Monsoon, Mangoes, Telephone
Early monsoon rains have washed the sky clear of a thousand dung and wood fires affording us a first and rare view of the middle hills—bluish in color against the backdrop of darker gray skies—shrouded in wispy puffs of fog and mist. It is easy to forgot here in the Terai that the roof of the world lies a mere 150 kilometers due north. I doubt if we will ever have a view of the Himalayas from this location, yet we like to imagine that the cooler breezes and welcome overcast skies are a gift from those snowy peaks…
The rains come in sheets—an hour here, an hour there—mostly in the early morning and late afternoon hours. Things are growing at an incredible clip—the rows of corn visible outside our kitchen window, the new grass green color of the rice paddies, the increasingly graying stubble on my face. At night, the silent and boltless lightning in the distance illuminates yet another power outage night. You would think we are in a war zone (and we are) but those are not rockets red glare.
Telephone service may indeed be coming to Bardibas, dear readers. I have been hearing rumors of this for weeks. Upon returning from work the other day, a small crowd of young and old alike had gathered next to the path leading to our house staring up in admiration at a concrete telephone pole, sans the wires, that had been erected earlier in the day. “Amenities are coming to Bardibas,” I shouted as I passed the growing crowd of onlookers and admirers. A few smiles. They quickly grew tired of the unadorned concrete pillar and fixed their gaze on me as I continued down the path.
I have learned not to linger too long in public no matter what I am doing. People come from as far away as one hundred meters to gawk, to listen, to peek inside my wallet. A growing crowd becomes a nightmare of good intentions. I struggle to string together a question and, inevitably, someone shouts out of the crowd, “10 rupees! 15 rupees!”
“Yes, yes, I understand the price, but what I really want to know is….”
“No, 10 rupees, 15 rupees!”
I smile and say,” thanks but I don’t need your help.”
“Your introduction,” is their reply…
“Just let me finish what I am doing.”
“Which country?”
And then there is the mother and daughter vendor team from whom we buy our fruit. Sweet ladies but unrelenting. The daughter dressed in a bright orange sari with red blouse discretely cups a bidi cigarette in her hand, which she drags on during the lull of answering customer queries, and the mother with streaks of gray running through her hair who has foregone the blouse all together due to the heat and has draped her scarf across her chest. I ask about the price of mangoes.
“These are more delicious,” the daughter says.
“But I prefer the yellow ones to the green ones,” I retort.
“No,” she says. “These are better than those.”
“But I had those yesterday, and I like these more,” I say.
“No,” she says as she begins to place the green ones in a bag.
“But I don’t want those, I want these,” I plead.
“Those aren’t as good.”
This sort of back and forth goes on for a while, a crowd gathers to observe and shout out support: “NO, those aren’t good; get the other ones…”
“You like the green ones, we like the yellow ones,” I say.
“No,” several onlookers shout, “green one delicious, yellow one not delicious…”
Fifteen minutes later, we have our yellow mangoes.
And speaking of food, I am eating fairly well these days yet still feel constantly hungry. Migyoung jokes that I have worms although my belly feels fine. Still a possibility… I have a strange metallic taste in my mouth, which I surmise is from the mineral content of the water. We are (still) challenged to be able to collect enough “clean” water for drinking—after disinfecting and running it through a filter—and are on alert this time of year for traces of cyclospora or blue-green algae in the water common during the monsoon period. Muddy water still comes out of the so-called government tap from time to time—unannounced and no real pattern—so we are vigilant about that as well. We seem to spend a good many hours each day dealing with water. For Nepalis, water issues normally involve access rather than cleanliness. Although it is certainly not healthy over the long-term (the papers are still full of stories about outbreaks of diarrhea or cholera), their immunity is such that they can drink water from almost any tap and source. Most shrug their shoulders when I mention our dirty water problem. The look on their faces suggests an expression of, welcome to our world.
Work
I have been reluctant to mention too much about work, as things have been very slow to develop. I am still learning my way around the system here, meeting people from other NGOs, government officials and others in this community and throughout the district. I am resisting the pressure from my colleagues to be a writer of proposals only, and constantly remind my workmates of the virtues of putting systems into place, thinking more holistically, and becoming more cause rather than donor-driven. Change comes slowly and I find myself working within the confines of a work culture that places very little value on long-term strategic planning, horizontal lines of decision-making and leadership, and focus on one matter at a time.
