I woke up this morning and thought my building was on fire, as I have on many other occasions since I arrived. My room was smoky, smelling not like a campfire but like singed hair and chemicals, and I could hear the loud crackles of a fire gobbling something up.

Of course, it’s just garbage. Crushed water bottles, notebook papers, rotten food, potato chip bags, banana peels, and who knows what else. As in many places, this is a common practice to deal with waste. Convenient and fun!

There are black splotches of soot and char up and down the roads and footpaths around the monastery, many of them in the dirt below my second-story room.

In the evenings, you can see plumes of smoke and sometimes the orange glow of the fire itself all throughout the valley. Some are so big that I’m certain it’s the beginning of a forest fire. But they inevitably die down after an hour or so.

When I wake up in a fire panic, however, it’s not the garbage fires I’m worried about. Because fire is so common and so permissible here, there is no such lesson as “Don’t play with fire!” Kids are always lighting bags and sticks and grass on fire, throwing them in the air and at each other, whipping them around, and then stomping on them. It feels like it’s only a matter of time before I turn around to find that my backpack has been lit on fire while still on my back and a bunch of kids are laughing hysterically behind a corner.