Nepal’s ‘Mother Teresa’ has rescued over 18,000 girls from sex trafficking

Anuradha Koirala works to help exploited Nepali women and children sold into sex slavery.

Inspired by Mother Teresa, Anuradha Koirala always knew she was destined to serve people. So she became a teacher, educating young children in Kathmandu, Nepal. But after two decades, she decided to pursue an even greater calling: protecting women and girls from abuse, trafficking, and exploitation.

On her morning walks past the Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu in the early 1990s, Koirala would regularly encounter women begging on the street. She was drawn to them and began to engage the women in conversation — they all told her that they had been victims of some type of gender-based violence, she recalled in her 2015 TEDx Talk.

Koirala was far too familiar with their pain, having suffered extreme physical abuse at the hands of her ex-husband.

"Every day, there was battering. And then I had three miscarriages that I think [were] from the beating. It was very difficult because I didn't know in those days where to go and report [it], who to...talk to,” she told CNN in 2010.

Her decision to change careers was triggered by her traumatic personal experience.

Koirala began educating the women about gender-based violence and the empowerment of women. She offered to help them support themselves if they stopped begging on the streets.

At first, just eight women took her up on her offer, and she gave them 1,000 rupees each from her meager earnings to start small street shops. Through a portion of their profit — the two rupees that Koirala would collect from each of them daily — she was then able to provide security and economic opportunity to other women in need.

Soon after, she took her mission a step further, founding the nonprofit Maiti Nepal in 1993, through which she has served exploited women and children for the last 26 years. Throughout her career as a humanitarian and activist, she has specifically focused on tackling sex trafficking, a rampant industry that forces young girls from underprivileged communities across the India-Nepal border to be sold into sex slavery.

“These are poor regions with high illiteracy rates. If a relative or friend turns up offering someone a job, it is often the girls’ parents themselves who encourage them to go, without realizing what is really happening,”she told the Guardian. “It is the perfect breeding ground for traffickers.”

Maiti Nepal, which now caters to over 1,000 children, has grown to include three prevention homes through which at-risk girls are identified and educated on the dangers of trafficking. The organization also runs 11 transit homes that operate as immediate shelters for rescued girls, two hospices that treat women and children infected with HIV/AIDS, and a formal school.

Today, Koirala is 70 years old and, touted as Nepal’s own “Mother Teresa,” continues to fight against sex trafficking through her organization, which hosts a series of initiatives, including awareness campaigns, female empowerment programs, and skills training sessions for children and women.

Maiti Nepal, in collaboration with local law enforcement, regularly conducts rescue operations and patrols 26 points on the India-Nepal border in an effort to stop trafficking. The organization has saved over 18,000 girls since the founding of Maiti Nepal, Koirala said at the Global Peace Leadership Conference in 2012.

“When I see their pain — their mental pain as well as physical pain — it is so troubling that I cannot turn myself away. This gives me strength to fight and root this crime out,” she said in a phone interview with the Borgen Project.

Maiti Nepal also assists in the apprehension of trafficking criminals and has aided in the prosecution of over 700 traffickers.

While some survivors of sex trafficking are able to recover from their trauma and go on to live full lives, Koirala recognizes that not all are so lucky. Some survivors contract HIV, and require antiretroviral therapy to control the virus. The treatment can slow its progression and reduce the chances of transmission, so the organization also offers access to the treatment to affected women and children. Its two hospice centers provide those suffering from AIDS a safe place and comfortable place to live.

Koirala has been widely recognized for her work and has been awarded numerous local and international awards, including the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian award. She was also named the CNN Hero of the Year in 2010, for which she won $125,000 to further her work.

“Just imagine what would happen if your daughter was standing there, and if your daughter was there, what would you do? How would you fight? So you have to join hands. You have to take each child as your daughter,” she said in a video played during the 2010 CNN Heroes program.

“I want a society free of human trafficking,” she added, as tears welled in her eyes. “I hope I will make it happen one day.”

