a phrase I read in an article about people in the third world, "small but healthy persons." Americans are huge by comparison to most of the world. Part of me wonders if Tara's baby will outgrow them all, raised on American abundance, albeit in Nepali-food form.

They ask me to go shopping with them, which I love. Six months ago, I was the one driving them around and explaining prices and quasi-translating their heavily-accented English for store employees. Now Padma has a car and all the shopping savvy he needs, and I am just along for the ride. We go to the thrift store, the first place they look for anything (which really, makes the most sense for anyone), and Padma picks out three-dollar shoes for work. At Fred Meyer, they peruse fishing poles for their son, Bikash, but put off buying one for another day. As always after shopping with them, I think to myself, "I spend too much money on crap I don't need."

In the late evening, sitting in the living room with Padma, drinking tea with about three tablespoons of sugar dissolved in it, we fall into conversation about religion, my all-time favorite topic with him. His mind is so quick and deep, but his English is still relatively shallow, and so he has to express large thoughts in small and simple words. "If heart is good, it is good," he says, "if outside is different than heart, no good." The matter of sincerity is one he returns to whenever we talk about faith. And this focus on sincerity comes from a man who sees no problem with being a Hindu and worshipping at a Christian church. I'm always trying to ask questions about specifically "Hindu" theology, but Padma has a way of sidestepping those questions and jumping straight to the bigger picture. The sincerity he talks about has little to do with adhering to a specific theology at a specific church. It's a sincerity that starts between man and God, and then person to person, and it has more to do with basic decency and empathy than any specific theology. It's more about relationships, about maintaining ties with family and being open to new friends, about feeding whoever finds their way into your home and sticking close to the person you marry. I noticed early on that both Bikash and Shrijana would refer to friends/cousins/aunts/uncles in Nepal as "my sister" and "my brother," calming ignoring the Western fascination with precise labels like "third-cousin" or anything "in-law". I don't know if it's Hindu theolofy or Nepali/Bhutanese culture or just life in a refugee camp with bamboo huts that connect wall-to-wall, but they see basically every person in their life as family. In my Americanness, it took me a while to realize that included me, as well. But I love it. From now on, I have two sets of family members to visit whenever I am in Idaho. I am looking forward already to Christmas and being able to introduce them to more of the people that they constantly ask me questions about, like my sister and my boyfriend.

I never foresaw being adopted into a family from the other side of the globe when I moved back to small-town Idaho last fall, and now I honestly can't imagine not knowing them, not being a part of their lives. Cheesy? Perhaps. But true.