Part I: January 28th-March 14th
I’m sitting in my friend’s apartment in Tokyo, staring at a blank computer screen, trying to figure out how to write a blog entry for my experience in Nepal. I’m distracted by novelties I once took for granted: brushing my teeth with tap water, the sound of a washing machine washing my clothes, having internet at home and logging into Gmail in 15 seconds, electricity all day, indoor heating, hot water coming out of the kitchen sink, a refrigerator keeping the milk cold...It wasn’t only the experience of living without these things that challenged me and expanded my mind, it was also the experience of returning to them, for they are visible to me now.
I grew to love Nepal for many reasons, but I am especially grateful to this incredible country for the wealth of little moments I lived and for all the little light bulbs that ignited in my mind--things that my wildest imagination could never have expected or thought up. More than anywhere else I’ve ever been or anything else I’ve ever done in the world, my experience in Nepal provided me with what I seek from travel. In doing so it reminded me why I travel. It warned me and rewarded me for being a traveler and a volunteer in a developing country. It helped me decide what to seek in travel and how I should travel. It reminded me why I will keep traveling.
My previous trips always temporarily satiated my desire to travel, and I wondered what I was doing as I boarded the plane in January to a strange new place and what I knew would be a challenging experience. I had just had an amazing four month trip and was feeling very content in California. My incredibly enjoyable month at home flew by and I wasn’t restless again yet. It was the first time I had embarked on a trip without eagerness and excitement. What consequences awaited me? How could I delve into something new and challenging if my travel-weariness hadn’t even worn off from my last trip? How would I last three months if I was already ready to go home. I worried about this during the two days it took to get to Nepal: I worried about it on the long flight to Japan. I worried about it as I looked longingly at the flight leaving for San Francisco from the Tokyo airport. I worried about it as I crawled into bed by myself that night in Bangkok. I especially worried about it during my first glimpses of Kathmandu (I can remember how it looked to me then--like absolute chaos, like sitting too close at the movies and not being able to visually process everything on the screen without darting my eyes from one end to the other--though the same scene looked entirely different as I rode along the exact same road two and a half months later as I returned to the airport on my last day in Nepal). But what this trip did was take me beyond an inner boundary I had never crossed before. And instead of reaching travel-satiation by the end of the trip as is usual for me, I left wanting more, with a new passion for travel ignited. I want to see and experience new and very different things. I want to challenge the way of life I grew up with--my views, thoughts, daily habits, ideas of what’s normal, expectations for human behavior. I don’t want my life in America to be my only lens. In my mind I continually return to a quote my volunteer program provided on some pre-departure literature: “Nepal is there to change you, not for you to change it.” With every new and different small experience Nepal changed me a little bit:
Not using toilet paper for five weeks (water only, over a squat toilet, often in the dark)
Eating dal bhat (rice, lentils, and, for example, curried vegetables, spicy goat meat, and fermented spinach with raw onions) at 9:30 in the morning (on March 6th I wrote in my journal: This morning I ate rice, lentils, tarkari, gundruk and onions, and massu at 9:30am and didn’t think anything of it. I’ve totally adjusted to eating dinner food in the morning. I had to come out of my Nepali world for it to dawn on my that this is strange.)
Showering once a week
Eating with my hands
Not checking my e-mail for two weeks
The surprise and delight in Nepalis' faces when we spoke to them in their language (“Nepali bolnuhuncha?!” You speak Nepali?!)