(Source: Global Citizen)

The hidden origins of mankind

There is a movie that came out decades ago. I saw it in a theater in Paris as part of a Robert Mitchum festival, which, as luck had it, was playing in a small theater across the street from my small hotel at the end of a small street during a small, lonely season of my life. Instead of going to museums, I passed the days in the dark watching Cape Fear, The Night of the Hunter, Out of the Past, and Pursued, an obscure movie directed by Raoul Walsh. Martin Scorsese once described it to me as the only Freudian Western. It deals with repressed memory, signs and symbols, dreams and fantasies of uncovering the hidden origins of your existence. It’s about a cowboy. He lives in New Mexico with his mother, whom he loves; with his sister, whom he loves in a different way; and with his brother, whom he hates, though he doesn’t understand why. At night, he is haunted by a strange dream—in it, he sees dancing boots and spurs, and there is always laughter. In the last act, we learn the meaning of the boots and the laughter, a secret that explains the cowboy’s fear and distrust. The dream is more than a dream. It’s a memory of the day the man who’d been posing as Mitchum’s uncle killed Mitchum’s father, then danced over the body in spurred boots laughing as the woman Mitchum would accept as his mother scooped up the terrified child to be raised as her own.

That movie has haunted me ever since. Its dancing spurs have become my dancing spurs, its story less a plot than a parable. It’s mankind reduced to symbols. It’s a secret encoded. It’s telling us that the truth about our past—as a species—has been hidden. It’s about the effort to keep it hidden, which constitutes a conspiracy. It’s a secret that remains just out of reach, though the existence of the secret is hinted at in all the ancient books. It’s in the Bible (Old Testament) and in its sequel (New Testament). It’s in Exodus when Moses climbs the trail to the peak of Sinai, the holy mountain, the Lord’s abode in the upside-down. God gives Moses the Ten Commandments, then something else, a secret teaching, whispered in the left ear. Moses shared it with his nephews, who either passed it on or were not listening. Some of it may have been recorded in Jubilees, a noncanonical book of the Bible. It’s in the Gospels, too, most clearly in Mark, when Jesus, explaining why much of his teaching is given in the form of parables (in ancient Israel, a parable was like a riddle) says he does it to obscure as much as to reveal:

You are permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but others are not. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given, and they will have an abundance of knowledge. But for those who are not listening, even what little understanding they have will be taken away from them. That is why I use these parables, for they look, but they don’t really see. They hear, but they don’t really listen or understand.

For Jews, this method—teaching via seemingly pointless stories—will be familiar. All our old-timers prefer anecdotes to instructions, questions to answers. Think of the Bob Dylan lyric: “I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain.” Or think of my pop who, when asked why he answered every question with another question, responded, “Why do you ask?”


So in Mark, you again have the existence of the secret but not the secret itself, which is reserved for a handful of disciples who will pass it on to a chosen few, protecting the masses from a truth that would only confuse them.

You find mention of the secret all through art and literature—once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. It’s in every book that’s really knocked me out. Start with Walker Percy, whose novels I came across by accident—of course, there are no accidents—freshman year in college, when I was hungry for the secret. The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming—these books gripped me and disappointed me. Gripped me because the protagonist was always on the verge of discovering the secret; disappointed me because he never did. I always closed the book hungry, yet not knowing why. This not knowing drives Percy’s protagonists toward suicide. Better not to know you don’t know than to know you don’t know and never will. It’s a realization his characters experience as a fall from Eden, a move from blissful ignorance to tortured knowledge. Once again, and just like that, the bleak nature of their predicament comes back to them.

This can happen anywhere, even on a golf course:

Another time, he sliced out-of-bounds, something he seldom did. As he searched for the ball deep in the woods, another odd thing happened to him. He heard something and the sound reminded him of an event that happened a long time ago. It was the most important event in his life, yet he had managed until that moment to forget it.

Shortly afterward, he became even more depressed. People seemed more farcical than ever. More than once he shook his head, and smiling ironically, said to himself: This is not for me.

