Tansen

November 24, 2011

While waiting (unsuccessfully) for the weather in Pokhara to clear, my dad and I headed to Tansen for a few days. Tansen is known these days for two things: First, it is famous for producing dhaka, woven fabrics they use to make topis (traditional cloth hats for the men), jackets and shawls. The pattern you see most frequently on topis is a kind of wild crisscrossing of oranges, pinks and whites that makes my head spin a bit—this pattern is called palpi, named after Palpa, the district that Tansen is the administrative seat of. Second, Tansen was unfortunately the location of one of the bloodiest battles of the recent Maoist insurgency. In 2006, 40,000 Maoists attacked the Tansen Durbar in the middle of the city, which in modern times serves as an administrative building. The Durbar is still being rebuilt, and around Tansen you can see bullet holes in the bricks still.

Tansen was a great little detour. I particularly liked three things about it. First, I liked wandering around the bazaar without anyone pressuring you to buy things. Even when you stop at a stall, the shopkeepers help you politely but never get tense if you seem like you might not purchase anything. Every time I go to a small town in Nepal, I want to buy something, both because I would rather give my friends and families authentic gifts and because I would rather pump my money directly into the villages than the tourist district in Kathmandu. In most towns, there is not enough industry to actually make this happen, so Tansen was a nice change. I was able to buy some great Christmas gifts at three different shops around Tansen.

Shopping!

Second, the bus ride to Tansen was fabulous. Or at least, the scenery was fabulous. In Nepal, I’ve started getting motion sick (one too many 10-hour bus rides I guess) so any road with twisty bumpy turns (every road) is kind of a nightmare for me, but it was good for my dad to get to experience real Nepal travel. The road twisted through the hilly, wooded areas of Nepal’s Western Hills. AND my dad took all the touristy pictures I’ve been wanted to have but was too embarrassed to take myself. Win.

Bus interior

Most villages are not accessible by road. Nepalis take a bus to a random trailhead, then walk straight up the valley walls and 1-2 days to a village. This is a typical path Nepalis jump off the bus for.

Standard roadside shop

Third, the hills around Tansen were beautiful for hiking. I got my hiking fix for the fall, since I’ve been unable to hike solo due to safety concerns. It was kind of weird because there were a lot of trees, but barely any foliage on the ground. My dad suggested that maybe the trees block the light.

All in all a great final village to visit. Stay tuned for Elena’s Nepal Greatest Hits: a trip planner for all of you who are now dying to come to Nepal. J

Mindful Communication

November 21, 2011

The Background Story:

In the last six months at my job, I got really interested in how we communicate. My interest was sparked by observing how staff reacted to different people in leadership roles. And my initial goal was to figure out if there are easily adoptable things that make some leaders able to gain respect and cooperation more easily than others. The short answer (in my opinion) is yes and no. I do think that some people are naturally more suited for leadership roles; but a lot of leadership appears to be teachable. Specifically, it occurred to me that two people could convey the same message with two different speeches and get completely different reactions. I started listening incredibly carefully to the types of words that different folks used, and noting tactics that were particularly effective.

I love this game of listening to how people communicate; it makes every interaction a learning experience. Over the summer, I started trying to implement some tactics that I liked, some of which worked for me and others didn’t fit. The general skill I am trying to develop is speaking more gently with others. The specific skill has initially been focused around how to express a different viewpoint in a way that doesn’t immediately garner a prickly response. I was blessed with a plethora of amazing role models in my time at the Foundation, and some of my favorite “best practices” include:

1. In August I went to a course on evaluation theory taught by Mel Mark, one of the country’s experts on the topic. Yet regularly throughout the day, he would preface his comments with, “Now, from what I understand…” and then he would ask the class if that was how we understood the theory. The genuine modesty this conveyed—that he was positioning himself not as the expert, but rather a student of the field just like the rest of us—made me so much more attentive to his comments. It was incredible. That’s the kind of professor I want to be—deeply knowledgeable but unwaveringly interested in learning from others, regardless of their background and education.
2. My first supervisor at the Foundation was a powerful speaker because she is the most even keeled person I’ve ever met. By maintaining such a calm speaking style, you don’t get distracted by the way someone is speaking and can really pay attention to the content of what they are saying. Though this is not something I am likely to ever achieve (I just get so gosh darn excited sometimes!), I greatly admire the skill.
3. My second supervisor at the Foundation is a pro at explaining really complicated methodology in a simple way. In our department, we did a lot of teaching, and at times I felt like a broken record, saying the same things over and over again. I was always worried that at some point I’d hit my limit of times folks were willing to listen to my guided tour of statistical significance and bar charts. Yet she skillfully avoided this trap by prefacing things with, “I’m sure you know this, but…” kind of making every point a reminder of things we learned previously rather than her always teaching something new. Just fabulous.
4. Two of our program officers had a marvelous way of expressing an opposing viewpoint by starting with a positive about what the other person had just said. So even when they completely disagreed with someone, they would start a point by saying something like, “Wow, I never thought about it like that, thanks! Here’s what I had been thinking…” This one’s hard for me to pull off because I tend to have such strong opinions that the intro feels disingenuous to me. Maybe I need to model these ladies’ open mindsets at a more fundamental level before I have success here.
5. Another coworker was my idol for how she adapted her speaking style for each of the people she assists. She has a knack for understanding what makes people tick and can quickly shift between many different approaches. This to me is like a platinum level skill, which I don’t think I’ve seen someone so good at—it requires both an expert knowledge of effective communication and the prowess to switch between tactics smoothly.

The Recent Experiment:

Despite all my effort in this area, I noticed last week that it is the people I have known the longest that I am slowest to change around. I guess I fall back into old patterns when around people who knew me before the patterns were broken. It seems completely unfair that the people who put up with my flaws for the longest are the last to benefit from my self-improvement. Most recently, this manifested with my tendency to immediately shut my dad down the moment he suggests something contrary to my opinion. So I decided to go cold turkey on the word “no.” For one week, I tried my very best to avoid using the word “no” at all. My thinking was that there is always another way to convey your point, but leading with the word “no” is unnecessarily harsh.

Giving up “no” was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be and I think I did pretty well this week. There were, however, three occasions that I did not succeed at avoiding “no:”

1. There are a lot of phrases that have the word “no” in them! “No problem” and “no idea” are two that I use a lot. At the end of the week, I decided that these phrases were acceptable, because they are not harsh like “no,” so the general policy of speaking more delicately can still be achieved.
2. In one of the Dalai Lama’s famous speeches, he suggests analyzing your behavior at the end of each day, noting how many negative activities and how many positive activities happened. “Because you give this subject special attention, as time goes by your behavior will improve.” What I’ve found is that proper behavior becomes particularly challenging on days when your mind is not in top shape. I am not a nice person when I’m grumpy. I was in a foul mood one day this week and the “no”s came back out in full force. Ugh. In retrospect, I wonder if by focusing more on a concrete task like not saying “no,” my bad mood might dissipate because it would not have mental energy to feed on. An experiment for another day.
3. Direct yes/no questions, particularly when there is a language barrier, sometimes require a firm “no.” When my Nepalese cab driver asked “Do you want to stop to take a picture?,” he did not understand my response of, “That’s ok.”

This was a fun little experiment for me. I hope I’m able to keep avoiding jumping to the “no” reaction. Speaking more gently may be a lifelong challenge for me; I’m aiming for gradual improvement in my speaking style over many many years. But I like this strategy of taking a speaking tactic to an extreme for one week and I may try to think of some others for the months I’m back in the States. A week of speaking really slowly immediately comes to mind. Yikes, that sounds hard. Maybe I can start with just a day…

The Mountains Around Bandipur

November 18, 2011

My mountain luck continues to be atrocious. Maybe growing up in Colorado I somehow used it all up. I’ve been in Nepal eleven weeks as of yesterday, and I can count the number of days I have seen the Himalayas on one hand. The unexpected benefit of this is that I have grown an immense love of the hill regions of Nepal, because without the mountains looming above, the rolling hills are gorgeous. Green and tiered and the kind of pastoral I thought only happened in paintings. I keep thinking it’s a shame they get passed over for the 8,000 meter peaks above them…

But then I see the 8,000 meter peaks and I understand. The mountains here don’t look real. During the day, the blues on the peaks and the blues in the sky match so perfectly that it looks like a photoshoot background. And at sunset, the yellows, pinks and oranges reflected on the snow are so intense that it looks fake. I’ve gotten in the habit of watching the sunset every night in Kathmandu (the only plus about pollution is the fabulous sunset colors) and my two days in Bandipur set the bar for beautiful sunsets in my life.