A rapid series of children’s curious, shy, and friendly greetings as we strolled through an outlying neighborhood
Riding on the roof of a bus for five hours
Bathing Nepali-style (soap and a bucket of cold water) with the help of a nine-year-old
Hand washing my clothes with the help of a 15-year-old (or rather, watching the 15-year-old hand wash my clothes)
Laughing as Russell, one of my fellow program participants, exclaimed, “I can’t believe I’m bargaining for biscuits!” while we tried to get a good price for a package of cookies at the tourist bus station
Washing my clothes on the roof of my host family’s house in Kathmandu, with one of the children who live in the house as a tenant strumming a little guitar on a stool next to me
Soaking in hot springs on the bank of a river under a full moon, walking the forest trail back at midnight by moonlight, turning around to see the snowy peaks of the Himalayas towering at the end of the canyon, glowing ultra-violet white
Crossing an avalanche
Walking a highway punctuated with burning tires and felled trees
Washing my face and brushing my teeth every morning at a public tap three feet from the highway to Tibet
The children in Class Two and their reaction to my storybook read aloud—wide eyes and audible sucked-in breaths at the turn of each page
Eating lunch in a little shop near my school with ginger, onions, potatoes, and cabbage stored in piles on burlap on the floor around the tables
Making and eating momos (Tibetan dumplings) on the kitchen floor by candlelight (during the daily power outage) with my host family
Sitting at the head of a semicircle of a few hundred crowding and gawking children during my welcome ceremony, listening to an eighth grade student and two teachers give speeches for my arrival (announcing that I come from California, the "most developed state in America," the audience hushing to a silence when I rose to speak and attempted to stammer out some eloquent first words to this community I would be living with for a month
Wearing Keens, Gap khakis, a white v-neck t-shirt, and a backpack and feeling self-conscious about what I looked like. No women dress remotely like that in rural Nepal
Looking at one of the drawings I asked students to make—a boy’s house with a small structure beside it labeled ‘toilet’
Being the center of attention and openly stared at wherever I went, all day everyday for two months (it took awhile but I actually got used to it and even stopped noticing)
Bathing, again Nepali-style, with a bucket of fire-heated water in the courtyard of a rural home, this time a 24-year-old helping me as I struggled to clean myself under the ankle length skirt that was cinched up under my arms; feeling clean, refreshed, and entirely content as I let my hair dry in the sun, and amused as I watched the process unfold with the two children of the house
Explaining multi-lane freeways and the concept of a carpool lane, seeing it through a Nepali lens, and realizing just how culturally specific something like that is
Teaching Class Five hangman—one boy so sincerely disappointed when the students guessed wrong, so utterly excited when they guessed correctly: “RIGHT!” or “YES!” he would exclaim with a big smile. I didn’t have the heart to interrupt this enthusiasm to explain that he had misunderstood the game. He had just put blank spaces for five random letters instead of an actual word.
Trying to answer questions such as: “Do you have load shedding in America?” (Load shedding is the eight hours of power outages every day in Nepal, because there’s not enough electricity.) “Do you wear kurta (traditional Nepali dress) in America?” “Do you have fuel scarcity in America?” “Are men and women equal in America?” “What’s the difference between education in Nepal and America?” “Is Los Angeles a state in America?” “Was Hitler Hindu?” (The swastika is a ubiquitous Hindu/Buddhist symbol in Nepal meaning good luck.)
Being led excitedly around the primary school on my first day by a crowd of some 40-odd children, as many as possible taking me by the hand
Sitting around a large table with other trekkers, snow falling outside and an open kerosene stove burning at our feet for heat
Carrying a pack up 4000 stone steps at six in the morning
Taking the best shower of my life in a dark concrete cubicle
Letting all my body hair grow out for a month
Sitting on the floor of a traditional kitchen (recognizable to me as a kitchen only by the activity that went on there) learning how to cook tarkari—the delicious curried vegetable dish that accompanies almost every meal—without one electronic device or appliance, with one knife, one bowl, a wood-burning fire on the ground, and lots of fresh vegetables and spices
Taking my school’s school bus to a beautiful nearby village, the children in their uniforms waiting at the edge of the dirt road in small lines of four or five, the bus attendant lifting the littlest ones up the large stairs to the aisle
Walking the rural hills through tiny villages and small settlements, my Nepali teacher-friend (Uma)’s father leading me on a tour of his water project, the curtain finally pulled on my privileged Western romanticism of Third World rural life
Sharing a room with Uma and her nephew one night, listening to her read an essay by a poor Southern American woman (“What is Poverty?” by Jo Goodwin Parker). I processed the author’s words through a new lens and an entirely different understanding of being poor as I noted with some surprise that I, and most people in Nepal, were currently living under many of the conditions described in the essay. I realized that in Nepal and in the United States the same poverty is experienced in dramatically divergent ways. I asked Uma what she thought about this American poverty—not being able to afford a car (there are very few private passenger vehicles on the roads in Nepal), electricity (Nepalis experience power outages for eight hours a day), a refrigerator (most wealthy Nepalis don’t even have them), diapers, Kleenex/paper towels/toilet paper (never used by Nepalis), childcare (doesn’t exist), hot water (rarely used, heated over a fire if it’s desired). “We might say, wealthy poor,” she responded hesitantly. I ruminated further on this issue ...
