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.