My dad and I stopped by Bandipur on the way to Pokhara about a week ago. The town itself is tiny and I’m kind of Newari villaged out (temple, brick roads, wood carved windows, I get it), but the hills were fun to hike around in and we had two days of amazing mountain views from our hotel room, so I will let the best thing about Bandipur speak for itself:

Flying Solo

November 4, 2011

The three questions I get asked by everyone I meet in Nepal are:

1. Where are you from?
2. Where are your friends? / Why are you alone?
3. Aren’t you married?

I am definitely acting contrary to social norms here—Nepalese women only started riding local buses alone within the last two years, so the idea that I am in a foreign country alone is absurd to most Nepalis, especially older generations. When I say that I am traveling by myself and I am not married, folks look genuinely saddened. At first it kind of bugged me, because I think I interpreted the sadness as a statement about my capacity to travel alone. (My first reaction was along the lines of, “I can do it myself!”) But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I don’t think that’s at all how it is intended.

In both American and Nepali culture, being single (whether for a short trip or a lifetime) carries a certain stigma. Yet in America, I get the sense that being single is frowned upon because of its implications about that individual, for example, that there is something wrong with them, because otherwise they would have a significant other. In Nepal, the stigma is quite different—here, a woman alone signifies the failure of the community to care for its own. The sad reaction I get when I respond that I am in Nepal on my own is not a reaction to anything about me, but rather a feeling that my community has some how let me down.

One good example of how this plays out in Nepali culture happened to me this week on my way back to Kathmandu from Ilam. I had to change buses in Birtamod, with a three-hour wait before catching the night bus home. About 45 minutes into the layover, a woman comes over with one-year old son and her aging father. She points to her father and says, “He wants to know why you are traveling alone.” I tried to explain that I was just in Janakpur and Ilam exploring and now I was heading back to the family I lived with in Kathmandu. She relayed this to her father and he shook his head and asked to see my bus ticket. I thought that was the end of it, but fast forward 2 hours and when it was within a half hour of when my bus was supposed to arrive, this elderly man got up from his spot on the bench and waddled the 30ish feet over to each arriving bus to see if it was mine, every time returning and telling me, “tapaaiko bus china” (not your bus). The family’s bus came before mine so the man was unable to successfully get me on my bus, but when he left, another older man stepped up to the plate. This second man walked me all the way inside my bus, put my bag in the overhead and showed me my seat before returning to wait for his bus. Then the couple sitting in front of me figured out I was traveling alone, and they decided that I would “travel with them” for the duration of the 16-hour bus ride. Every stop, they would shuffle me off the bus, make sure I found the bathroom (often hard to locate in Nepalese rest stops), got a snack, and got back safely on the bus before the driver started the engine.

That I could have managed all of these things myself is completely besides the point in Nepal. The point here is that doing these things myself should never cross my mind, because my community should obviously do them for me. The social contract is clear, and everyone’s role is set in stone. Interestingly, the Nepali word for alone is the exact same as the word for lonely, “eklai,” which literally translates to “oneself.” The word independent is not in any of my Nepali-English dictionaries. I think this pretty telling about the culture here. To travel alone (or choose not to marry) is unheard of. Every thing a female does, she does accompanied by a male relative. At first I thought this would be pretty limiting; I was interpreting it as women can only do things that a man also wants to do. But that’s not how it works. Women do what they want and men are expected to accompany them. When I realized this, I was still a bit confused by how it works in practice, I mean, I only have four male relatives (dad, brother, uncle, cousin), if one of them had to do everything I wanted to do (and everything the other five women in my family wanted to do), they would never get to do their own thing. But you have to remember that this cultural phenomenon goes hand in hand with Nepal’s broader definition of family. They call almost everyone brother/sister or aunt/uncle. Thus, there is a larger pool of male companions, and the community as a whole comes together to take care of the women. In exchange, the women take care of all the cooking, cleaning, shopping, money management and other household tasks. Rather than gender equality, it strikes me that Nepal has support equality; the type of support you provide and receive just takes very different forms depending on your role in the family/community.

In America, I think that we have out grown traditional gender-based roles but we have not yet figured out what our new roles are. And maybe never again will there be a culture-wide understanding of individuals’ roles. I think there is something to be said for having more flexibility in societal roles; a major barrier to women’s empowerment here is that women cannot enter the workforce in a real way because the home responsibilities do not just disappear. But there is also a level of comfort in knowing what support you can expect from different people in your community. And I love this concept of support equality. Maybe true, literal gender equality is not the end goal, but rather we should strive for equal opportunities in society and equal support in relationships.

