The truth was that the temple’s location was almost entirely accidental.  An earnest young woman had decided to forgo an acceptance to Oberlin College in order to enroll in the Peace Corp, where, she knew, the truth of humanity would become apparent.  Sent to the far reaches of rural Himachal Pradesh, she was doing her best to encourage fertility awareness and pregnancy spacing in the local Indian population when the Chinese got it into their heads to take over Tibet.  Fleeing over ice covered snow, an extended family of twenty seven arrived in her village three weeks after the Dalai Lama himself had fled to safety.   This family was even poorer than the local villagers, who offered them the Peace Corp buildings as a location to rest up and get their bearings.  A fifteen year old boy, skinny from worms and cold and dysentery on the trail, came up to her one afternoon. He pointed to her and said the only word he knew in English, “home”.  At first she thought he wanted to go home, who would have blamed him, she knew how hard it was to be far away from what you found familiar.  But his brow furrowed repeatedly, and he kept up the same set of gestures, pointing to her, then saying “home”.  It dawned on her that he wanted to know where her home was.  She shook her head and whispered, her eyes traced the dirt floor, “Kansas”.

It was all he needed. He’d find his way across three oceans and half the country to settle amongst the cornfields.  He had no marketable skills, but his vision was perfect, having grown up staring off into the distance at the towering snow-covered mountains. Soon he was driving for a living, first he delivered pizza, then got his CDL to drive trucks, then soon he owned a fleet of trucks.  Five years passed, then seven. He brought twenty five members of his family over slowly, then they sent for their extended families across the Tibetan diaspora in northern India, then suddenly Kansas became a place people had heard about, a place they wanted to go to, a place they would file endless paperwork to get to.  Ten years later, he knew it was time to call his father, the only one who had not wanted to leave for the magical land of Kansas, the only one who held out an undying hope that one day they would return to their homeland, to their village, to smell the incense burning in the temples and drink the butter tea.  He knew that if he was going to invite his father one more time, there needed to be a temple in town.  It might be the one thing that could lure him away.  The community, now numbering close to one hundred and fifty, had rented out a local grange for their important holidays.  To have their own space would mean something important and also something sad.  He bought the land, the lumbar, the paint, negotiated with shady antiquities dealers to ship a medium sized Buddha from storage in Dharamsala to the port of Virginia Beach where it was loaded onto a truck and arrived four days later in the custody of a coked out driver to be placed in the newly completed temple.  Now he could call his father and invite him with a clear conscience.  Now there was no way his father could make excuses about why he still slept apart from his wife of four decades.  Their community was complete.