I was put in charge of supervising 8 monks and keeping tract of their whereabouts during the 9 days, taking them to restaurants for their meals and making sure they got to various places at various times. The problem was, we were staying at a hotel attached to one of the largest shopping malls in the world and the monks wanted to explore the entire 4 square mile, 4 floor complex on their own. Many of them did not know English and I felt it was pretty much guaranteed they would get hopelessly lost if they wandered as they wished. Therefore, I had to do a lot of monk-herding, which incidentally, is similar to cat herding. The only advantage I had was their maroon robes, which caused them to stand out from the typical teenage girl shopper crowd.
The second day I was there, I found out I was being appointed the Master of Ceremonies for the two-day teaching and that the crowd was expected to exceed 600 people. I had to write my script the next day (introducing and transitioning the various teachings and activities planned for each day), learn it, and then report to the venue at 7 a.m. the following morning to practice with my counterpart, the Chinese language emcee. We worked well together, despite the fact that she was 18 inches shorter than me. My opening line, “gooooood mooorning laaaadies and gentlemen” was a favorite among the monks and they would repeat it back to me in their best Zach impersonation throughout the trip.
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During the day, I kept reminding the audience to submit questions for the evening Q&A session and boy did they respond. As the emcee, I sorted out which questions to pose to Master Yap and Shyalpa Rinpoche among the 50+ submitted. Some were very personal, such as “what do you do when your husband cheats on you and beats you but you don't want to get a divorce because it might harm the children?” Some were very abstract, “what is the difference between the experience and the experiencer?” And some were controversial and timely, “What is your view on same-sex marriage?” I managed to keep the questions coming to both teachers for 2 straight hours while keeping the audience engaged.
The next day featured a long life empowerment, which is always a big draw. Fortunately, in terms of crowd management, the people of Kuala Lampur are generally not devout Buddhists and were therefore not as eager as, say, devotees in Nepal to get such a blessing. Sometimes in Kathmandu, when crowds are not carefully contained for long life empowerments, near-stampedes occur when the blessings-starved people make a mad rush to the temple to receive the empowerment at the conclusion of the ceremony. This time, everything went smoothly. As the day was coming to an end, I orchestrated a group of 15 local Malaysian volunteers to hand out the blessed food (fruit and cookies) to the 650 people in the crowd.
The next day, the monks went to the homes of two wealthy patrons to perform ceremonies for their continued success in business and life. At one of the homes, I got a chance to watch my favorite football team, the Minnesota Vikings, perform live on television. Unfortunately, it was their worst game of the year by far and they lost in disgraceful fashion.
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We then went into the heart of Kuala Lampur to the famous “Twin Towers”, which unlike the former Manhattan versions, are connected near the top with a walking bridge to enhance stability and functionality. They reigned as the highest in the world for a few years last decade.
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I was the group leader for the trip back to Nepal, so naturally continued my tradition of staying up the night before our early flight to be on the “top of my game.” Fortunately, though, the trip was without incident and a group of us even got a complimentary business class upgrade. We arrived in Nepal in the morning, and I spent the day sleeping and dreaming of my Southeast Asian adventure.
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