Then it was that it occurred to him that he might shoot himself.
First, it was only a thought that popped into his head.
Next, it was an idea which he entertained ironically.
Finally, it was a course of action which he took seriously and decided to carry out.

The books satisfy but not fully: you want the answer Percy himself seeks but never finds. You are left with the same questions you had at the beginning: Is there a secret? Who keeps it and how? And, most importantly, what is it?

That’s where secret societies, and the hatred of secret societies, comes in. Because these groups, real or imagined—Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Illuminati, Jews, always Jews—are thought to be in possession of the secret, which they use to manipulate the multitudes. If not, then why the codes, the symbols, the strange languages and signs? Why the two-headed eagle, the pentagram, and the all seeing eye? What are these things if not a wink to the hidden elite, those who know but are not telling. And what about the secret books—the Book of Enoch and the Gospel of Judas, or the occult writings of Theosophist Madame Blavatsky? And what about the rituals? The goat loaded with sin and driven into the wilderness, the horned helmet worn only in the inner sanctum, the staff and the flowing robes?

*

A fixation on such questions can drive people mad; they stand before the world like a person standing before a 3-D poster, hunting for the pattern. The answer is so close they can almost touch it. It shimmers like a heat mirage up the highway, forever receding. If they knew this, maybe they’d know everything. A man in my town told me that he gets goose bumps whenever he walks past the synagogue, wondering what’s being said in there. I can assure you, I told him (it’s my synagogue), nothing is being said. Or, if we are talking, it’s not about you. We know nothing you don’t know, which is why I have trouble connecting with the services. I am searching for the same thing as you, I tell him. In fact, the core of Judaism, as far as I’m concerned, is not knowing. We had the secret, then lost it. That’s the worldview. That’s the humor. That’s the food. That’s the sad old men. That’s the klezmer. That’s why people pray to a wall in the desert. Because the wall used to support a temple, in which there was a room where the secret was spoken once a year, but the room and the building have been destroyed.

People join secret societies for the business contacts, the companionship, to pass time and, of course, for the answers. But are these answers, if they do exist, anything other than ludicrous? The Nation of Islam believes the white race was made in a lab by a black scientist named Yakub. Scientologists believe human history was warped by an intergalactic overlord named Xenu who, in an effort to deal with overpopulation, killed millions of beings, stashed their frozen souls—“thetans”—beside volcanoes on earth—Hey, I’m doing the best I can here!—which he then nuked, scattering alien souls that adhere to modern humans in the way of burrs picked up in the forest. You pay, they are removed, and you become “clear.”

Every religion has a creation story, and the story, whether told in school or church, is always basically the same. The lyrics change, but the melody is the melody. It is always order arising from chaos: a big bang, an explosion of life, the creation of man and the fall from the paradise of not knowing. In the Bible, Cain kills Abel and is cast out. In Darwin, Homo sapiens plunge the Neanderthals into nonexistence. In both stories, the bad brother survives. In the Bible, the snake tempts Eve in the Garden, she eats from the tree of knowledge, and brings suffering into the world. To Gnostics, God is really a demigod who means to imprison us, to keep us from learning the secret: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely eat; But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, though shall not eat of it; for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” In this reading, the spirit we have accepted as almighty is more like a prison warden, hiding the truth, which the snake, who enters the Garden as if entering our dream, tires to reveal. Having eaten from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve must be cast out before they eat from the tree of life, at which point they will become the equal of their jailer. “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:  Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”

And who is this “us,” anyway?

