Tihar

October 28, 2011

Colorful Tihar decorations!

Another big Hindu festival, Tihar, is wrapping up across Nepal today. I stayed in Kathmandu this week to celebrate with my host family and though (again) it was difficult to get an explanation of the significance of all the rituals, I got to experience a ton over the five-day festival.

Day 1:

The first day is pretty mellow, food is set out for crows, which are thought to be the messengers of the god of death. Funnily, I was in Gorkha this day and a crow stole a potato from my dinner plate, so in a way I took part in this ritual.

Day 2:

Dogs are honored on day two--families give dogs tika, flower garlands and special foods because dogs are the gatekeepers for the god of death. My family does not have a dog, so I kind of missed this one, but I liked seeing the neighbor’s dog with red tika all over his head and a marigold necklace.

Day 3: (aka Diwali in India, same basic celebrations here)

Day three is when things really start to ramp up, with two main festivities. First, cows are given food (not that they are ever denied food) and flower garlands, since they are the soul’s guide to the underworld and the symbol of wealth (and the embodiment of nature, but that doesn’t play in here). Second, Deepawali (Festival of Lights) is when all the houses and shops in Nepal are lit up with candles, gas lights and string lights to guide the goddess of wealth so she can bless everyone with prosperity. For a city with irregular electricity, Kathmandu does holiday lights really well. The strategy seemed to be as many lights as possible. I asked what happens if there is load shedding during Deepawali, and the response was basically, “the electric company wouldn’t dare.” 

Lights around New Road

In addition, each home draws a kind of landing spot mandala/flower for the goddess of wealth and then a path to lead her into the house and up to the offering left for her.

At night (and actually continuing through the end of the festival), groups of kids come door-to-door singing and playing instruments and receive treats and small sums of money in return (a practice called “Diusire”). I kept asking people what they were singing (like, what the words meant) and kept being told “they are playing diusire,” so I have no idea what the purpose of this activity is. Manish said it was their equivalent of trick-or-treating on Halloween, which he knew about through Scoopy Doo episodes. Haha. I also got to experience a special treat: “modern version diusire,” which consisted of a full rock band coming to the door, complete with drum set and amps!

On top of the ruckus of many many traveling music groups, this is also the main night for fireworks, which Nepalis light off of their rooftops. Oh, and fireworks here do not have much in the way of fuses, you basically light the firework directly.

Day 4:

Day four is Mha Puja, a concept with doesn’t translate well to English but is literally “self-worship.” Most Nepalis stay home and have a quite day of reflection to prepare for the upcoming year and conduct private rituals. (The television was even off at my house, which is very rare.) The exception to this is the Newari caste, which celebrates the New Year this day. I went around town to check out the celebrations, and like the drum festival I saw in Patan, it was a complete madhouse. There were a ton of jeeps loaded up with Newari teenagers with drums and cymbals and microphones, each playing their own tune and driving their own route. A couple of times during the day there would be a celebration jam—all traffic came to a stop as two parties passed each other on the crowded Kathmandu roads.

Celebration jam!

Day 5:

The final day, Bhaai Tika, is the most important for most Nepalis, like Dashimi during Dasain. The main event is sisters blessing their brothers and giving them flower garlands, treats and tika in hopes of warding off death indefinitely. In modern Nepal, brothers now reciprocate and give their sisters a tika, though without the full ceremony. There were a lot of steps in this process, and I have no idea what they all meant, but here are some pictures!

Sisters preparing the offerings

The blessing setup

Radhakrishna and Sita receive tika from Radhakrishna's sister

Manish receives tika from a cousin (since his sister is in India)

Tika for me from Sita

One final really cool thing about Bhaai Tika: The prettiest spot in Kathmandu is arguably Rani Pokhari (Queen’s Pond), a gorgeous white temple surrounded by a green pond (a pretty color if you don’t think about why it is that color) that a Malla king built for his wife to consol her after their son was trampled to death by an elephant. Sadly, in modern times Rani Pokhari became a popular suicide, so the gates are locked 364 days of the year. But the temple historically had an important role in Bhaai Tika: it is the spot where only children can leave offerings and receive tikas to ward off death, so the gates to Rani Pokhari are open one day a year for the benefit of Nepal’s only children. I felt very lucky to get to walk around inside. 

Now I have a few days off from festival festivities, but on Monday I am heading down to Janakpur to celebrate Chhath (only celebrated in India and the Eastern Terai) with my host family’s best friend’s family!

Bloom Where You're Planted

October 26, 2011

Nepal has a couple of common sayings that seem to reflect their self-image as a nation. As I’ve been traveling around, I hear one or both of these from nearly everyone I speak with. The first is “Nepal is rich in resources but poor in development” (or some variation of this). It becomes quickly apparent how accurate this is. Nepal has a tremendous wealth of natural resources, especially water and flora/fauna resources, but no ability to make use of them. There are three major rivers in Nepal, about equally distributed east-west across the country, and countless other rivers that materialize during monsoon season and the annual spring thaw. Nepal has got to be one of the countries best positioned for hydro-electric power—yet Kathmandu is still plagued with load shedding up to 16 hours a day and any hydo-power they do generate is exported to China and India. As for the flora and fauna, Nepal has three distinct ecological zones—the Terai (in the south bordering India), the Hills (e.g., Kathmandu, Pokhara) and the himals (Nepali for mountains, so saying the Himalayan Mountains is a bit like saying the HIV Virus, fun fact, huh J). As a result of this diversity of climates, Nepal is home to over 6,500 types of plants, including many medicinal plants—yet no industry has popped up to harvest them. Locals give the same reason for both of these two phenomena—there is not the infrastructure to make use of the water and flora/fauna in Nepal. And when I ask why they think the infrastructure is not there, I get common self-image number two: “In Nepal, it is very easy to survive but very hard to thrive.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this one lately, at first I didn't really understand, but now I think it is true on a number of levels here:

1. With regards to developing infrastructure, Nepal as a culture suffers from a dearth of drive and aspirations. The social structures here are so strong that you will be taken care of no mater whether you get a low-level job, excel in your career, or never enter the workplace. There will always be a parent, or a child, or a sibling, or an uncle to make sure you are fed, sheltered and dressed. A family with few workers may not thrive, but they will survive. Yes, there is rampant poverty in Nepal and there absolutely is a need for poverty reduction work. However, it does seem that most Nepalis get by, even right along that poverty line, because of application #2 and #3:

2. Nepalis are remarkably self-sufficient. Outside of Kathmandu, most families grow whatever they need to eat, then sell the excesses to buy clothing and other material goods. Overwhelming people I talk to say that children do not migrate to the city (or abroad) because they are starving, but rather because they have an idealized fantasy of “making it big in the big city” (without trying very hard), that is very very far from reality.

