The old grandfather who lives in the house just behind ours has phlegmatically announced his presence—that and the bucket of urine he nightly dumps out of his upstairs bedroom window; yes, chamber pots are still in vogue… He’s actually one of my favorite people among my neighbors although his personal hygiene habits leave a little bit to be desired. He wears thick bottle eyeglasses, one of those paper thin dotis or waist wraps, and some sort of orange colored top (or doti) that older men who turn toward devotion and meditation are fond of in their later years. He has a big, toothy grin that he flashes my way when he sees me coming on my bicycle and he is out squatting on his haunches by the road tending to his goats or water buffaloes. When we first moved in here, he politely asked if he could cut our grass with his small curved scythe for animal fodder. Take as much as you like, is what I think I said. It’s a rarity when someone would even bother to ask about taking something like that, since usually people take whatever vegetation they like. Each day I see at least 20-30 totting large bundles—in woven wicker baskets on their backs, on the backs of bicycles, on the top of their heads—from some unknown and far away field.
Mercifully, it’s almost the end of august although I’m not sure why I say mercifully since the weather has been about the same here since april, but we are hopeful for cooler days and, with it, a bit of renewed energy. I believe that the monsoons are (almost) technically over; mostly now we get hard rains for one to two hours which is considerably better than one to two days nonstop.
Maybe you’ve heard about the Maoist blockade of Kathmandu—it’s actually the first international news (BBC) that we’ve picked up about the insurgency although here it is sort of old news and may actually help these villagers make a bit more money if shortages start to take place in Kathmandu. It matters not much to us of slim pickings anyway… The bright side of the Kathmandu blockade is that I have heard more sincere rumblings for the resumption of peace talks emanating from His Majesty’s government since the time we arrived here coming up on six months. But I believe the whole affair has been mostly blown out of proportion by the news media; indeed, a lot of the news out of Kathmandu itself has focused on how the foreign media doesn’t understand the situation and how HMG has total control of the situation and can handle its own affairs. What pro UN mediation proponents have been saying for months now is that HMG can’t handle the situation (absolutely true outside of Kathmandu) and I think the State’s vociferousness over the most recent affairs is to squelch that sort of commentary from resurfacing. Anyway, as of today the so-called siege has been called off…. Now we are back to district-level closures—you’ll hear nothing of this from BBC or VOA.
***Note to readers: I've had some difficulty getting things up to this site, but a bit better luck with email... If you'd like to receive these vignettes via email, let me know...
Badribas or Bardibas?
The name Bardibas apparently stems from the inverted form of Badri (the family name of the original inhabitants) and bas, or the root of the verb basnu in Nepali, which means to sit or live—the place where the Badris live. No one is quite sure how this became Bardibas; perhaps it just rolls off the tongue a bit easier.
The original village of Bardibas was built around a small pond, a Shiva temple with a Nandi bull statue in front (Nandi is Shiva’s vehicle, as the mouse is Ganesh’s) and a smattering of mostly ramshackle adobe homes. The more “modern” Bardibas lies along the Mahendra Highway (think country road, not highway) about 400 meters from the original settlement. The original Bard (this is the only place where you will spot a couple of rusty old signs announcing in both English and Nepali where you are) is now mostly where the poorer folks live: it still plays host to the twice weekly haat bazaar or flea market where everything from kitchen utensils, to cloth and clothing to vegetables to the services of makeshift barbers can be had (sadly, the selection of vegetables is no different than the regular vendors near the new Bard), and it is seemingly a place of residence for the lower caste households. Only children and water buffaloes are bold or innocent enough to brave the murky waters of the pond—water buffaloes immersed up to their eyeballs and naked children passing the time on very hot summer afternoons. There is the obligatory and shady pepal tree with stone platform around its base, which serves as mostly an informal place for men to gather and discuss the day’s events. Some laborers and field workers catch a few hours of sleep. There are a few tea and snack stalls made of scrap wood with long wooden benches in front made smooth and shiny by hours of sitting. The old Bard is mainly a place where I ride my bike through the many foot and cart paths through the fields and enclaves of farmhouses. I prefer the paths to the roads with fewer animals to watch out for and more opportunities to just be alone and reflect without the good-natured yet screaming children or the gaping stares of adults.