Orientation in Kathmandu (homestay, language and culture lessons, guided sightseeing)
January 28th-February 10th
From my journal:
February 4th, 2008
I’ve been in Nepal for one week and it’s been an utterly surreal experience. I am completely removed from almost everything that is culturally and socially normal to me. I am fascinated and stupefied. I try to take it all in but I can’t. I’m staying with an absolutely wonderful family in a wealthy (for Nepali standards) neighborhood on the north edge of Kathamndu. Everyday I walk a couple houses down the road to my program director(Rajesh)’s house where the other two Cultural Destination Nepal program participants, Helen and Russell, and I have language and culture lessons. The lessons coupled with the homestay experience have provided me with such an intimate experience of this country that I could never have gained from being a regular traveler here.
I know my numbers from one to thirty—my host sister helps me—and I can form some simple sentences.
Every night I eat heaping portions of delicious rice, lentils, curry vegetables, and sometimes chicken, fish, or goat, with my (right!) hand. What a great eating utensil. I love it. As children we are constantly told to use our fork. After 20 some-odd years of this cultural training, it felt strange at first to dig in with my hand, but I quickly adjusted to this practical and instinctual way of eating. Every morning I drink chiyaa—water and milk boiled with tea, sugar, black pepper, and sometimes other spices like cardamom.
At 8 o’clock this morning, my break visible in the air, I learned how make chapatti—pan-grilled flat bread. My host sister and brother (Aasta and Ankit) and I ate it with salty, spicy cooked spinach. My host mother (my aamaa) and her sister-in-law, who is visiting with her baby for a week, ate after us. In Nepal, women always cook the meals, and always eat after the children and the men.
I’m cold. Modern houses here are made out of concrete and are not heated. I sit in language lessons in two pairs of socks, long underwear, five layers on top including a fleece and my jacket, a hat, and mittens. I watch my breath, shiver, and some of my toes go numb. At night I crawl into my sleeping bag under the blankets, with almost as many clothes on as I wore during the day, and am finally warm. Sometimes I read or write with the light of headlamp. I could use the overhead light, but that would mean having to get out of my warm haven to turn it off later. Within a week the cold snap abated, and the rest of my time in Nepal was spent in quite comfortable temperatures, except in the Himalayas at 13,000 feet, and it was even getting quite hot by the end.
I’m dirty too. People here bathe once a week. I’m lucky to have warm water at my house to shower with. It’s not common. People in Nepal also don’t use toilet paper. They just wash with water. I’ll spare you the details, but will just say I emerge from the bathroom soaking wet. I’m lucky to have a “comfort toilet” and a spray hose. In the countryside where I’ll go to teach English I’m assured there will only be a squat toilet and a bucket.
Last night I was showing my aamaa’s sister-in-law some photos of home I brought. She flipped eagerly through the pile and paused when she came across a photo of Mike and me: a warm close-up of our smiling faces on a Malibu beach at sunset. “Oh, you look different,” she remarked. “Hmm, that was just taken a few weeks ago...” I mused. “I was just warm and clean,” I almost said. I’ll never forget another evening a few days later, when my aamaa and her sister-in-law were sitting on either side of me, firing curious questions about my culture and society, particularly women. They would follow up my answers with respective information on Nepal. It was a true cultural exchange and such a unique opportunity and experience. I realized that as a normal travel nearly all your day-to-day interactions with locals are based on money: you’re a customer at a restaurant or store, a guest at a hotel, etc. My experience with my homestay family was delightfully and refreshingly devoid of financial dealings, it was pure human exchange, and so positive for that.
February 5th, 2008
People have been remarkably nice considering I’m an American and an untouchable casteless foreign cow-eater.