And what about the modern sects, dozens of them, who’ve picked up and reassembled the pieces of the puzzle into ever wilder patterns. Take, for example, members of the Raëlian Movement, who believe mankind was created by ancient aliens—a genetically engineered hybrid designed to mine the gold needed to save the alien atmosphere. It’s a story they say can be read in the tablets found in the ruins of ancient Sumer, the world’s first civilization, which show reptile men, spaceships, thrones, little people worshipping giant lizards—the snake that crept into the Garden? These were the old-world gods, the immortals of Mesopotamia and Egypt, Greece and Rome. People with the right kind of eyes can find these intergalactic overlords even in our canonical texts. There they are, above the wine-dark seas of Homer. There they are, in the first pages of Genesis, where they are called the Nephilim. “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.” It’s a secret known to the Masons and Illuminati, though it has been kept from the people, who, to this day, are ruled by the descendants of half alien/half human hybrids. (This is what conspiracy theorists like David Icke believe; it’s what people mean when they speak of the reptilians.) Some think we are not even free-range hybrids, but live in a vast zoo, where we are gawked at by schools of field-tripping aliens. Some think we are on a reality TV show—that we’re famous on a distant planet. Some think this is all a computer simulation, that this world is not the real world but a reflection or echo of the real world, that we are living in a mainframe, our lives the playthings of adolescent boys who really should be doing their homework.

So what does it all mean?

It means that no book, no teacher, no religion, no philosophy, no scientific discovery will ever satisfy. You are looking for something you will never find, which they used to call God.

(Source: The Paris Review)

German lessons

Learning a new language in old age is said to be good for the brain and the memory, so in my mid-seventies I took up German. I didn’t want to learn tourist or business German, I wanted to read poetry. I find it easier to remember poetry than prose, and could still recall odd snatches of Goethe that had come my way when doing an O-Level way back in the 1950s. Maybe I could add some Rilke or some Hölderlin to my memory bank? I’d long wanted to read them. About thirty years ago, I found myself at dinner sitting next to a cultural attaché from the Goethe Institut and talking to him about this very vague wish. I was just making polite conversation, but a day or two later in the post a handsome bilingual volume of Michael Hamburger’s  translations of Hölderlin arrived. It’s the Routledge and Kegan Paul edition, Poems and Fragments, dated 1966, bound in dark blue and maroon leather, with copper foil lettering.   I was touched and impressed by this thoughtfulness, and occasionally, in my then very busy life, I would open the volume, which I kept by my bed, and read a few lines. There was one fragment that enchanted me, four lines that I would read again and again and learned almost by heart:


Die Linien des Lebens sind verschieden,
Wie Wege sind, und wie der Berge Grenzen.
Was hier wir sind, kann dort ein Gott ergänzen
Mit Harmonien und ewigen Lohn und Frieden.

The lines of life are various; they diverge and cease
Like footpaths and the mountains’ utmost ends.
What here we are, elsewhere a God amends
With harmonies, eternal recompense and peace.

But I never got much further than that. More years passed, and eventually I reached an age where time seemed more spacious, not to say at times boring, and I felt in need of a pastime more stimulating than jigsaws and quick crosswords. (‘Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.’ John Berryman, Dream Song 14) So I thought, once more, of German. I had long ago and hopefully acquired a second hand copy of Teach Yourself German and an excellent  large indexed Collins dictionary, but I never got very far with them: my greatest success had been composing the sentence ‘Ich habe meine Brille verloren’ while on a lecture tour of the Rhineland for the British Council. (It was a very successful sentence: a sympathetic bespectacled caretaker wearing friendly brown overalls found my glasses tucked away under the lectern on the lecture room podium where I had left them, an hour earlier. He snatched them from under the nose of a professor in full flow.) I knew I wouldn’t stick to my task without external discipline, but I couldn’t find a suitable class to attend. There were conversation classes available, but I didn’t want to converse. I wanted to read. I had enjoyed my Oxford Continuing Education courses on Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, but there didn’t seem to be any language courses on the same level.

I asked friends for advice, and was put in touch with a PhD student in Oxford for private lessons. I told her I wanted to read the poems of Rilke, and she understood at once what I needed. The first poem we did (which she later told me was the poem that made her want to study German when she was still at school) was ‘The Panther’. Such happiness it gave me. She read it aloud to me, and then we went through it, word by word. I realise now how well chosen it was for a beginner.

Sein Blick ist vom Vorubergehn der Stabe
So mud geworden,das ser nichts mehr halt.

