decisionmaking

I have a few things on my mind tonight. Many of them are nice things, but some of them are not so nice. One nice thing is that a dear friend from ages ago, with whom I'd fallen out of touch, wrote today! She is in a far-flung part of the world but she was thoughtful enough to take the time to write! I almost cried! But instead I peed and didn't answer her email for 12 hours.

She is in Nepal, which sort of ties into the not so nice things I am thinking about. Yesterday, for the first time since I've started clerking, I made a decision I was really not at all certain about. The law did not clearly dictate an outcome, so the parties bickered. I came to a decision. I won't say too much more here, except to say that when the law does not compel a result - which is what the law, being in theory perfectly rational, ought to do - then irrational factors start to creep in, and for no particular reason I was thinking about RR, a friend who banished me in 2006 for failing to take her post-college mental health issues as seriously as I should have, as part of my decisionmaking process for this case. 

I uploaded the files right before leaving for my bike ride home. And on my bike ride home I could only see evidence everywhere that I had made a decision I would regret. I felt so awful about it that this morning I called up the deputy clerk and had her pull the files off the electronic case filing queue so that I could think about it some more. I am extremely bad at decisionmaking, and this was a decision that could really affect someone else's life! 

I still don't know how the case will turn out. All I know is that yesterday I felt that horrible feeling of regret that I have only felt with any real conviction a few horrible times in my life. 

To bring this back: one of those times was in Nepal. I still think about this person, and I thought about him yesterday, so it's funny or prescient or God's will that a dear old friend living in Nepal would choose today to get in touch with me. His name was Pedro Jorge, and he was from Portugal, but he was in prison in Nepal. I saw his name and the address of his prison posted at a Buddhist monastery in Bodinath, and an invitation to visit him. I had nothing else to do and I was at the end of my stay in Nepal, so I went. I walked away from the tourist hovel I had been staying in for seven weeks ("Mom's Guest House," $1.14 per night) to the real-people part of Kathmandu, to a little prison with lax security.  In the main office, there was a three-column chart. The first column stated the prisoner's name, the second his country of origin, and the third his crime.  It was MURDER, MURDER, THEFT, ASSAULT. The row next to Pedro's name said simply, "VISA."  (This was all in English for some reason.) 

I told a guard that I wanted to visit Pedro, and he led me to the open-air visitors center, where it was sunny, warm, and dry. Pedro came out and we sat on benches, him on the bench proper, me raised up on the back of the bench. He was probably in his mid-thirties, thin, hard tanned, smoking cigarettes. He wore a dirty old loose t-shirt and dirty half-length pants - they weren't shorts, they were just ruined pants.  We chatted, and he told me his story: he had left Portugal to seek spiritual enlightenment in Nepal, and he found this monastery in Bodinath that really called to him.  He stayed on in the monastery for a spell of years, allowing his visa to expire. He would have had to pay some money to renew the visa, and he didn't have it. So he stayed on without documents and without money. The details are unclear, but somehow the police discovered that he was staying without documents, and that he owed the Nepalese government $1200 dollars. If he could pay the money, he would be freed. He was in debtor's prison.

I asked him why nobody in Portugal had paid his fine, thinking maybe that he didn't have a way to get in touch with his Portuguese family and that I might be able to help him in that respect. Pedro shrugged and said simply that he had nobody in Portugal. 

I stayed maybe an hour, and we chatted about what it was like in the prison. I didn't talk much, but he seemed to enjoy, or at least not to mind, chatting with me. He told me the conditions were poor. He slept on a mat on the floor in a room with twelve other prisoners. It was cramped and dirty and it could be violent. He had been in prison for eighteen months and had another year to go. One thing they did have was badminton. He asked me for some money so that he could buy a new shuttlecock. I had 80 rupees in my wallet, but I gave him only a 20 rupee bill because I didn't want to empty my wallet for him. It was really a selfish thought - I could have walked back to the guesthouse for free instead of taking a rickshaw, and in my room I had plenty of cash, so it wasn't as if I needed those other 60 rupees in my pocket. I just didn't want to go through the hassle of finding a vendor willing to change my 500 rupee notes. The exchange rate in 2001 was 80 rupees per dollar, so I gave the man $.25. 

He was nonetheless happy and grateful for it. He said it would pay for a few shuttlecocks. I told him I would return with some badminton rackets for him. We shook hands, and I left.

I had a week left in Nepal, but it was a busy week for me, so I never got around to finding a badminton racket and delivering it to Pedro. It bothered me so much that I hadn't given him the remaining $.75 in my pocket, which would have meant nothing to me but possibly could have bought Pedro some needed amenities in prison. My guilt fed on itself, and grew and grew such that at the end of the week I was considering walking to the Portuguese consulate and paying Pedro's fine myself. It just happened that I had exactly $1200 in my bank account, which I had dutifully saved by spending only $6 each day of my $35/day travel writing salary. So by the time my Royal Nepal Air flight lifted off the ground and I said to the country shrinking in my window, Fuck you lonesome, I am never coming back here, I was burdened by not only the guilt of the $.75 I didn't give to Pedro out of selfishness but also by the much more irrational guilt of the $1200 I didn't give to Pedro to bail him out of jail. 

In the end, I did nothing. I didn't go back and give him 60 more rupees, or badminton rackets, or $1200. You may think I am a rube for feeling guilty about any of this - maybe the story was all a lie, maybe he was not a good person, maybe he deserved it for coming from a country of privilege and not acting more responsibly, and what do you really owe a stranger, anyway? - but even eight years later I still think those are small-minded thoughts, and that I should have paid his fine and given him a year of his life in freedom. I spent $709 this fall on a fucking bed, for God's sake. 

We all make mistakes. The other ones I've really regretted all have to do with me hurting my partners in spectacularly hurtful ways. The decision I uploaded and then canceled today was maybe a mistake, or maybe not. I still don't know. But at least I will take some more goddamn time to think about it so that I won't be wondering eight years later whether the person I see on the street is the person who my decisions as a 28 year-old ruined.

You are the first person I have told this story to.