Volunteer teaching placement at Golden Future Higher Secondary School (K-12) in Tamaghat (45 kilometers, and three hours by bus, east of Kathmandu)
February 10th-March 14th
February 12th, 2008
While I eat dinner the 30 children who live at the school are usually in the dining area. Out of respect, I am served first, which means there are 60 eyes on me as I attempt to look normal eating with my hands alone at the corner table. My first instinct in such situations is to keep my eyes averted and just try to ignore the unwanted attention. But today I realized that I am just as curious about them as they are about me, so I waved hello and they giggled. When they got their food I watched them, fascinated, expertly mixing their dal bhat on their plates with their right hand only, scooping bites quickly and gracefully into their mouths hardly touching their fingers to their lips.
If you never thought you could gain weight on rice, lentils, and vegetables, come to Nepal. The amount of food they feed me here rivals experiences in Italy, and for better or worse I have become quite good at downing large meals while not the least bit hungry. (“Please try to finish everything on your plate if possible,” Rajesh told us during our orientation.) I have gotten good at remaining persistent in saying pugyo (enough) multiple times throughout each meal as they come around to refill plates. The day before I left Tamaghat I visited a few families, which means I was basically eating all day. For my last night the family from the school that lived in the same building as me cooked me a special goodbye dinner, which meant five dishes instead of three, and blatantly ignoring my pleas of pugyo. I was so uncomfortably full at the end of the day, and it was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back. I woke up in the morning with quite an unhappy stomach and was so sick of overeating that I decided I did not want to eat that day. At least not until dinner. How could I possibly get around eating that day, my last day? Then I remembered that on certain occasions Hindus have independent holy days for various reasons, like when they or a loved one going to travel. On these individual days of worship they often fast, or partly fast, excluding things like meat, garlic, or sugar from their diet. There was my answer! “I’m fasting today,” I solemnly told my food-pushers. “Why?” They asked. Silence. “Um, it’s my last day?” (Is that a reason you’d fast? I wanted to ask). “Ah, you’re so sentimental,” Uma said. It worked. I got away with two cups of tea, mango juice, and a plate of fruit all the way until dinner, when I was greeted back in Kathmandu by one of my aamaa’s delicious meals. By then, I was even ready for seconds.
February 15th, 2008
The students stand when any adult enters the classroom and chorus, “Good morning miss!” They stay standing until you respond, “Good morning, sit down.” Then they respond, “Thank you miss!” If they enter the classroom while you’re teaching, like if they’re late or coming back from the bathroom, they stop at the door and ask, “May I come in?” The usually stand when they’re called on, and don’t sit down until you them to. (That made for some comically awkward situations when my forgetting to give the command left one student randomly standing up for a few minutes as class went on). I’ve decided this is what kids in the States need, and have resolved to teach my next class at home to spontaneously and simultaneously stand and greet any adult that enters the classroom.
The students never complain, about not being able to see the blackboard because of the horrible glare, about not being finished when it’s time to stop, about not being able to see the book you’re reading because they’re sitting in the back of the classroom (there are no front-of-the-room rugs for storytime), about sitting on one wooden bench all day. Between all the classes I gave crayons to (one little box for each bench of three to five kids), there was not one complaint or whine or argument or bicker. Probable complaints from my second graders last year rang in my head: “He’s put the box too close to him!” “I said I got the purple next!”
It’s really a testament to children’s innate desire to learn: to see students paying attention and doing their work diligently despite the teaching style: everything is memorized, the lessons are dry, irrelevant, meaningless, above their heads or dumbed down, students never get to draw or write their own stories or work in groups or use math manipulatives. They are given almost absolutely no opportunity for creativity. Their learning takes place in wagon wheel ruts. They don’t have science centers or reading corners. Yet they come to school everyday in clean uniforms ready to learn, and even the six-year-olds dutifully listen, copy, and memorize.
At Golden Future Higher Secondary School I met Uma Chaulagain, my guardian angel, a teacher who immediately adopted me. Uma is a twenty-four-year old mature well beyond her years, who raises her two young nephews, who already has a Master’s Degree in Western Literature, who, as a little girl, pulled back animals’ lips because she wondered why they didn’t smile. As I stood awkwardly in the courtyard on the day of my arrival, she grabbed my arm and took me to her class. From that day on I was attracted to her like a magnet: every time I entered the school I scanned the premises for her. If she was there, I was at her side in three seconds. As grateful as I am for my experience in Tamaghat, and as enjoyable and rewarding as it was overall, at times it was incredibly challenging for a variety of reasons. I might well have been a very unhappy person a lot of the time if it hadn’t been for Uma, and although I gained so much, the whole experience would have been worth it for the friendship alone that the two of us formed. One of the other teachers once told me that before I came Uma was very solitary, that she became a lot more social once I was there. I was so touched to hear this, and relieved that our relationship went two ways, that she wasn’t just bending over backwards to ensure I was doing alright, as Nepalis constantly do.