I learned it, almost, and I could hear it pacing in my head, like the panther in its cage.

We moved on, through various sonnets, and then she herself moved on, to another university further north, and handed me over to a PhD friend. On I went with my new mentor, through more and more ambitious Rilke, through passages from the Duino Elegies, then back to Hölderlin, then on   to the fin-de-siècle sadness of Stefan George and the despair of Georg Trakl.  We discovered Ingeborg Bachmann and Else Lasker Schuler. We explored the anthology Deutsche Lyrik, and I learned how to pronounce the word ‘Lyrik’ in German — not at all how I’d been saying it in my head.  We dipped into some very lively Heine, who had hitherto been just a name to me, dimly associated with Matthew Arnold  and romanticism. He wasn’t at all what I had expected. She introduced me to the poetry of Brecht, which was a revelation. I hadn’t known he was such a fine poet, though I knew his plays quite well. I loved the swagger of ‘Ich, Bertolt Brecht, bin aus den shwarzen Waldern…’ and the lyric melancholy of ‘An jenem Tag im blauen Mond September.’ It still fortifies me up to say to myself “Ich, Bertolt Brecht, bin aus den shwarzen Waldern.” I, Bertolt Brecht, from the black forests come…He is cheering me on.

A new world opened to me with these poems. It’s sad that so few English readers know this world, and that the learning of languages is in such steep decline. One of the reasons given is that GCSE language courses are too demanding, and neither schools nor pupils want to risk the lower grades that might result. I suppose that might well be true. Learning a language is hard. I remember as a small child reading my way through the worthily pedagogic volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, which had some sections with little illustrated stories in French, and being dismayed to find that every single word had to be learned, separately, and that the syntax didn’t always reflect the meaning. This is from the story of the kitten that fell down the chimney, as it appears in the Encyclopaedia:

First line: French.   C’est un petit chat, dis-je. Il a peur. Puis-je lui donner du lait?

Second line: English.  This is a little cat, say I. He has fear. May I to him give some milk?

As we say it in English: It is a kitten, I say. He is frightened. May I give him some milk?

I studied these banal little tales as though they contained some hidden mystery. I longed to read and speak French, but I could see it was going to be a long haul.

I had hoped, as did Jude in Jude the Obscure, that there might be some key to the code, some easy way of converting one language into another. As a young man Jude sends off for a grammar from Christminster and is deeply disappointed by the two thin soiled thirty year old volumes that arrive. He had thought that ‘a grammar of the required tongue  would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription or clue, to the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him, by merely applying it, to change at will all the words of his own speech into those of a foreign one’, but he learns that ‘every word in both Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the cost of years of plodding…This was Latin and Greek, then, was it this grand delusion!…he wished he had never seen a book, might never see another, that he had never been born.’

Jude perseveres, lonely and against the odds, and learns his Latin and his Greek, though to little avail. I had more help at school, and was very well instructed in French, reaching a level where I knew I would always be able to read Racine and Baudelaire, even if I couldn’t face tackling the long texts of Balzac and Zola in their own language.  I tried once to make my way through Balzac’s Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes, with its untranslatably magnificent title, but was defeated by the richness of the vocabulary.  I simply couldn’t read fast enough to get the hang of the story.

I knew my forays into German were never going to be successful without supervision and interaction, and I enjoyed my one-on-one tutorials. But I hadn’t the patience for the memorising, the repetition, the revision. I wasn’t a very perseverant student, but I enjoyed looking for words in the dictionary, and grappling with the structure of composite nouns, and struggling to make sense of the poems by myself, and writing out lists of vocabulary in the sumptuous dark green marbled notebook which my daughter had given me for my birthday. One Christmas I requested Hammer’s German  Grammar and Usage as a gift from my grandchildren, and spent many hours looking up phrases and trying to remember them. Some of them were startlingly but charmingly useless: I learned, for instance, the subtle difference between the plurals of Die Strausse  (ostriches) and Die Sträusse (bunches of flowers). Looking through my annotated Hammer now, I am struck by the sadness of the words and phrases that attracted my attention. Fremd meaning alien, An Einsamkeit sterben  meaning to die of loneliness, der Qual meaning pain or sorrow. Etwas ist faul im Staate Dänemark…Like Rilke, I liked the word irgendwo. I’m not quite sure why- it had a vagueness, a yearning about it. Somewhere, some place, anywhere. Yonder. Irgendwie is good, too. So wie der Staub, der irgendwie beginnt und nirgends ist,…Just like the dust which seems to come from nowhere….(Rilke, Neue Gedichte)