3. (Closely related to #2) Nepalis’ have a tremendous ability to make due with what they have. I’ve been here two months and I am still in awe of the places in Nepal where things grow. Growing up on the edge of the Great Plains, I think of farmland as gigantic flat areas. But here, they put rice absolutely everywhere. All around the hills, there are stairs created to make small flat areas for rice plants. 

Rice paddies between Nagarkot and Sankhu

And now I am learning that rice is only one half of this land’s life cycle—now that the rice is harvested, winter vegetables are being planted on the same land. Property rights are complicated and hard land is hard to transfer. The land that your family has is the land it has always had and (unless the new constitution magically fixes property law) always will have, so the motivation to make the best of it is high. In the city, I see this same characteristic in home construction. Homes are built in chunks as people get the money for it. (Esther Duflo describes this phenomenon in her book, Poor Economics, but it was very cool to see it in person.) All over the city (and country) you see one-story houses with I-beams sticking out the roof. It took me a while to figure out that this was because they build on additional stories as they save enough for it, while the family is living in the house. Since I arrived, a house on the corner of my street has added a new level. 

Occupied in-progress house in my neighborhood

Another example is the umbrella/shoe repair guys on every street corner. Once you make a purchase here, it is a long time before you get a replacement so things have many lives. (And they have fewer material goods overall than we do—my family has exactly enough dishes for one meal and clothes for one week.) If my umbrella broke in the US, I would most certainly donate it to Goodwill and then buy a new one. But here, I was walking down the street and one of the umbrella repair guys started gesturing wildly at my decrepit umbrella (it was barely still in one piece). For one-third of the price of a new umbrella, he took five minutes, repaired three different sections of my umbrella (including one part I didn’t recognize was broken), and now it works better than it did when I bought it.

I think there is a lot to be learned from these two elements of Nepali life. Sure, it’s not as necessary for me to be self-sufficient (you can pay someone to do almost anything) or to maximize my use of everything I have (often easier to just buy a new one), but I think it would be good if I tried to do more of both of these things. Two concrete examples come to mind. First, I want to learn how to do basic clothing repair. Nothing fancy, I’m not going to be making my own dresses anytime soon, just learning to do things like sew buttons back on, patch smalls holes and re-sew seams that rip. I guess I already am kind of moving this direction with the basic car maintenance class I took in the spring, it’s just time to expand to more areas! Second, I want to try to be less concerned with having the right clothing for different occasions. This is going to be a really hard one for me. I think buying new outfits is sometimes a way I try to make myself more comfortable in unfamiliar territory because it is one thing that I can control in a short time frame. (And is closely related to my Barbie doll approach to life, incidentally.) The circumstances I’ve relied on clothing the most was when I was trying to be a debutant, pledging a sorority, and reentering the dating world. In all of these cases, some basic attire changes were probably necessary (I probably did indeed need a party dress to be a debutant), but the lengths I took it to may have been extreme and just a way to avoid dealing with the base issues. And let’s face it, no boy is every going to notice whether I wear the same shirt to work as I do on a date.    

Gorkha

October 25, 2011

This week I took a quick overnight trip to Gorkha, about half way between Kathmandu and Pokhara, along the ridge from Manakamana. Gorkha is most famous for the role it played in Prithvi Narayan Shah’s rein. For 27 years (ending in 1769), Gorkha Durbar (durbar=palace) was the launch pad for Shah’s eventually successful attempt to conquer the Kathmandu Valley. Immediately after he captured Kathmandu, Shah moved the capital there and Gorkha was pretty much forgotten. But it’s actually still a sizeable town, a nice change from the tiny hamlets around the valley I’ve been exploring lately.

To get to the Durbar, you have to climb 1500 stone steps up to a sharp ridge. It’s now an important religious site, since Shah was thought to be an incarnation of Vishnu (I have not been able to get a clear answer to whether Hindus decide people are reincarnations of Vishnu before or after they do something cool) and there is still a small army base inside. On my way up to the Durbar, there were a lot of people carrying recently sacrificed goats down the steps in plastic bags. I felt sad for the poor goats that had to climb 1500 stairs just to be killed. At least the Manakamana sacrifice victims got to ride a gondola up. There were also houses and shops all along the staircase and children evidently have to climb the steps every single day to get home from school. Makes the hill from 7^th to 9^th Ave on Sherman seem like cake.

I can definitely see why one would put a fort on the ridge above Gorkha. It seems very protected and the views were great, but I didn’t think the palace was actually all that impressive. It certainly didn’t seem like “the crowning glory of Newari architecture,” as Lonely Planet describes. (My theory is that they put so much effort into the staircase that by the time they built the palace they were all worn out.) In fact, at first I did not realize I was looking at the palace, I thought it might be just the guesthouse. Luckily, some of the army men stationed decided to set me straight and provide what may be my strangest Nepal tourism experience yet:

There were a ton of tourists and Nepalis around the Durbar but for some reason I caught the attention of the army, some of who decided to show me around. They however did not speak English, so my tour consisted of them commandeering my camera and pointing at things I should stand in front of so they could take my picture. Then they wanted me to take their picture; then they wanted pictures of us together. After about a 30-minute photo shoot, one of the men went to get the station commander, who spoke some English, to actually tell me what I was looking at. And then the army commander took me inside the base (past all these scary “no entry” signs) to see the palace’s helipad. Then I was invited for tea and a rest inside the army base. Ha. This is actually the second time I’ve been invited into an army base. The first was in Bardia—we were having lunch outside the army base inside the park and I trotted off to go use the restroom in the woods and the army man ran after me and told me to come inside the base and use their bathroom. First though, he had another army man clean the bathroom for me. Maybe this is not unusual for Nepal, especially since their military is not that active. I asked Gita what the army did now that the Maoist insurgency was over (there are still military stationed absolutely everywhere) and she responded that they are training. Still, I can’t imagine either of these two experiences happening in the States.