February 18-20th, 2008
Uma unknowingly came to my rescue more than once, but perhaps most significantly after my first week in Tamaghat. I was unhappy, hit with the realities of a volunteer situation. I had known I was coming to Nepal for an experience for myself, not really to change anything, but I had more delusions and glorifications of volunteer work than I had thought, and as they (gratefully and necessarily in hindsight) were dismantled, I became depressed. The people at Golden Future were doing A LOT more for me than I was for them. The problems there (with Nepali education) were way beyond my reach to change. And anyway, it is not my, or anyone else from my country’s, place to. Change in Nepal, as anywhere, needs to come from within, from the millions of intelligent and capable, incredibly mature and selfless Nepalis who love but are often disappointed in or ashamed of their incredible country. I hated the America-worship, and at the same time the stares and occasional (minor) antagonism from strangers, the whole dynamic of someone from a wealthy Western country coming in to volunteer in a poor Asian country. I felt that the nature of the volunteer situation was implying a sort of imposition, an intrusion, an assumption, that I found myself suddenly aware of, and having quite a knee-jerk reaction to. My every need was catered to, I was the center of attention. I didn’t know if it created any resentment, but I would have understood if it did. In general, I think the school community was just excited to have a foreign guest, but it gave me a new awareness. How must Nepalis feel about their country being so reliant on foreign aid and foreign development projects? On so many foreigners coming in to their country to tell them what to do? On being dependent on tourism, which brings so much ugliness and destruction? Furthermore, the Nepali people’s heightened awareness of the state of their underdevelopment and the state of our high development really struck me. I think I had the Nepal-is-so-underdeveloped-why-is-America-so-developed-and-what-is-it-like-there conversation ten times a day. But for Nepal, Golden Future is an excellent school, and the teachers are hardworking and well-meaning, educated and successful. Really, what was I, a young person with one year’s teaching experience and almost completely un-fluent linguistically, culturally, and socially, doing here? Did people want me here? I decided I was there just to learn about their culture and have a different, better sort of travel experience, and once that became clear in my mind, I wanted to explain it to them as well. But the volunteer situation just innately presumes otherwise. I did everything I could though to send my silent message. I mostly avoided explaining about American teaching ideas and techniques, about American classrooms and American students (urban Los Angeles schools are no longer poor in my mind-quite the contrary!). It had been suggested I hold “teacher trainings,” which I had initially been gung-ho about but obviously decided not to pursue. Yes, the teachers would probably have been open to or interested in my AMERICAN ideas on how to teach, but I didn’t want to fuel the strange volunteer/poor school dynamic, and, as I slowly discovered, the Nepalis are so incredibly insecure about their country and how it appears to foreigners from rich countries, that I wanted no part in further telling them what they were doing “wrong” and how, with AMERICAN advice, they could “fix” it. (They get very nervous around me when there’s any sort of social aberration like a homeless, drunk, or mentally ill person. I try to explain that there are more of these people in the city limits of San Francisco than in all of Nepal combined. I thank the lord that I never got a bacterial diarrhea sickness while I in Tamaghat, not for me but because of how bad they would feel. Just the news of a cold I came down with spread like wildfire and I heard more than one nervous explanation attributing it to the weather or something like that. “It’s okay, I get colds in America too,” I told them trying not to smile.) So, I focused on cultural exchange, and voiced my opinion about all the valuable and unique things Nepal does have, which Nepalis are often quite aware and proud of but often too modest to admit aloud.