And there were less fearful words to which I was drawn, words that do not exist in English.  Geschwister I loved. It is a plural noun, meaning brothers and sisters. We use the word ‘siblings’ but it is not plural and collective, and it is not elegant. It smells of neologism and sociology. Geschwhister is poetic. Here is the ending of Rilke’s Sonnet to Orpheus, Number 14, ‘Siehe  die Blume’ (‘Behold the Flowers’):

Oder er bliebe vielleicht, und sie blühten und priesen
Ihn, den Bekehrten, der nun den Irhrigen gleicht
Allen den stillen Geschwistern im Winde der Wiesen…

That last line whispers of a meadow of flowers rustling in the wind together. The poet says the flowers are silent, ‘stillen’, but we hear them whisper in the line of the verse. Silently whispering. Edward Snow, perhaps Rilke’s most sympathetic translator, avoids the English word siblings which others have reasonably adopted, and gives us, more beautifully, ‘all the quiet brothers and sisters in the meadow’s wind.’

When Rilke wrote those lines, he must have thought that peace had come to him, might come to him. But it hadn’t, it didn’t.

I didn’t learn very easily, and there’s so much that I haven’t retained, but it was an adventure. Another friend, a musician who has been patiently studying Italian for years, sent me a book of Lieder, with bilingual texts, because, as he rightly assured me, they were linguistically and philosophically less challenging than Rilke. I enjoyed them, and encountered old favourites. ‘On wings of song I’ll bear thee’ had been on  one of the very few gramophone recordings that my grandparents possessed. But I had been right to think that Rilke was what I needed. Poetry is a companion in sorrow.

Sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter
Dir, wie der Winter der eben geht.
Denn unter Wintern ist einer so endlos Winter,
Dass, überwinternd, dein Herz überhaut übersteht.
Sei immer tot in Eurydikee…

…Be in advance of all parting, as if it were
Behind you like the winter, just now going by.
For among winters there’s one so endlessly winter
that, wintering, your heart will win through.
Be forever dead in Eurydice…(Edward Snow)

That was a poem that I read with my daughter in hospital in her penultimate illness, the one we thought she might survive.  I hadn’t known then that we would be needing it so soon, so sadly. Einer so endlos Winter…Nor had I then known that she had written a poem for me which she had asked her friends to save for me and send to me after her death. It is a villanelle, written some years ago, in which she imagines my death. I don’t know if she noted the resemblance when we read the Rilke together in hospital. As I hadn’t yet read her poem, I couldn’t have noted it. Her poem begins:

 You, who have not died, lend me your pre-imagined ghost
To prepare the art of losing…

I still have not died.  But she has. And everything I write and think returns to her.

While she was ill, and I no longer had the time or the heart to arrange German poetry lessons, I was introduced by my son to Duolingo, a basic language-learning app which confronted all the subjects that Rilke and Hölderlin neglected: super market trolleys, air tickets, mustard, shower gel, trousers (which Duolingo anglicized as pants), football teams, hospitals. The culture section concerns itself largely with sausages and beer and the phenomenon of the Oktoberfest. These basic lessons were a kind of company,   and they kept me occupied in hospital waiting rooms, and on the bus and on the tube. Duolingo’s English is not always wholly accurate, and as it invites suggestions and corrections, I sent a few in, as I knew my son had done. These were for the most part ignored, but I was gratified to receive, months after my submission, an acknowledgement that ‘That is not a fitting answer’ was an acceptable translation for ‘Das ist keine passende Antwort’.