This social contracts topic is a big one that I’d like to keep pondering. And when I return home and continue to build my life, I’d like to be more deliberate about the people with staring roles in my life. I’d like to spend some time figuring out what types of support I need and where I expect to get that support. On the flip side, I want to make sure that I am in a solid position to provide support for the people that I love so that I do not end up expecting things I cannot reciprocate. I have no intention of giving up my American-bred fiercely independent self, I’d just like to gain a better understanding of how I fit into the larger community around me and learn to accept support more graciously. 

Janakpur

November 4, 2011

This week I finally made it down to Janakpur (the trip that got rained out in September). The city itself suffers from the usual Nepal tourism dilemma of being a full day bus ride from Kathmandu but only having about 2 hours worth of things to see. Janakpur is most famous among southern Nepalis and northern Indians (Janakpur was formerly the capital of the Mithila territory, half of which is now in India) for it’s role in the relationship between Rama (the seventh incarnation of Vishnu) and his wife Sita (an incarnation of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth). The Janaki Mandir is a huge temple built to honor Sita and then next door the Ram Sita Bibaha Mandir memorializes the spot where Rama and Sita were married. I’ve pretty much had my fill of the red brick and woodcarvings of the pagoda temples throughout the rest of Nepal and the bright colors were a much appreciated change of pace! 

Janaki Mandir

Janaki Mandir Inner Sanctum 

Ram Sita Bibaha Mandir

Two things made the 10-hour bus ride worthwhile for me. First, the trip was timed with Chhath, a major Hindu festival most intensely celebrated in Janakpur. Tens of thousands of Indian and Terai-Nepalis flood to the city twice a year for a multi-day festival to worship the sun goddess (and also something about good luck in marriage—Hindu festivals are never just for one purpose, as far as I can tell). On November 1, each family prepared offerings along the side of one of the many ponds in Janakpur. Then, when the sun goes down, the women fast and sit vigil with the offerings until sunrise, at which point the offerings are considered blessed. The families take the food home and make a big feast and everyone who eats the blessed food is supposed to receive the benefits of the offering until the next Chhath (the equivalent of receiving tika during most festivals). My favorite part was seeing all the women in colorful saris (day glow is still socially acceptable here!) and sheer volume of people and offerings involved in this festival.

One family's offerings

Pond surrounded by offerings

After dark

Second, my dad arrives on Sunday, so my time solo in Nepal is coming to a close, and in many ways, this Janakpur trip served as a final exam for my first solo travel adventure, specifically regarding embracing life outside my comfort zone. Tests included:

• Relinquishing all control over my life to male “relatives”: Prakash (the doctor who lives next door to me) and Radhakrishna (my host father) decided that Chhath would be the best time for me to go to Janakpur. Radhakrishna decided that it would be better for me to stay in his friend’s house (Mr. Balram) than in a hotel and that 2 nights would be the best amount of time to stay. When I arrived, Mr. Balram announced that his son (Sushant) would show me around Janakpur. Sushant and two of his friends thus became my tour guides for the trip and decided what I would see and when. I doubt I’ll be giving up control of my life again anytime soon, though it definitely was a “true Nepal” experience. I think there were pluses and minuses in this particular case. I read my guidebooks afterwards, and I think there are probably some things I missed by not exploring solo (though, if the locals didn’t take me there, how important/cool could the site be?). But it was nice to have some “male relatives” to shoo away the train of small child beggars and pesky teenage boys I inevitably acquire every time I leave Kathmandu, and it was nice not to have to keep track of where I was going.
• Shifting to Nepal time: When told that something would happen “now,” I automatically understood that in Nepal, that really meant “maybe in the next few hours” and it didn’t irritate me!
• Adventuresome eating: I ate on daal bhaat with my hands while sitting cross legged on the floor and I did not make too much of a mess. Though I think I failed this test because I made the rookie mistake of admitting I was hungry before dinner. Never ever say you are hungry in Nepal, because then when you say you are full, they respond, “but you are hungry, is it not tasty?”
• Not mentally jumping to the worst case scenario, part one: The “what happens if I get separated from Sushant in a sea of Hindu pilgrims” thought did not even phase me during Chhath.
• Not mentally jumping to the worst case scenario, part two: When the bus ticket counter was closed unexpectedly for the festival, and I wasn’t able to get out when planned, it was me who shrugged and said, “ke garne?” first. (“What to do?” the Nepali catch-all when something doesn’t go as anticipated, similar to our “whatcha gonna do?”)