So anyway, I was depressed, in the midst of working through these issues, when Uma asked if I would like to come with her to her family’s village. Because there were political strikes and protests in the southern part of the country which blocked the entry of fuel from India into Nepal, there were no buses and we walked three hours to her house. The walk took us through some of the most gorgeous countryside I’ve ever seen. But as we walked through the flowering mustard fields dotted with clusters of traditional mud homes and surrounded by steep terraced hills, I was kicking myself because I was finally given the sort of opportunity I’ve always dreamed of, but couldn’t enjoy it because I was depressed, unhappy, homesick. Slowly those feelings changed, however, as I settled in with Uma’s family. I was greeted Italian-style upon arrival, Uma’s mother grabbing my face with both hands, kissing me on the cheek, and calling me Daughter in Nepali. Uma’s father handed me three red flowers respectfully with both hands. I was given fresh honeycomb from the single hive they keep in their third-storey window. Four generations of extended family lives together in the concrete, brick, and mud house, a rough wooden ladder connecting the floors. Uma’s young nephews, who came from Tamaghat for the visit, ran around with the other village children by day, and slept with their grandparents at night. I shared a room, and a bed, with Uma. It felt a little like a sleepover from middle school, and after chatting eagerly in bed for awhile Uma said, “Let’s sleep, talks are endless.”
During the day the women cooked, cleaned, gathered and chopped firewood, took care of the buffalo. One morning Uma’s sister-in-law laid a fresh coat of mud on the floors of the second storey. Uma’s family’s house is the only one in the village with a phone, which was frequently ringing. Villagers were frequently either being tracked down to receive a phone call, or dropping in to make one. I learned to make tarkari, the curried vegetable dish, over a fire fueled by wood and dried corn cobs on the mud floor kitchen. Referring to the corn cobs Uma remarked, “In Nepal everything is used, nothing is wasted.” But embarrassment accompanied the pride in her voice, for Nepalis can’t afford otherwise. Eating locally grown produce, drinking fresh milk collected from the buffalo that morning, producing very little garbage, using very little gas and electricity, generating solar and hydro power, are not environmentally and politically correct choices for the Nepalis, they are necessity. “It’s compulsory here,” Uma said, when I explained to her there are movements in the States now to, basically return I suppose, to many of these practices initially necessitated by poverty and quickly left behind with the development of technology and the accrual of wealth. It made me think about industry and pollution and development in a different way. They may be ugly and polluting, but I owe to them all my conveniences, which I gained a new appreciation for on this trip. I don’t think I will be as quick anymore to look disdainfully on factories, power plants, electric lines, garbage trucks, landfills, and gas stations, sewer lines, for I reap the benefits of these unpleasant consequences of developed civilization every day, in the hot water that flows plentifully from my sinks and shower; in my refrigerator, washing machine, dryer, oven, TV, and stereo system; in the flushing of my toilet; in the weekly pick-up and whisking-away of my garbage to god-knows-where; in my wall heater and air conditioner; in my high speed internet connection and cable television. It’s easy for us to look down our noses at the plastic bags and other garbage littering the streets of developing countries, but the truth is we create much more waste, and are just better at hiding it. It’s easy for us to protest the construction of dams or polluting power plants in unspoiled Third World wilderness, but we have done the same and live comfortable lives because if it. I’m not excusing or defending the environmental destruction or human exploitation we’ve caused to live like we do. I certainly still know that things need to change and we have a lot to learn from they way people live, intentionally or not, in poorer societies. The importation of Western culture, like packaged cookies and Wonderbread into a previously healthy and nutritious traditional diet, and plastic and other litter into a society previously without it and still without the infrastructure to deal with it, is becoming increasingly damaging. It’s just that I’ve been able to view industry and development differently now and understand more of the complexities behind civilization’s greatest hypocrisies and conundrums.
The second day I stayed with Uma her father walked us around the hills, through some surrounding villages and settlements. He does social work and is now working on a project to bring fresh spring water to 900 villagers in the region. The modest concrete water tanks, pipes, and ditches replacing trees on the hillsides above the villages were beautiful, impressive, and hopeful to me, and I realize I might have looked upon them differently if I had never had this experience.
I know the secret behind the tidy potato patches and flowering mustard fields. Behind the oxen and plows on terraced hillsides. Behind the cute baby goats prancing around courtyards and corn hanging from eaves. Behind children chasing hoops with sticks and babies swaddled to mothers’ backs with pretty fabric. Behind orange mud houses and straw roofs. Behind shiny copper water jugs and colorful clothes in exotic patterns hanging to dry. Behind women washing their hair outside, behind the pretty jewelry and gold nose rings.