Yes, Duolingo was my friend. I even liked the German voice that spoke to me when I was alone and nobody else was listening, the voice that asked me to transcribe its words.  At least somebody was speaking to me. I was lonely, and I knew an even greater loneliness, a terminal loneliness, was coming towards me. I knew I wouldn’t know how to stay alive through this so endlos  Winter.

German is a fine language for grief. By chance, the LRB sourced house sitter who looked after our house in Somerset during the first months of 2019 was a poet, and a translator from the German, with a strong affinity with melancholy. Will Stone calls himself my poet concierge. He sent me his excellent Pushkin Press translation of the poems of Georg Trakl, Surrender to Night. Trakl is a classic poète maudit. Will and I cannot find a contemporary German phrase for that, though the Germans had plenty of them. (He tells me verfemter dichter is sometimes used, but it doesn’t have the ring and knell of the French.) There is something calming about surrendering to the night. How strange are Trakl’s tones and images: vivid colours, asters and mignonettes, sunflowers and violets, blackbirds and wild fowl, wells and fountains and chestnut trees, gleaners and children playing on the green. Mourning and corruption, strange skies. ‘In the corn the stern scarecrows turn’. A pastoral world, a world already vanishing, the end of an era. A break between the old world and the new. You wouldn’t think Trakl would die in the First World War, and so unpleasantly. But so he chose to do.

I think my relationship with the German language and with German literature has now faltered to a standstill. I retain a few phrases. These fragments have I shored against my ruins.   I heard somebody say on the radio the other day that now that we have Brexit coming, we don’t need to learn any foreign languages. My German has not been utilitarian. It has been a language of mourning and of loss. And in that, there has been comfort.

(Source: The Paris Review)

We lived here

I’ve never owned a house or a refrigerator, never had to think about knobs for cabinets. The cabinets in our apartment don’t have knobs, and it’s not for the sake of sleekness or simplicity. It’s cheap, functional. Lately, every time I open the front door, I wonder how many strangers have closed it for the last time. I wonder what might have caused the painted-over dents on the wall in my bathroom. And I wonder if someone else stared at the gap between the front door and the foundation the way I do, saw the sunlight sneak through during the day, felt the cold scuttle in across the floor at night.

Every time my daughter and I have moved, I’ve rented a place sight unseen, because I can’t afford to make the trip to the new town to scout rentals, walk room to room, peek in closets. I’m easily swayed: I said yes to the house in Utah when the landlady on the phone said, “It’s on a corner,”; yes to the duplex in Oklahoma because a Craigslist photo showed a built-in bookshelf in the living room; and yes to this apartment complex because the website showed black appliances, and we’d never had black appliances before.

Last year, I decided to rent a house. I wanted to give my daughter, Indie, two things for her last year at home: one, a place to practice trombone without worrying about the neighbors, and two, her own bathroom, which she’s never had.

Not long before my mother died, she worried about my inability to make decisions. She told me it had been her fault, hers and my father’s, that they had made all my choices for me when I was growing up. I suppose that’s true.

When I went to the apartment office to put in our sixty-day notice, I asked the receptionist, “What happens if I change my mind?” She assured me that as long as I came back in before the lease was up in May, I could sign a new one.

Indie started zooming through Zillow and Trulia, lugging her laptop onto the couch every night, showing me gray-carpet living rooms and backyards, asking the budget, X-ing out ones that exceeded it. We drove down tree-lined streets for walk-throughs, but the rooms either reminded us (in a bad way) of a place we had lived before, or I’d call the number on the sign out front to hear it had been rented that morning. The weeks went by.

Indie and I contextualize our lives, the years, by cities: “We were in Canton, so you were nine, ten”; “That last year in Stillwater, so it would have been 2011”; or “You remember a mirror on the back of the bathroom door? Cedar City.” We can pack boxes and run tape across them and keep track of the Sharpie pen through the span of a few viewings of Tootsie, our moving movie. The one that plays while we pack and fill garbage bags, the kind of bags meant for leaves.

