Joyce Tapper has an affair of the heart with Nepal. She loves many things about the country, including the way people greet each other in the street by touching their palms together and saying namaste.
"It means 'the god in me reflects the god in you,' " Tapper says. "In Katmandu, people 'namaste' left and right."
Spending the afternoon with Tapper, as I did recently, is almost as good as visiting Nepal, which the State Department discourages because of an increasingly violent guerrilla war waged by Maoist rebels. Tapper, a retiree in her 60s who lives in Van Nuys, has visited Nepal seven times since 1990 and is active in the America-Nepal Society of Southern California, which supports the people and culture.
Like many who keep returning to the tiny, troubled Himalayan nation, Tapper has made dear friends there, paid to put Nepali children through school, collected the country's arts and crafts, and studied its religions.
We met at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, where she guided me through "Visions of Enlightenment: Understanding the Art of Buddhism," a special exhibit with paintings (called thangkas), mandalas, prayer beads and statues from all over the Buddhist world, including Nepal. Though Tapper insists she is not an expert on Buddhist art, she brought the exhibit alive for me by relating the objects in it to her travels in Nepal.
Looking at a prayer wheel, which devotees use to send prayers to the deities without actually reciting the words, she recalled meeting the father of a Nepalese friend who was masterfully multi-tasking by watching a Hindi movie on a big-screen TV while turning his wheel. A small, pagoda-shaped sculpture known as a stupa reminded her of Boudhanath, a huge landmark Buddhist stupa in Katmandu, which, as one of the last things she sees when leaving Nepal by plane, brings tears to her eyes.
"I know about 50 people who went to Nepal and never left," Tapper told me later in the museum's Chinese courtyard.
She meant it figuratively; in a sense, she never left. On her first visit, in 1990, Tapper went trekking in the Khumbu region, a standard tourist adventure that was, for her, an overwhelming experience. She loved the mountains, of course, and the people -- their sense of humor, strong families and ability to be happy without American-style luxuries.