But the newer Bard is where I do most of my business and I am known to many of the shopkeepers. The one thing there is always plenty of here are chairs in front of the sundry goods shops that seem to be selling just about the same thing, or everything that you don’t need. It is there that shopkeepers hold court—it is a rarity to find them on their own without the normal loyal subjects passing the time.
My favorite of these is the shop of one Ram Krishna—he’s a chubby, good-natured guy with a dark complexion and thin moustache a la India or this part of the Terai. He is also, purportedly, the richest man in town, a board member of my organization’s cooperative and has a penchant for paan—not the wimpy single, plastic package stuff, but the big green leaf in the shape of a triangle. He has a cheeky, cat like grin that exposes said years of paan chewing. I always get a seat at Ram Krishna’s and on particular days there are even cups of tea which follow. In our first few weeks here, he let me step behind the counter—there are no shops here where you can step behind the counter or inside—so I could have a look at the goods, which all too often resemble numerous packs of biscuits. It may take half an hour to buy a kilo of sugar, but it is my social event par excellence. As the proprietor, Ram Krishna is merely the money handler of the operation; his sons sometimes assume this responsibility, but there are 3 or 4 other “attendants” that measure out all of the bulk goods and handle the merchandise. Ram Krishna sits in his high back wooden chair, is passed the money from one of the attendants and informed of the total price; he pulls open a wooden desk drawer stashed with tattered and torn rupee notes and produces the change. Everything is calculated by hand first on a small slip of paper and then rechecked on the ubiquitous calculator that all shopkeeper’s have—like the scepter of their court and status—before a total price is produced. By this time, Migyoung has calculated everything in her head and pointed out the mistakes…
There is also the town “supermarket,” which is really just another sundry goods shop just a little cleaner and crisper in appearance, but it is merely that and nothing else. Commodities such as rice, sugar, flour and other grains are sold by weight and stored in sacks. Invariably these goods are full of rocks, bugs and sometimes the shit of what I hope is geckos and not rats or mice… It used to take us almost an hour to clean the rice of bugs and rocks before cooking it, but we have since found prepackaged 5-kilo bags. Flour, sugar and everything else not sealed, has to sifted and giving a good going over. There’s the pots and pans shop run by an ex-policeman where the prices magically rise and fall depending on if I am on my own or with a local Nepali; the bicycle repair shop where I stop in every two weeks to have my tires re-inflated and which is run by an Indian man who always wears a blue doti wrapped around his waist—pumping up tires usually draws big crowds for some reason; the samosa and sweets shop where children aged 10-14 do all of the work—the ubiquitous child labor of Nepal; the liquor, soft drinks and water shop where I sometimes purchase bottles of mineral water and an occasional bottle of beer, which I take home and put in the freezer for several hours (being no middle ground between drunkard and teetotaler, the word is out that I am the former…); and the meat and egg shop where I used to purchase my eggs until the youngish proprietor with a bowl haircut became incredibly rude with me because I once refused change in Indian and not Nepali rupees. I now buy my eggs from one of the vendor carts set up along the streets and run by a lower caste couple.
The wild grass growing out of the town’s median chowk has gotten long enough to hide the debris (it’s hard to get close now since there are perpetual puddles around it) and our six street donkeys have mysteriously and sadly disappeared. The pink, balding dog that hangs around the ciyah pasal near the chowk clings to life. The surrounding rice paddies are a painter’s palette of greens in every shade that one could imagine.
The heat continues unabated—every day we pass the century mark, usually well past, and only the night brings a little bit of relief, but not much. To be inside is to sweat unless you perch yourself directly under the swirling ceiling fan. We shower during the early morning and late night hours when the rooftop water tank has moderately cooled down. Fortunately, the power supply has returned to normal levels of only a few hours of outage per day after suffering through 16 hour a day outages for many weeks. We have moved our bed into the living room of our place since the bedroom—with its walls facing south and west—was like an inferno and virtually impossible to sleep in. We are now beginning to catch a few more hours of sleep per night. Every day it threatens rain but little has fallen since the floods. Although that was certainly a rather miserable time, we find ourselves looking to the skies for a bit of afternoon relief more frequently… We await autumn with great anticipation.