And some Gorkha pictures:

Goods delivery in Gorkha

Gorkha Durbar

Annapurna views

Me and one of my photographers

Clothing

October 25, 2011

Women in Nepal still predominantly wear traditional attire—either a full sari or a kurta and salwar with a scarf. Younger women (less than 20) will sometimes wear Western clothing, and women about my age sometimes wear jeans and a kurti (a short kurta). Men’s attire varies depending on the area of Nepal and the age of the man. Sometimes they wear jeans and a t-shirt, sometimes a button down, kakhis and the topi (a little hat). And sometimes they wear the full kurta, salwar, vest and topi. I’m not exactly sure why so many more men where Western clothing than women, but one explanation I’ve received that seems plausible is that men are more likely to interact with Westerners in the workplace, so they have Westernized faster.

Last week, my host mom Sita, my neighbor Gita and three women who work with Sita took me to buy some Nepali clothing. It was a fun experience, mostly because Gita was the only one who spoke English so I had no idea what was going on most of the time, and because we went to this shopping area near New Road that I would never have been able to go on my own. All the shops look identical, and when I asked Gita how they know which to go in, she said that Sita does all the shopping for the joint family that I live with, so she knows the shop owners some places and can get good deals. After buying my kurta-salwar, we went to a bunch of other stores to buy presents for Tihar.

Yesterday was my first day in my kurta-salwar. Nepali women wear their saris or kurta-salwar for everything. Traveling around you see yak herders in saris and porters in kurta-salwar, so in typical Nepali fashion I went for a hike my first day in my kurta-salwar. In typical Elena fashion, this was unintentional—I got lost on my way to Gorkha Durbar. 

Kurta's first hike

I definitely still don’t blend in, but the attention I receive seems to be a bit different. Instead of blank stares, I got a lot of double takes. And people assume that I know my way around and speak Nepali (which I should by now, but it turns out that the one thing that has stayed the same since age 17 is that I am not good at foreign languages). Of course, it is impossible for me to do an adequate controlled comparison because I will not be going back to the places I had a hard time in Western clothing and I am indeed more competent in Nepal now than three weeks ago. The elastic waisted salwar pants are much more comfortable for 7-hour bus rides, though, and I like that my money pouch is more hidden under a long top, so I think this outfit will get a lot of use in my remaining time here.

Food

I had a weird (in a completely awesome way) experience this weekend. I was staying at a hotel in Nagarkot with a fixed Nepali Set for dinner and when they brought out my daal bhaat with a fork, I sat there for a good five minutes wondering how one might eat daal bhaat with a fork! I’ve gotten so accustomed to eating with my hands that I could not fathom how you would properly mix the rice, lentils and veggies using a fork. Eventually I started mashing things around with my fork, but it took me another couple minutes to figure out that I was holding my fork like a shovel rather than silverware. Haha, I think it safe to say I am adjusted to Nepalese dinning. Granted, I still have to sit on my left hand during every meal so I don’t accidentally touch my food with the wrong hand but my eating is no longer dinnertime entertainment, which I consider a great success. And with that, I suppose it’s time to do some writing about food culture differences.

The food was one area (maybe the only one) where I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I knew before I left the US that Nepalis eat daal bhaat (lentils and rice) two meals a day, silverware is scarce, meat is the exception rather than the rule, and leaving leftovers is considered rude. But boy was I not ready for the quantity of food consumed here. A day of eating here goes like this: I wake up with the roosters at about 5:30 am, we have black tea with two pieces of toast and a hard boiled egg between 6:30 and 7 (I fondly refer to this as pre-breakfast), then the morning daal bhaat between 9 and 10. I get hungry around 2 or 3 pm, so I have a snack if I am out and about or at work we have tea and biscuits at 3. Then the second I walk in the door at home, whether 4 or 5 or 6, my host mom immediately comes to get me for afternoon tea and snacks. When I am not hungry, I try to come in really quietly to buy myself some extra food-free time, a strategy that never works but has earned me the nickname of the family cat. Afternoon tea includes milk tea, fruit and a heavy snack (I fondly refer to this as pre-dinner, and it is sometimes a egg and beaten rice, or Ramen, or cornflakes). And then evening daal bhaat is between 7 and 8 pm.

Basically I feel like I am eating all the time. And portion sizes are insane. Pre-breakfast and pre-dinner is more food than I eat for breakfast and dinner in the US and those are not even really considered the meals! When I first got here, I tried to eat everything on my plate but at some point I just couldn’t and Manish said it was ok to leave it. (Because you eat with your hands, once the food is on your plate, either you eat it or the neighbor’s dog eats it out of the trash.) The next meal decreased to a reasonable size but then every meal it started to increase until I hit the break point again. This happens every few weeks: My portions increase until I leave a bunch of food on my plate, my portion decreases the next meal and the cycle starts over again. Oui.

A couple weeks into my stay, I was talking to a cousin here about the portions and he said that everyone still eats like food is scarce because just 10-15 years ago, folks could not be certain when their next meal would come. In the Terai and Mountain regions, this makes some sense because it’s still primarily manual labor and they do need to eat as much as they can. But in Kathmandu, it’s ridiculous. And there is no way to work any of the food off, because it’s too polluted and dangerous to walk/run around the city and anywhere we would put a public park, Nepalis put a temple. Being overweight is a source of pride here, as if telling the world that you are well off enough to overeat. (My first week here my host father announced to the family that his goal was for Elena to be “fat like me,” said while rubbing his belly and smiling from ear to ear.) Another side effect of the food not changing with the times is that men are universally heavier than women: women eat whatever is left over when the men are finished, because historically the men would be doing the more intense field work. (House guests are fed with the men, I am always offered seconds before my host mom has even started.)