When we had only a week left in our lease, I went to tell the apartment manager we’d be staying. He pulled out a black binder, flipped to a spreadsheet, told me our apartment had been rented. The receptionist, it turns out, had been let go weeks before, and someone was scheduled to move in to our home, our rooms, our kitchen, our bathroom, in eleven days.

Indie and I have a tradition: on our last day living somewhere, after a truck has backed up and hauled away the U-Box, when the rooms are empty and the shower curtainless, we leave pennies. I give Indie a few, grab some for myself, and we disappear into our own spaces, leaving a penny on a windowsill or on the floor where my writing desk had been or on a shelf in her room. We only tell each other where we placed them, and why, after we’ve gone.

When the apartment manager offered us a two bed, two bath apartment across the parking lot for the same rent, I went out to the storage closet on the patio and started pulling out empty boxes, the same ones we’ve always used for all our moves. Cue Tootsie. Sharpie on the kitchen counter, packing tape, a box of black bags. We kept thinking how we had lived in this apartment longer than we had lived anywhere. With every pull of tape, every BOOKS written on a box, every time Indie dragged a bag from her room across the floor, I thought, This is the last time we’ll move together. The next move will be hers alone.

This complex has signals for vacant apartments: blinds closed and the dining room light on means this one needs maintenance or cleaning. Blinds open means the apartment’s ready. The doors, I discovered years ago, remain unlocked until move-in day. On the last night before the new tenants were scheduled to arrive in June, I hurried across the parking lot with a blue Bic pen and slowly opened the door to our old apartment, the light from the streetlamp crossing the dark floor in lines. Here was where I told Indie her grandfather was gone, here was where she played trombone, where I wrote essay after essay, where we returned after leaving the hospital the morning my mother passed, where Indie posed for a picture in a blue dress for prom, and where I shook the hand of her first date. I opened the front closet, stepped inside, and wrote on the inside wall: “We lived here. 2015-2019.”

Sometimes I use Google maps to look at the places we’ve lived, to see how they’ve changed. It’s strange to live across from our old apartment, to look through the blinds to see strangers moving through rooms we knew. This morning, when I stood outside to wave as Indie pulled away for school, I noticed the two garden hooks she had screwed in on either side of our balcony for hanging baskets. Empty.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Bad at maths in school? You might be a genius

If you were one of those unfortunate students who dreaded fractions and whose nightmares were filled with trigonometry, we have some good news for you. 

You might actually be a genius in disguise.

Having 'a natural talent' for maths is a myth. 
In fact, Elsbeth Stern, a professor at the Zurich Technical University, argues in a paper that maths is a fundamental human ability.

Stern wrote:

In the case of mathematics it is entirely plausible that nature has equipped human beings with intuitive number knowledge and sensitivity for magnitude.

Stern argues that bad maths grades usually stem from ineffective maths teaching - however, this assumption shifts when it comes to learning abilities such as dyscalculia.

Maths puzzles can be tough sometimes iStock/Imgorthand

She went on to lament that the education system may be failing those who would otherwise excel with numbers, adding:

A serious lack of conceptual understanding remains, as even the most intelligent students often cannot transfer the insights they should have gained to problems that differ from those dealt with in the classroom.

Hard work is more important than genetics 
Children who have had maths introduced to them from a younger age are bound to do better on initial school tests.

Meanwhile, kids who haven't benefited from being taught maths from a young age might assume that they just don't have the brain for maths, lose confidence and fall at the first hurdle.

Believing you are bad at maths can, therefore, become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But research backs the idea that hard work, not natural ability, is more important.

A study measuring maths achievement in 3,520 students over five years concluded:

It's not how smart students are but how motivated they are and how they study that determines their growth in math achievement.

So, you may actually be an undiscovered mathematical genius after all.

(Source: Independent)