At work, I am putting together the particulars of a dalit rights and inclusion project—a program aimed at reducing incidents of caste discrimination in 21 VDCs (counties) through inter-caste training and awareness programs in addition to educational, economic and public access opportunities for lower caste individuals, particularly women. At the same time, I am utilizing this process as a means of training my colleagues in how to plan, design and write proposals using such tools as logframes and project logic matrixes. So for me, I am hopeful that this process will be twofold: a learning/organizational development tool for my colleagues and an opportunity to contribute something positive to the development of dalit women and families.
The new digs
In the midst of floods, landslides and the heaviest monsoon in decades, we have moved into our new house. On top of a cart that resembled something from medieval times that would make the rounds to collect the dead—or a Monty Python film—we loaded our meager belongings and pushed through the ankle deep water to our new abode. It’s roughly the same size as the former; a stand-alone ground floor place with a, at the moment anyway, small, marshy yard. The bathroom is outside yet still connected by one wall to the house. Technically outside. Water leaking in from the rooftop down the concrete stairwell to the outdoor foyer to the bathroom has created a rather wet mosquito haven, as does being on the ground floor generally. As I squatted over the toilet yesterday morning, I killed three, and this morning I made it ten for ten. I would not make a good Jain, I suppose…
But we share no water tank here, and there is a direct line from the tap to the rooftop tank, so there will be no more tinkering with a pump continually on the blink. Our new place is in rather close quarters with other houses, and despite the smallness of the Bard, I hear people rumbling around outside—sometimes shouting to their neighbors, sometimes listening to the Nepali news at full blast—as early as 4:30 AM. The water tap for the house behind us is within sight and earshot of our kitchen window: the family lines up one by one at the tap for the brushing of teeth and the obligatory clearing of throats. We have finally figured out a milk delivery system for the morning ciyah; every morning between 5:15 and 5:45 two sisters with identical close cropped hair, nose piercings and school uniform of pleaded blue skirts arrive at our door with a small stainless steel, half liter jug of buffalo milk.
Too Much Dudh, Dude!
And the milk keeps coming… We have opted to receive an additional half-liter of milk in order to make our own yogurt. We are trying to knock back our first delivery to the more sensible 6:30 or 7:00 AM, and we are still trying to figure out the timing for the second delivery (from two different buffaloes/households), which sometimes comes on the heels of the first—30 minutes later, or so—sometimes mid-morning and sometimes in the evening. A growing group of children shows up on our doorstep at different times of the day—one to deliver the milk and the others to try and get a peek inside our house or to just observe the proceedings.
For all of its good-natured intrusiveness, I must say that in our new neighborhood (even though it isn’t that far from our old one) we are feeling a greater sense of connectedness and community, which was, for the most part, lacking in our former location. People in our immediate area seem a bit friendlier and inviting.
We picked the right day for the long journey back here from Kathmandu, for the very next day the skies opened up for 4 straight days—approximately 250 ml of rain per day! Roads, bridges and houses were washed away; the electricity and power supplies were cut for 4 days (we started catching rain water for bathing and cooking when our supply ran low) and we were generally trapped inside mopping up the water that seeped in through windows and under doors. Almost every piece of clothing we own seems to have molded…But we didn’t see the worst of it—just to the south of us, whole towns, villages and cities were cut off and many more houses were washed away or otherwise destroyed. Thankfully, we’ve had partly sunny skies for the past couple of days with only intermittent rain, which has dried things up considerably. Our water supply has returned in various forms: partly cloudy to muddy to even a vague resemblance to clear water.
I made my first trip to Janakpur today in a bout a month on the back of a motorcycle with a colleague. I tried logging on to send something out today, but, alas, all of the internet servers were down. Typical. I’ll try again in a few days hopefully… Nothing will be easy (it was never that easy) anymore since one of the bridges on the way collapsed right in the middle (still possible for bicycles, motorcycles and pedestrians to make a rollercoaster trip across, but buses have to attempt to ford the river, which they are already doing) snarling and delaying vehicles on both sides. The locals taking advantage of the economic opportunities caused by the delays have set up a makeshift market just beyond the collapsed bridge. Our big day in the city has been made more complicated.