Regardless of my portion size battles, I try to eat what’s put in front of me. Sometimes I have no idea what I am eating (there are still things I eat regularly that I don’t know the name for) but like my Door to Door Organics adventure, I have discovered some great new foods. Guava, for example, who knew! And some foods that I can’t stand, like this strange pickled thing. There are three things other things about the Nepalese food culture I really like:

1. The biggest meal of the day is at the beginning of the day and if meat is on the menu, it is eaten in the morning. Nepalis think it is hilarious and ridiculous that Westerners eat a big meal so close to bedtime. The eating schedule in Nepal is designed to “fuel the day,” which makes so much more sense to me. Plus I've never liked most Western breakfast foods, so maybe now I have a solid excuse to eat real food in the mornings.
2. Instead of vegetarians having to ask for meat-free food, vegetarian is the default here. At my house, we eat meat maybe two meals a week. And at all the guest houses I’ve stayed at, the meal choices are “Veg” or “Non-Veg.” It threw me off at first, but how cool that meat is called non-veg!
3. Milk tea is my favorite part of the day. It’s really sweet, which I didn’t expect, and I historically haven’t been the biggest fan of milk, but the combo works. I’m considering an Ilam (the Nepali Darjeeling) trip in a few weeks so I can get some tea from the source to bring home. I was looking forward to a ski season of cold beers after a long day, but how about some post-skiing milk tea instead? Any takers?

Rice Harvest

Ok, so this may seem like a really mundane topic for a post, just bear with me for a moment. One of the interesting parts of this trip for me has been the closer interaction with where my food comes from. At first it was the meat. I think in the US I’ve gotten incredibly removed from what I am eating because I never have to think about it. There is this great line in the movie Leap Year (probably the only good line in the movie…) where Matthew Goode kills a chicken to cook for dinner with Amy Adams, and when she looks shocked, he asks “Well, where did you think chicken came from?” and she responds, “the freezer section.” It sounds dumb, I mean, I know chickens come from live animals, but I never have to think about it while eating my dinner! In Nepal, my dinner lives on the roof next door or eats grass next to us at a picnic or rides in the bus on the way to the temple with me. It really freaked me out at first, this having to actually interact with the animals before I ate them business, so much so that I almost turned into a full-fledged vegetarian. I’ve gotten used to it now, my vegetarian moment has passed and I’ve moved onto the next food whose origins I never thought about: RICE!

I have absolutely never thought about where rice comes from. All that comes to mind when I think of rice is dinners with Rachel and Melissa freshman year and the first time I tried to cook for Ryan and he ate two servings of 95% uncooked rice. Here, you kind of have to think about rice because it is everywhere: 2-3 meals a day, everyday are rice-based plus any space that is not occupied by a building has rice on it. Turns out, rice grows in fields just like wheat! I mean, it makes sense, it’s a grain too, right? I guess I just couldn’t picture how rice would come from a plant. The monsoons are officially over in the Kathamandu valley and that means its harvest time! Every time I go out and explore the valley, I get to see rice in vary stages of harvest and it is so unbelievably cool.

In the Terai, they have big rice paddies and use machines for the harvest. But in the Kathmandu valley, each family’s rice paddy is pretty small and they are planted in steps into the valley walls so everything has to be harvested by hand. 

Stairs of rice in various stages of harvest

From what I can tell, the process is this:

Tie rice plants into small chunks and cut off each chunk at the base

Carry the bundles across the field...

To the hand operated grain separator
(or in some cases, men would just hit the plants
against the ground to remove the grains)

Filter the rice

Package and transport!
(i.e., put on a guy's back for him to carry onto the public buses)

Dry the non-grain parts and make sleeping mats!

I love that this process takes over the town squares and roads. Walking through any town in the valley right now (these pictures are from Banepa), you have to dodge food production. It's such a big contrast to the US norm of gigantic farms and factories far from where anyone lives. I am told that the rice paddies next to my house should begin harvest soon (they are tied in chunks now) and I can't wait for the front row seat! I'm not sure I'll be able to leave the house that day!

Public Transportation, Part 2

October 12, 2011

To continue my earlier post about getting around Nepal, I have now had a chance to experience a couple different kinds of long distance buses. I took a “tourist” bus to Chitwan, public long distance buses from Chitwan to Lumbini to Bardia (and Kathmandu to Manakamana) and an express night bus back to Kathmandu from Bardia.

The “tourist” buses in Nepal I think are supposed to give tourists an easy way to get about the country. They are marginally nicer than the regular buses but leave from a more convenient location (near the tourist district, rather than on the Ring Road) and do not stop constantly along the roads to pack the bus full of people. But the tourist buses are pretty useless because they barely go anywhere. You can take a tourist bus on the Kathmandu-Chitwan-Pokhara tourist triangle and that’s it. So, since I could take a tourist bus to Chitwan I decided to go ahead and try it out. Some things about it were nice. I liked not having to worry about whether my bag was going to make it there; I liked finally meeting some other tourists and getting a little English fix; I liked not stopping for an hour is Kalanki to fill the bus to the brim; I liked that I could buy a candy bar at the bus station. Interestingly, the bus had more Nepalis than tourists. I’ve discovered that the caste system is still really influential here, which I did not expect. There is a big divide between the highly education upper class and the lower class, and a lot of discrimination and prejudice. The public buses are apparently only readily utilized by lower classes. My boss will never take a public bus, he flies anywhere he can or hires a private car, and the same is true of my host family (they will take a public bus as a last resort, though never a night bus and they won’t eat the provided food). I’m not sure whether tourist buses are worth the extra money ($20 compared to $8ish for public buses), but I’ll only have one other opportunity to take them anyways.

The first adventure in long distance public transportation is always buying a ticket. I’ve had to navigate both the Kathmandu and Butwal bus parks, both times successfully. It’s a lot like Ratna Park, where I basically just have to start telling everyone where I am going and eventually I will land on the right counter, with the added challenge of limited English in Butwal and everyone assuming I was going to Pokhara in Kathmandu. Initially, I was actually kind of impressed with long distance bus travel. When you buy a ticket, they assign you a seat number and then mark the seat off their chart. And there was a fixed departure time, how exciting! So I got on the bus and tried to find my seat, but it turns out the seats are not really labeled and the conductor put me in a random seat. Then, miraculousl,y the bus pulled out of the bus park half full of passengers at the stated departure time… and then it sat outside the bus park for 30 minutes until it was more full… and then an hour in Kalanki (just outside the Ring Road on the main highway out of the valley) until no more people could fit on. So although I think Nepal has some idea how a transportation system should work, complete with tickets and scheduling and fixed stops, in reality long distance transportation is just the same as transportation around the valley. And ten hours of completely packed buses that will drop off or pick up passengers anywhere is a bit rough.