Behind these scenes so quaint and appealing to our eyes that get to look out safely and comfortably from behind modernism, technology, and wealth, is a lack of fuel, limited electricity, and dark nights. Hours of hard labor fetching and carrying water. Incredibly limited access to doctors and health care. Untreated ailments and preventable diseases. Miscarriages and infant mortality. Bare and cracking calloused feet and greasy hair. The stench of animals and sweat. Dirty faces and running noses. Cold water bathing once a week. Grandmothers peeing in pans at night because the toilet is down the ladder and outside. No money. Desiring and needing the development we have but the privilege to luxuriously disdain: paved roads, phone and electric wires, tractors, garbage trucks, buses, gas, factories.
The experience with Uma’s family was rewarding, unique, eye-opening, uplifting, just incredible. Despite everything, the Nepali people are remarkably happy and well adjusted. Community is amazingly strong and supportive. People have developed incredible skills. Life goes on and is accepted. I realize how much I waste at home, and how much waste I make, and now have tangible and lived motivation to do the things I always mean to do. Perhaps I’ll even start carrying a handkerchief instead of using Kleenex.
February 23rd, 2008
I’ve gotten quite good at telling lies-white lies. It’s part of the culture anyway. Rajesh straight out told us to do it. Politeness and social etiquette is valued over blind honesty. This cultural custom resonates with me, as I think lying is important in many situations, and I realize as I reflect that I already do it quite a bit. To me it’s about keeping peace and shaping your reality. Anyway, it’s become a bit of a necessity around here. I went to the “post office” with Uma to mail a couple postcards and some letters. The small building consisted of a couple rooms that were empty but somehow messy at the same time. No one was inside. Uma somehow summoned the “postal worker,” who came in and sat down at a desk. The whole scene was so unofficial I almost laughed aloud. I was standing there deciding what to do (there’s no way my mail would have made it to the States, or it would have taken years) when Uma broke the silence: “Do you have your letters?” I looked into my backpack and pretended to search. I looked disappointed and said I had forgot them, that I would come back another time. Of course she followed up the next day, when I said I’d go in the afternoon. In the late afternoon she asked me again and I said I couldn’t find them. I couldn’t say I already went, because she would find out I didn’t. In Tamaghat, everyone knows everything about everyone, especially about me.
Earlier today I was talking to the teachers about my upcoming weekend trip to Dhulikhel, a nearby town, and they asked where I was staying. When I told them they were concerned about the price of course. In these situations I have yet to find a way to express that the cost is no hardship for me, without exactly drilling in the fact that spending a small Nepali fortune on one night in a hotel ($25--an amount many Nepalis don’t make in a month) is like a drop in a bucket for me. So Om, my vice principal, said he would connect me his friend’s hotel instead that is much cheaper. (One thing I grew to love about Nepal is that it truly is a small world. One flipside to the lack of development is a wonderful dearth of bureaucracy, formality, and anonymity. So everywhere you go you meet someone who knows or is related to someone else you’ve met, or used to live where you live, or ran the shop you bought your clothes at. Everyone always seems to know someone who runs a hotel in the place you’re going to, or leads a tour of the activity you want to do. The social web is also just a large part of the highly supportive, community-based culture. It was wonderful to be part of.) As the entire purpose of going to Dhulikhel is to stay in the most expensive hotel we can find, I had to make up something on the spot. I blamed it on someone else—one of my favorite types of lies—saying that Helen (one of the other volunteers in Cultural Destination Nepal who was teaching relatively nearby and with whom I traveled to a hotel for a hot shower every weekend) had a friend who stayed at this hotel a couple years ago and had persuaded her to go. “So Helen really wants to stay there,” I said. “But we’ll go to Dhulikhel again and the next time we’d love to stay at your friend’s place” (which turned out happening).
February 25th, 2008
Most of the people here are incredibly wonderful to me. They really take care of me. I was told a million times that Helen came looking for me while I was away and did I get her note?
