If you
ever find yourself in Sukhumi and feel you are just too damn chipper
for your own good then I recommend a visit to monkey hill for a
healthy dose of melancholy. You will not be disappointed. The
conditions are abysmal and the primate population (monkeys/baboons)
looks happy in that 'I'm on the verge of swallowing my tail and
making shit castles with my feces' sort of way. Delightful.
So why
bother? After all, I was reasonably certain about what I would find.
This is not such an easy question to answer. Why did I attend the
largest animal sacrifice on the planet (See The
Wrath of Gadhimai)? Why roam the streets of Dhaka knowing I
would stare human suffering squarely in the eye (See Wandering)?
I would like to believe it is much more than morbid curiosity. There
would be no value in pausing at the side of the road to watch
emergency crews mop up a fatal collision on any road in any country.
That, at least in a cultural sense, would be mundane, objectively
pedestrian. There is nothing to learn other than gory tidbits and
tragic personal details. But with the animal sacrifice, with life on
the streets of Dhaka, and with this institute there is an opportunity
to peek deep inside the unsavory aspects of the human condition. It
is not pretty. There is no inspiration to be found, only darkness.
But that is life and it does no one any good to whitewash the
inconvenient details of our existence. See it all or you see nothing.
Face it all or live in a bubble.