Long Distance Bus Park

Bus ticket, hooray!

Public transportation seems to be a great way to get a feel for the different areas in Nepal, though this feeling is not always a positive one. The bus to Manakamana was no problem, basically just like the regular in the valley buses. Chitwan to Lubmini was fine too (and there was actually a group of three Polish girls on that leg with me). But Lubmini to Bardia was unpleasant. It took three buses and 10 hours and was definitely the sketchiest experience I’ve had here. I was never in danger, exactly, it was mostly just incredibly uncomfortable. The Western Terai was pretty wrecked by the Maoist insurgency, so there are no tourists in this region and a lot of police checkpoints. I thought I was used to being stared at after a month in Kathmandu but it’s not even comparable to the Western Terai. And there, folks did not stop at starting. Teenage boys are the worst. I had a number of boys get on the bus and sit next to me and then grab my hair or take a picture with me with their cell phones. I think the fact that they were trying to be sneaky (holding the phone at arms length as if to find a signal for a call, then flipping it around and quickly snapping a picture) made it even more uncomfortable. And then of course they would switch seats with their buddies so that everyone could get a picture. I had very little idea where I was headed (my travel agent just gave me the name of the bridge where the hotel would meet me, though he turned out to be incorrect) and English was sparse. The Butwal to Bardia bus was the first time my bus conductor did not speak any English at all. And around Kathamandu or the road to Pokhara I can kind of get some sense of where I am, because in towns the Coca-Cola shop signs will have the English name of the place on them, but in the Western Terai, all English writing disappeared. I made it safely to Bardia eventually, but I think the experience shook me up more than I initially gave it credit for. After talking with some folks here, it seems that the experience was pretty typical of what happens to women traveling alone in India. I talked to a girl in Kathmandu who says it was easier to travel around India if you wear a Kurti. I may try this approach, but she has dark hair and dark skin and she agreed that I am never going to be able to blend in. The blond hair/blue eyes thing is killer.

I thought I was going to have round two of Lubmini to Bardia on the way home from Bardia, but I was pleasantly surprised. My hotel in Bardia got me on an express night bus back to Kathmandu and it was such an easy trip. The seats were actually assigned! There was no one sitting on the floor! And the seats were comfortable enough I was actually able to sleep a bit! The bus made about four stops in the Bardia region, then other than dinner and bathroom breaks, did not stop again until we got to Kathmandu! Amazing. The night bus was less scary than I thought it would be, largely because although the speeds are still crazy, there were a lot fewer people on the road, and the sun came up before we got to the really twisty scary roads.

Integration

October 7, 2011

One of the cultural differences between Nepal and the US that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is about the level of integration in our lives. I notice a difference primarily in two areas, first, the extent to which different aspects of our personalities and life are integrated, and second, the extent to which individual lives are integrated with others around them.

First, some observations on integration within an individual: In the US, I feel like we take pride in the ability to compartmentalize our lives. We have the self we bring to work, the self we take out with friends, the self we bring home to mom, etc. While these are all obviously facets of the same person, it is striking what a different experience you can have with a person depending on the situation in which you interact with them and what personality characteristics they (consciously or subconsciously) present. On top of this, our days are intentionally segregated into work time or family time or relaxing time. Even if you try to mix them by brining work home or kids to work, in my experience this is difficult because each expects your full attention.

In Nepal, this kind of compartmentalization within a life just doesn’t seem as prevalent. I think the lack of personality segregation is largely related to the way social structures are set up. It’s hard to present a different person to friends and family when you live with your parents (or your husband’s parents) until they die and they pick who you’ll marry. And socializing in Nepal is not segregated the way we make a children’s table at family celebrations. In every village I’ve visited, everyone comes to the same place to socialize, regardless of age. Teenagers fly kites and chase cows right along with the little kids in front of the adults tending to their shops or cooking or washing. There seems to be less of a bubble around an individual and more of a bubble around a community. In addition, there is not such a defined split between work time/family time/relaxing time. You work when there is work to be done (in the case of tourism and agriculture) or when there is electricity (in the case of office jobs). Work comes home regularly and people leave the office randomly in the middle of the day (or unapologetically answer the phone in the middle of a meeting). It just seems to be accepted that things come up, work schedules are across the board very flexible, and it is understood that you are never 100% dedicated to a single task, because family is the clear priority and part of your mind is always on them. For Nepalis, the point of working is to provide for your family, so there is really no distinction between work time and family time. Going to the office is providing for your family just like spending time with your kids is providing for your family.

There are parts of this approach that are very appealing to me and parts that drive me absolutely nuts. I like the integrated personality bit. As I’ve grown up, I’ve been proud of my ability to cultivate different aspects of my personality. Yet they mostly still feel like distinct personalities within one body, and I think this may have been by design. It’s kind of like changing Barbie’s outfit—I can be ski bunny Elena, adventure Elena, academic Elena, domestic Elena, etc. I’ve had a number of people comment on the way my personalities kind of snap into place, most obviously when I’m trying to solve something and I go into business Elena mode. I think I would like to figure out how to better integrate all the different sides of me into one uniquely and honestly Elena Elena. I’m not quite sure how to go about this, but I’ll be working on it.

The part that drives me absolutely insane is the fluidity between work time, family time and relaxing time. On any given day, I have no idea if I will be working or not. Even if my boss had planned for us to work on a project on a given day, that may or may not happen depending on a variety of factors including but not limited to: the weather, the traffic, his family, the electricity, random Hindu holidays, the contracting process for new projects (no fax/bike courier here, you have to meet in person to sign and stamp contracts, and since the education buildings can take about 2 hours to reach from our office, this kills the day), etc, etc, etc. It’s difficult for me because I can’t really ever plan anything. I kind of just have to wait and see what happens that day, and then if by about 11 it looks as if work will not happen I can go do something. The consequence is that I am running out of cool places to go in the 6-hour window I typically have. I would much prefer to have hard working weeks/days and then predictable time off. A good thing for me to keep in mind as I continue to think about my long-term career plans.