I also made the trip to apply for a mobile phone at the Telecommunications Office—it’s a convoluted, not out of the ordinary process for Nepal: make a personal introduction and ingratiate yourself with the chief; take your forms to be stamped and looked at by several people seemingly all doing the same thing; pay your very hefty-by-Nepal-standards registration fee; take it back to the chief for one more going over, and wait for the thing to be activated. My colleagues have passed on an old phone set, so we’ll see how this works out in a few days. Reception for calls that have been made to Kathmandu have been rather lousy, but when I asked I was told that I “might” be able to receive (but not make) international calls. I doubt this will happen, but will send you the number if you’re interested…
My gut is much better, thank you, and Migyoung is doing much better as well. Gastrointestinal problems are common during this time of the year: the monsoons wreak havoc with water supplies and there have been serious outbreaks of diarrhea, cholera and typhoid. Even though public advocacy campaigns and newspapers urge individuals to boil their water for purification, most do not. Whether this is because of the considerable time and energy that goes into boiling, ignorance, or mistrust I am not sure, but even many well-informed Nepalis refuse to utilize this simple measure. I implore everyone I know to take caution; some, at least, have filters to use.
What to say about work? Things are still not progressing as seamlessly nor as quickly as I would like, but the slow nature of work and life is an inevitability that I cannot change. Communication continues to be a problem—more to do with open lines than language barriers although, of course, language interpretation creates difficult situations from time to time. As technically an advisor to the organization, one would think that I would be asked for my opinion and/or assistance; rather, it is normally me that does the asking. I probe into all the inner workings of the organization, which may at times come across as intrusiveness to my colleagues or is perhaps even seen as a threat to their authority. There are a few projects in the works, with opportunities for many more, and I am hopeful that a 4 day strategic planning session I have arranged for my organization in the coming weeks will be a good opportunity for me to re-clarify objectives and goals and work through the mission and vision of the organization in addition to reiterating my own work objectives.
A few days later:
It seems as if all of the planets must be in perfect alignment for me to accomplish some simple tasks these days. Migyoung and I made the perilous trip to Janakpur yesterday via bus, or rather, what used to be a one-bus journey of approximately an hour has turned into a 3 hour 3 bus affair. What used to be the road is now mud and water. We disembarked from one bus, sloshed our way through the mud, zigzagged our way through the mass of humanity, made the risky trip across a collapsed bridge now in the shape of a V and leaning heavily to one side as if it might drop at any moment, and waded through the waterlogged village of Mahendrenagar for another bus southward. Hundreds gathered on the bridge to watch the raging river below and the efforts of a truck to pull a bus out that had earlier and foolishly attempted to ford the river. Old women setting up makeshift vending stalls fanned buckets of coal used to char ears of corn for the hungry and growing throng of bystanders. Other barefoot woman and girls carried large sacks of rice plants on top of their heads, rushing off to the paddies to take advantage of the breaks in the rain to plant their crops. The humidity is overbearing—the air hangs thick with epidemics of typhoid and cholera; people cough and sweat. The whole scene resembles that of a crude refugee camp—a temporary village set up on the periphery disaster and disease.
While there was electricity when we left the Bard this morning, in Janakpur there was not. We bought a few supplies and waited around drinking cups of tea for the power to return and the opportunity to use email, but by late afternoon when it became apparent that the electricity would not return, we again sloshed our way back to the bus park for our return trip. What was a few weeks ago our rather easy—by Nepal standards—and enjoyable trip to the city, has now become a nightmare of logistics and luck.
Muddy, sweating and feeling rather sullen and depressed about my day’s effort to communicate with the outside world, I consoled myself with some of the striking beauty of the passing countryside: rows of women in brightly colored saris moved like little rainbows on the horizon in the paddy fields; hundreds of dragonflies hover over a field of wheat; the slow passage on foot and bicycle offering time for the renewal of friendships or even conversation with a stranger.