If I ever feel “boring” or lonely I have a million invitations to people’s homes. My mom sent a package to me when I was in Kathmandu and unfortunately it arrived a day after I left for Tamaghat. Tomorrow my principal goes to Kathmandu and told me I had a package and that he’d get it. I had found out about the package but had never mentioned it to him. He must have found out from Rajesh. There’s like a whole world revolving around me but behind my back. He’s going to go way out of his way to pick up the package at Rajesh’s house, which is on the outskirts of Kathmandu, and haul it back. He’ll be taking public transportation because he doesn’t have a car (few Nepalis do), which anywhere would make the favor more difficult, but this Nepali public transportation, which makes the favor saintly.
March 1st, 2008
Sometimes I step out of my room, walk to the road, and blasted with foreigness, wonder where I am and what I’m doing here.
At other times, I feel so at home as I wander into teachers' homes to hang out after school, and many moments create the now familiar rush of feeling during which I thank myself for bringing myself here.
March 5rd, 2008
Today I saw an article in the Kathmandu Post about a conference held in Moscow. Its purpose was to study and promote the preservation of languages, and was attended by experts from around the world, including Nepal. I hate to be a part of the rampant spreading of English and subsequent disappearance of native languages.
March 7th, 2008
I decided to walk home from Tinpiple today (the location of a small branch of Golden Future), as it’s only a few miles. But they didn’t understand this. The Nepali people don’t really understand walking like this for the purpose of pleasure or exercise. Nepalis often have no alternative but to walk. They must walk long distances in the hot dust or humid monsoons because the bus doesn’t travel to their destination, or it’s too full, or it doesn’t come, or it’s not running because of fuel shortages. If all the planets are aligned they, understandably, make use of development and technology and take the public transportation. They would not choose to reject it. For me especially they choose the bus. They would not be taking care of me if they sent me off on foot, to endure physical hardship or challenge, and to brave the dangers of the road. To me though, I would much rather walk through the beautiful Nepali countryside, taking pictures, ogling the loads women carry, meeting friendly people, looking at attractive traditional homes on potato and mustard fields as I slowly pass by. This experience is highly more enjoyable than being packed like a sardine in a smelly bus taking the narrow turns entirely too fast. I knew they would find out I walked, I knew they would ask, incredulously, why. But I did it anyway. I passed a man sitting in the road wearing only shorts talking to himself. A grandmother and teenaged daughter, going my direction, were passing him at the same time. I smiled sympathetically—I’ve come to understand, I believe, that Nepalis have a heightened awareness of the faults of their country, which turns into nervous self-awareness in front of foreigners. I wanted to assure her that you see this sort of thing at home all the time, but as my current most complex Nepali language skill is to say “I’m learning to speak Nepali,” I couldn’t. My smile said enough though and the grandmother beckoned me over. “I’m learning to speak Nepali,” I declared. Ma Nepali sikhiraheki chhu. Her face lit up with a wrinkly, toothless smile and she put her hands together across her chest in ‘Namaste’ to me. The girl spoke a little English so in simple Nepali and English we chatted. The grandmother loved this and grabbed both our arms, pulled us together, and said something about saathi—friends. The girl giggled and pulled away shyly. I laughed, conscious that I could never have imagined myself in this situation if I had tried—a friendly old woman pulling me excitedly and forcefully towards her granddaughter at the side of a road in rural Nepal. I was of course invited to their house. I refused, politely I hope. I’m learning how to set limits. If I never said no to these people I would weigh 300 pounds from all the food they want to feed me, drink 30 cups of tea a day, and spend the night at a different house everyday. They split off to their house and I continued walking. I snapped photos secretly from my hip. I saw an adorable child in traditional clothes standing on a small hill above me in front of her house. She stared at me the way so many people do everyday—in a way so easily interpreted by the uneasy, defensive traveler as a disapproving frown. Time and time again now I’ve summoned all my courage (as a shy, keep-to-myself person) and broken through that conceived barrier. I waved and smiled and was, as I am time and time again, amply rewarded. Her face broke into an excited grin and she waved back awkwardly, imitating the foreign gesture. I was invited again for tea by another teenage girl whose path paralleled mine for a couple minutes. Towards the end of my walk I ran into Uma, who asked if I just got off the bus from Tinpiple. Her face broke into alarm when I told her I walked. “Why?!” She asked. I was forced to explain myself again to the vice principal and principal after they passed me on their motorcycle, having seen me off from the same place an hour before under the impression I was getting on the bus. I was totally busted.