The second big difference in the way Nepali and American lives are integrated is the extent to which we are dependent on others. I’ve commented before on how big an adjustment it has been for my host family to have an independent 23 year-old living with them. In fact just yesterday Radhakrisna was briefly talking to my mom on Skype and she was thanking him for looking after me and he told her, “Oh no no, I have learned she can take care of herself. She is like the whole of the family all by herself.” I don’t think this was intended as a complement, since lately he’s been trying to teach me what the role of the different family members is and why I cannot continue without a husband. But anyways, the difference is not just in family life but in work too.

The Nepalese economy functions through a system of intermediaries. There are lots of things here that you just cannot do for yourself, rather you hire someone who hires someone who does what you need do. At my office, instead of mailing a survey to a school to fill out, we hire someone to take a plane to the district with the surveys, then we hire another group of people to take the surveys to the school to fill them out, then the first person flies the surveys back where another set of employees transcribes the results. And all of this travel has to be arranged by a travel agent because the airlines do not take reservations directly. To some extent, subcontracting like this happens in the US, but here you could not do it all yourself. If you tried to book a hotel directly, they would charge you probably double what you would pay through a travel agent, even including the agent’s fees. And when the doorhandle came off my door, and I asked where I could by a screw to fix it, my host family looked at me like I was crazy. The next day they hired two people to come over with a screwdriver and this little bag of assorted screws and fix the door. Insane. I guess this a good full employment plan. If it takes five people to do a task I would do myself in the US, that’s five more employed Nepalis, but it strikes me as horribly inefficient.

There are a lot of consequences of this system, and the one I’ve found most interesting is how much you have to rely on other people. For a girl who prefers to do everything myself, this has been quite an adjustment. In the US, I certainly have people I can rely on in a pinch. I have an autoshop I trust and family to swoop in when I get in over my head, but on a day-to-day level I’m pretty autonomous. The primary take away I got from all the group projects teachers assigned throughout the years was that it’s faster to do things myself. And I don’t think is an uncommon approach. In the US, we’re pretty focused on either independence or on finding that one special person to support you. In Nepal, it just doesn’t work like that. You are not supposed to get everything from one person/place or do everything yourself. There is no Target, I have to go to four different corner shops to get all my cleaning supplies. Each member of the family plays some role in its support; it is not a one or two person island. And the same goes for businesses.

Here, I have to take a leap of faith and trust in random strangers to accomplish whatever it is I am trying to do. I’ve had to accept that things may not be done my way or exactly and they were planned… and that this is not the end of the world. While I am looking forward to the return of some level of consistency and quality assurance when I return to the US, I think this change has been good for me. And maybe, just maybe, I can maintain a chunk of my newfound faith in other people when I get home.
 

Dashimi

October 10, 2011

Tomorrow is the last day of the biggest Hindu festival in Nepal, Dasain. It’s a 15-day festival celebrating the victory of the goodess Durga over evil demons. In addition to some key activities on specific days, the Dasain period is when everyone goes home to their families and nothing in Kathmandu functions. It is this holiday that gave me the week off for my Chitwan/Lumbini/Bardia adventure and I knew one of the days I would be in Bardia (October 6) I would be stuck at the hotel with the other guests because the 10^th day is the main day when really nothing functions. A part of me still thought I’d be able to at least get food at the hotel, I mean come on, ski instructors work Christmas right? Aren’t there some nice Buddhists that could come feed me? But nope, everything was shut down. Luckily, my jungle safari guide from the previous day, Bardeep, took a liking to me and invited me to come home with him for the day’s festivities.

First, bit about the family: Bardeep’s mother lives about 16 km from Bardia in a traditional Tharu village made up of rice paddies and mud huts. When I first read about the mud huts in my Lonely Planet, I pictured the huts you see in photos of Africa, like maybe a one room small building with a grass roof. But in reality, saying that something is a mud hut is akin to saying the neighborhood has a lot of brick houses. Really all you know is the building material, but the actual structure can vary a lot. There were a lot of one-room tiny mud huts with straw roofs, but there were also some gigantic and really sophisticated multilevel structures. In some places I though the houses looked nicer than some Denver neighborhoods. Bardeep's family has a two-story mud hut housing 7 people (the mother, her older son, his wife, their 2-year old, plus Bardeep's sister and her 5 year-old son (her husband is working in India) and the family’s father (though I did not meet him because he was out in the paddies all day)). Bardeep left home at age 7 to start working at the resorts and he’s lived in resorts since then. He feels very lucky because when he was 17, he was able to learn how to be a guide and has been doing that for the last six years while also trying to finish school. Bardeep tried to explain to me that his mother’s house was not so nice, that it was very old (his father built it a long time ago, apparently) and he wanted to earn enough money and build her a new one before he got married. Bardeep’s older brother does not work at all; he was a professional futbol player until last year when he broke his leg. So the only income coming into the whole nine person family is Bardeep’s income, the sister’s husband’s remittances from India and a very small profit margin from the rice paddys, though they mostly just feed the family.

Celebration basics: The 10^th day of Dasain is Dashimi, a day when the elders bestow blessings on the younger members of the family for the year. Each family in Nepal sacrifices a goat a couple days earlier. Then, each older person blesses the younger people with three things: a tika, jamara (yellow grass), and a small amount of money. The tika is a mixture of rice, yogurt and red coloring supposed to represent the blood of the family as well as the sacrificed goat and it gets put on your forehead. The jamara is a symbol of the godessess’ conquest and is put behind your ear (or in a girl’s pony tail). I have no idea what the money is for. I kept trying to ask Bardeep about the significance of things happening that day, but he just kept telling me that Dasain was the time of the year when Nepalis waste all their money cooking extravagant meals. He also said that because so many people do not work here, they need festivals to keep themselves busy. In addition, younger members of the family receive a new set of clothes on Dashimi. For some poor families, this is the only time of year they receive new clothes. For richer families (like my host family in Kathmandu), Dasain is the time to buy all new things for the year. This year, Bardeep’s mom gave him his wedding suit as his clothing, though he has no immediate plans to get married. Ha, talk about a not at all subtle hint! After we had all received our tikas, we ate a big lunch then headed off to “relatives house.”

