What's in a Name?

Friday night Rebecca and I went to a dinner where we met Apa Sherpa, the Nepalese climber who has ascended to the summit of Everest 21 times--a record he shares with Phurba Tashi Sherpa.  It is an extraordinary achievement by a remarkable athlete.

We had the pleasure of sitting next to Apa's son at dinner.  Penba Sherpa grew up in a small village in Nepal.  Over dinner, he explained to us the naming conventions of his native people.

Sherpa is the surname used by nearly all villagers in the Everest region of eastern Nepal.  It was given to them by census takers, who didn't understand that some of the local population had only one name. So they gave them the surname Sherpa, which they kept, even though last names were not part of their culture.

First names for the Sherpas feature only slightly more variety, as each person is named for the day of the week on which he or she was born.  Sherpas rarely use middle names, although some do have prefixes, or virtue names.

And perhaps that is related to the humility shown by both Apa Sherpa and Penba Sherpa.  There is less ego involved in their identity.  The individual is, by its very name, less distinguished than the community.  I like that.

The Blue Zones

Dan Buettner, 2008.

Ridiculously short one-sentence description of the book: A study of geographic pockets around the world with a high incidence of centenarians, and what we can learn from them.

I loved this book, largely because it doesn't try to be more definitive than it deserves.  Rather--here are the areas where people live to be 100+, and here are a few observations about them.  And while there are a number of recurring themes, here are a few snippets I found interesting:

• Nicoya, Costa Rica: "We notice that the most highly functioning people over 90 in Nicoya have a few common traits. One of them is that they feel a strong sense of service to others or care for their family. We see that as soon a they lose this, the switch goes off. They die very quickly if they don't feel needed."
• Sardinia: "People here possessed a reverence for family... All the centenarians I met told me la famiglia was the most important thing in their lives--their purpose in life."
• Loma Linda, California, land of the Seventh-Day Adventists: "About half of the Adventists were vegetarians, or rarely ate meat ... We learned that non-vegetarian Adventists had about twice the risk of heart disease as vegetarian Adventists." Also, the non-vegetarians had a 65% greater incidence of colon cancer.  And Adventists who consumed nuts 5-6 times a week had half the risk of heart disease as those who didn't.
• Okinawa, Japan.  The old people in Okinawa, before they eat, say hara hachi bu, which is a Confucian-inspired adage which means "Eat until you are 80 percent full."