I have created a form and systems by which my organization can better lead and document staff meetings, and reporting forms for field staff by which they might better monitor progress, report on problems and issues and suggest reform measures. I have created potential funder prospect forms as a means of first considering the appropriateness of approaching INGOs, and have introduced the idea of logframes as a means of systematically planning out new programmatic and proposal ideas. I emphasize open lines of communication, the need for more focus and encouraging more equity and shared responsibility and vision. I have planned out missioning and visioning workshops for the staff (if I can ever get them to schedule this…), and I am in the process of putting together a much more thorough 1-2 year strategic planning session. It is a fine line between forcing the issue and emphatically suggesting that we begin to implement some of these ideas.
But mostly these days I am asked to help out with developing program ideas and putting together proposals. Help out might be too nice a way of putting it—I am normally just asked to do these things with little or not input from my colleagues other than some very informal brainstorming discussions. I have basically refused to write proposals or develop programs on my own, however, since my role is supposed to be one of support for these tasks, and nothing is learned or shared without working on these things together. They are still quite under the impression—as our most of the people in town—that the white foreigner will pull endless streams of funding out of a hat. Although I have not been approached directly, many people in town have contacted my boss about funding for a pet project that will benefit their area.
come down off the cross, we can use the wood
I am up at 5:00 am most mornings, not because I do not wish to sleep any longer, but normally due to rustlings outside our window, sleep which somehow evades me, and, most recently, some gnawing and unidentified insect bites. Although we are quite secure in our mosquito net-it is a haven for us during our nighttime reading hours-there always seems to be an added element of nature there waiting to take its place. It’s a bit like camping: inside our netting we have our books and other reading material, flashlight, tiger balm and other assorted ointments and wristwatch.
The early morning hours, along with the night, are the cool ones-an internal debate I have going whether to utilize them for waking or resting activities. I normally go down to check out the water situation, suck on the garden hose connecting the bottom water tank to the pump to the upper water tank, crank up the pump (and hope that it works) and fill up the rooftop tank. Power supplies are a bit more dependable and of a higher voltage in the morning, and our pump barely has the oomph sufficient to pump water up to the roof. Now, we have only muddy water at our disposal; something about leakage of river water into the system although it is hard to get a knowledgeable answer as to the source of the problem. Some have commented that this is a problem during the monsoon (just beginning; oh goody) while others say it is a temporary situation… But normally, the answer is a simple if not obvious one, and I quote: here is a water problem; here is an electricity problem; here is a wood problem (no wood in the markets for constructing window screens); here is a lock problem (no locks for the doors); here is a mail problem; here is a government problem; here is an insurgency problem, and the list goes on and on and on… The head wobbles from side to side-it is both a yes and a no and neither, an affirmative, negative or neither, a tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.
I put on some water for a fairly awful yet caffeinated cup of instant coffee before brewing a pot of ciyah-I like to read for half an hour with that first cup of coffee; an old habit that eases me into the day. Some semblance of breakfast comes next. We occasionally find sliced loaf bread in the markets, which is barely palatable. Sometimes we scramble some eggs and have a few curried leftovers from the previous night, and on occasion we will even have rice. We also make roti or flatbread on occasion using an empty beer bottle as a rolling pin. Our flatbread pan, however, only allows for one to be cooked at a time, and we are generally just not that industrious in the mornings… Roti is good in the evenings as well for dipping into curried vegetables.
We were invited to and attended a pooja (offering/blessing) for a new house across the way yesterday. Well, actually, it was quite an old house, but there were new tenants moving in. There was plenty of singing and dancing of mostly devotional Hindu music that sounded so much like the Sufi music-a la Ali Khan-that I love so much. A harmonium, hand cymbals and something akin to a tambourine accompanied the singing and dancing, and everyone from the youngest kids to the oldest grandmothers pitched in with clapping and/or generally being in a trance like state. By far the most interesting and fascinating cultural highlight of our time in Bardibas.
Nepal has a new prime minister who is actually the last prime minister dismissed over a year and a half ago. Some strikes and closures called by the opposition parties will hopefully be called off now. A temporary respite.