Tika from Bardeep's Mom

The Celebration Continues: When Bardeep said we were walking 30 minutes to his relatives house, I thought he meant like one relative. Instead, we spend the entire rest of the day going to every single one of his relatives’ houses. The younger members of the family have to receive blessings from every elder. Luckily, Bardeep’s family has a monopoly on a particular corner of the village. So we would walk though some paddies, then boom we’d be at another family member’s house. I have absolutely no idea how everyone was related but there was a lot of tika and a lot of food. By the end of the day I had red rice falling into my eyes and could not eat another bite. I think I had seven lunches. English was less common in the village than Kathmandu (understandably) so most of the day I had no idea what was going on, but it was a really cool experience. Everyone was so welcoming and did not seem at all surprised by the presence of this random American girl. Lots of people wanted to take a picture with me (one woman joked that it would be a “black and white picture”). His little cousins also gained a special place in my heart, because instead of the usual chorus of “Hello, how are you?” or “Hello, what is you name?” I hear yelled over and over again at me throughout most of Nepal, his cousins picked “You are very beautiful.” Luckily, I know how to say “And you also” in Nepali. J

Tika from an uncle

And Continues: Since families are now more dispersed across Nepal, it has evolved that you get the last five days of Dasain to receive a tika from every elder in your family instead of having to make it everywhere on Dashimi. A smart move I think, because families here are gigantic. When I returned back to Kathmandu on the 8^th, it was time for tikas from my host family, and every night since then extended family members have been here for dinner and tikas. Radhakrisna said that there are more than 100 members in his family. Geez. Dasain is almost now over now, tomorrow’s big highlight is that kids gamble with the money they got on Dashimi, but have no fear, the next festival (Diwali, but it’s called Tihar here) is just 15 days away…

Bardia National Park

Welp, the jungle and I are not soul mates. Bardia is like a huge tourist-free version of Chitwan. There are no tourists because it is really hard to get to and because it is in the heartland of the recently ended Maoist conflict. I had a set program through a resort there, and the first day was a full day-long jungle trek. I was the only guest who had that program that day, so I got a private safari. I have to say, walking through a National Park famous for tigers, sloth bears, crocodiles and rhinos with nothing but a small Nepali man with a stick to protect you is a very humbling experience. It turns out, I should have been a lot less worried about the animals I came to see and a lot more worried about allergies and leeches. I am allergic to absolutely everything in the jungle and apparently am the biggest leech magnet in the world. I’m glad leeches aren’t dangerous, but having my entire pant leg and both socks soaked in blood was too much for me. It was not such a fun day, though in some way it’s nice to know that not every single place in Nepal is a candidate for most amazing place in the country. And I am proud of myself for not bursting into tears in the middle of the jungle as I so badly wanted to after attack of the leeches round three (not to mention four, five and six).

Most of the day spent in this position: hiding in the bushes by the river.

But they had baby elephants! I like baby elephants!

Financial Guiding Principles

October 1, 2011

You know those days that are otherwise unremarkable but are great thinking days? The bus ride to Chitwan was possibly the greatest thinking time I’ve ever had. I share just a bit of it here, since this is a topic I have discussed regularly with friends and family over the years.

Since graduating from college, I’ve developed a strained relationship with my finances. I fluctuate wildly and irrationally between feeling financially secure and feeling like I’m about to go broke. This issue has been aggravated in Nepal by how openly people talk about money. I get asked frequently how much I make and how much my parents support me and how much things cost me. And particularly this splurge trip of jungle safaris has stirred up some internal conflict. I figured since I am all the way around the world and have the chance to ride the elephants, I should do it right. And even after paying for my trip in full, I was still way under budget for the first five weeks of this trip. Yet for some reason, the day before I left, I panicked about this “extravagant” expenditure. I was still freaked out when I got on the bus, but eventually I realized that the trip was already paid for, so it was a moot point and perhaps I should channel my thinking to figuring out why money freaks me out so easily. And so followed a tremendously productive few hours of thinking.

I think that finances freak me out because it is an area in which I feel very susceptible to judgment. And I think this susceptibility stems from me wanting to feel like I spend and save appropriately/normally and not having any concept of what that looks like. So when I graduated, I bought all these young adult finance books and found the “spend x% of your income on this category” stuff completely useless because it had no grounding in my financial context. In retrospect, I think it must be really hard to write a book about budgeting because how we mange our money and what we spend money on are such immensely personal decisions. At the base, expenditures are kind of the external manifestations of our values—we spend money on things we care about and not on things we don’t. So maybe, when I feel judged about my expenditures, it is actually a part of me feeling like my values are being questioned (even though that is never how it is intended). And then I get all worked up because maybe I do spend too much on things that don’t matter. But wait, my finances are my finances and why do I care what others think and how it compares to the “norm”? AH-HA! Unlike many areas in my life, to this point I have not had a firm understanding of my approach to finances, so I am easily swayed by the opinions of others. I’ve made budgets, of course, but I have never stepped back and examined the assumptions behind those budgets.

This was such an epiphany for me and I spent the next bit of time writing myself a set of financial guiding principles. The goal was to explicitly decide on a set of criteria for me to judge my financial decisions. Theoretically, then I would be able to distinguish overly extravagant purchases from ones that are just fine and panic only when appropriate. I found the exercise so incredibly worthwhile that I thought I would share the process here. The questions I focused on contemplating were:

(1)  What are my financial “golden rules” that should never be broken?

(2)  What amount is a comfortable safety net to always have in the bank?

(3)  Under what circumstances am I willing to take on dept?

(4)  What kind of ongoing financial support would I accept/do I expect from my parents? (I guess the flip of this for parents would be, “What do I expect to provide to my adult children?” And maybe as we get older it shifts into, “What do I need to provide for my aging parents?”)

(5)  What are my priority spending areas? What things are important to me and worth financial expenditures (at whatever level is appropriate for my current financial situation)?

(6)  What are low priority spending areas?

(7)  For “rainy days” (literally or figuratively, whenever you have a really bad day), how much would I be willing to spend on a short-term fix? (Almost definitely depends on how regularly you have bad days.)

After I thought thoroughly about these items, I felt so much better about my splurge trip. Given my financial situation and my financial priorities, it was absolutely appropriate. I’m going to go back and revise my guiding principles periodically, and certainly whenever I have a change of financial situation. And of course there will always be times when an exception needs to be made. But in the end, I made this agreement with myself:

My financial life is mine alone. I will gauge my financial decisions on these guiding principles and not on the opinions of others. I shall work hard to never judge the financial decisions of others because their guiding principles differ from mine.

A few days later, I was reading the Dhammapada (the scripture for Hinayana Buddhists, I'll do some more writing on this later) and my favorite section of that is actually very similar to the agreement I wrote for myself, though it's about morals rather than finances. An excerpt:

First once must establish one's own high moral principles... Let one mold himself in accordance with the precepts he teaches... One should not neglect one's one moral good for the sake of another's... Let each one embrace his own truth and devote himself to its fulfillment.  

 

Lumbini

October 3, 2011

“A Symbol of Unity in Diversity: the Foundation of World Peace”

Lumbini’s tag line captures almost perfectly what makes Lumbini such a special place. Lumbini is another World Heritage Site, the birthplace of Buddha. It’s a huge preservation area that houses three sections: (1) The Maya Devi Temple, (2) The Buddhist Monasteries and (3) The World Peace Pagoda. In the middle of the preservation area is a long reflecting pool that would put the one in DC to shame. At one end is the Pagoda and at the other end is the Temple and all along the sides are the Buddhist Monestaries. I have a few thoughts about each place that I’d like to share:

(1)  The Maya Devi Temple marks the exact site of the birth of Buddha. In addition, the area houses the Ashokan Pillar commemorating the spot from the Indian government and the Sacred Pond and Sacred Garden, around which lots of folks were meditating.

·       Buddha’s birthplace was really different than I expected. I guess for some reason I thought it would just be like, a really old Bodhi tree with a plaque or something. But of course, this is a popular religious pilgrimage site, so a few iterations of temples have been build on/around the spot. The Maya Devi Temple is actual the ruins of a temple that was built at least 2,210 years ago! Inside the temple there is a stone on the exact spot of Buddha’s birth and a brick pavilion now protects the temple.

·       I was again deeply moved by the peaceful coexistance and mutual respect between Hindus and Buddists. I definitely did not expect to see Hindus taking tikas at the marker stone of Buddha’s birth. Right now I’m about 400 pages into reading the Bible (I’m on 2 Kings), and it’s such an interesting contrast: So much of the history books of the Bible are about the Isrealites being persuaded to worship Baal or other idols and God punishing them for it. Yet Buddha is a Hindu god, the ninth incarceration of Vishnu. As Buddha, Vishnu convinced the demons to abandon the Vedas (Hindu scripture), and that’s how the gods were ultimately able to defeat the demons. This strange role (helping the gods defeat the demons… but by convincing the demons to renounce Hindu scripture) kind of shows how uneasy the Hindu priests were about the rise of Buddhism at the time, but in modern days, Buddha is worshiped regularly by Nepali Hindus just like the other incarcerations of Vishnu. I guess the ability to make that inclusion is a big difference between polytheism and monotheism.

·       There is a big different between spots with true and deep religious significance and those just dolled up for tourism. I’ve noticed this before, and all my favorite spots are those that are truly religiously significant, but it was really driven home by watching the monks mediating under a tree just across from an everyday family meditating under a tree. The Maya Devi Temple is nothing special to look at, but the place just has such a powerful feeling. 

Variety of religious pilgrims

(1)  The Buddhist Monasteries that line the reflecting pool are divided into the west zone for the Mahayana school and the east zone for the Hinayana school. The difference between the two schools is that Hinayana Buddhists (or “Followers of the Lesser Way”) seek to attain Nirvana for the individual’s sake whereas Mahayana Buddhists (or “Followers of the Bodhisattva”) seek Nirvana for the sake all sentient beings, but a lot of times a monk will move from being a Hinayana Buddhist to a Mahayana Buddhist and there is a lot of overlap between the scriptures for the two. I hired a rickshaw to take me around to all the monasteries because they are quite spread out.

·       I love seeing how many different forms places of spiritual significance can take. I didn’t take many pictures of the monasteries, because there were monks all over the place and I already felt like I was intruding enough, so I will try to describe it. Every country that has an active Buddhist population can build a temple in this area. There are countries you would expect, like China and Thailand, and countries you would not, like France and Austria. And all of the monasteries are so different. The biggest contrast for me was between the Chinese monastery and the Korean monastery (both Mahayana). The Chinese monastery was this ornately decorated building with lots of colors and beautifully painted sculptures (Buddha idols mostly, but others too) and murals and the rectangular building surrounded a grassy courtyard with nice flowers and a little pond. Directly across the pathway is the Korean monastery, a gigantic building made entirely (inside and out) of cement. The only decoration was a small golden Buddha and some hanging lotus flowers. I love that they have such different physical manifestations, yet both serve as spiritual sanctuaries for so many.

(2)  The World Peace Pagoda. Oh my goodness. Seeing this alone was worth the rickshaw hire because I would not have made it all the way there by foot. The World Peace Pagoda is this fabulous white stupa made of $1 million worth of white marble. It is beautiful. I’m sure it helps that it is surrounded by a crane sanctuary and that I was there at sunset. I didn’t want to leave; I just kept walking around the different levels in my clockwise circles. Then I got dizzy. At the base of the stupa is the grave of a Japanese monk killed by anti-Buddhist extremists during the monument’s construction. I found this both sad and shocking. I had never heard of an anti-Buddhist extremist before.

All in all, I thought Lumbini was amazing. It didn’t require a long stay, but it was worth the long trip. 

Parting shot: Sunset over the Sacred Pond