davethegrinch.net

Dave says:

In a effort to save our souls, atone for our self centered western existence and just to step off the tourist trail for a while, we have decided to volunteer in Nepal. Once upon a time one would have to give up two years for the Peace Corps but these days, with the influx of little time / much money do-gooders, one can buy ones way out of the confessional and onto the express elevator to karmic balance. Today volunteering means paying an NGO money to give you a “meaningful vacation experience”. As illustrated by the opening of this post, it is very easy to be cynical about the whole process but, nevertheless, here Sarah and I are, a few dollars poorer to help make someone else’s life a little richer.

The NGO we chose is called Info Nepal and they do a great job of putting the meaningful into the experience. Our total time with them is one month and the first week was spent in language and culture classes. We can now utter a smattering of Nepali and can tell a Hindu temple from a Bhuddist stupor. So confident are we that we can butcher the language enough to feel good about ourselves and to impress you, our dear readers, we shall attempt to write a future blog entry in Nepali.

Nepali culture is very strange when compared to our homogenized Anglo-American one so to prepare us for this paradigm shift we were sent to the village of Dhulikhel for two nights to stay with a family and get the shock over and done with. Info Nepal didn’t quite phrase it that way but were extremely insistent we pay the balance of our fee before we left for the village whereas they had been almost lackadaisical about it up to that point. That was my first indication this would be a very different experience and one other volunteers had found too much and had left the program demanding a refund. The reader would be advised to remember the Asian culture is to bargain for everything and refund nothing; a policy in direct opposition to our own.

Our training family could not have been nicer and they could also have not have been poorer. Sixteen family members lived in two structures on a small piece of land. The houses were a combination of brick and mud-bricks with no glass windows and no furniture to speak of. Breakfast and dinner (dahl-bhaat) was cooked on an open fire, served on a tin plate and eaten only with ones right hand whilst squatting on a mud floor in the only communal room in the house. Dhal Bhaat is rice served with a lentil soup. Pour the soup over the rice and stir with your hand until it makes a goopy mess then stuff it in your face. Sometimes a little vegetable is added. They eat this and only this twice a day thereby dispensing with the words “breakfast” and “dinner” and replacing them simply with dhal-bhaat. “Have you had Dhal-bhaat yet?” we would ask twice a day when we felt hungry. Yet, karma is good to us and these people gave us as much of their hard farmed food as we wanted even if it meant they went without. Once dhal-bhaat is done, the plates are taken to the outside standpipe to be washed and the mud floor is cleaned with cow dung. That’s right: cow dung! One of the daughters returned to the kitchen with a handful of cow crap, threw it on the floor and rolled it around like modeling clay. I have to admit, it does pick up the spilled rice well and they say it has anti-bacterial properties but I almost rangi-changi wak-wak’d my dhal-bhaat straight up again.

Translation note: Rangi Changi Wak Wak is a phrase Sarah and I made up from the Nepali words Rangi Changi meaning multi-colored and Wak Wak meaning vomit.

Our sleeping quarters were fine, as clean as they could be considering where we were and our family had done their absolute best to make it as comfortable as their means would allow. Electricity is scarce here. The whole country is on a rolling blackout schedule and so that combined with the our family’s single 60W light bulb dictates when the sun rises so does the family and vice-versa. We surfaced to find the yard already overflowing with harvested mustard grass. The girls, for it is only women in Napali families that do the manual labor, spent the whole day threshing and sieving the grass to extract mustard seeds which they would then mill into mustard oil. I thought I’d help out and, much to the amusement of the entire family, spent and hour or so sieving husks with a shaker to extract the seeds. For this I earned the name “Jalle-Daai” which means “Shaker Brother”. This is clearly the best nickname I’ve ever had.

About this time, nature called and both Sarah and I had to venture to the latrine. This is where it all started to unravel. The squat toilet was overflowing with a very large family’s worth of processed dhal-bhaat. It was not good. It was not remotely sanitary and, worse of all, it did not appear to bother the family one bit. We dropped some hints but in any culture it’s considered rude to mention to the host the state of their toilet. After they cleaned it, it was no better. Our fellow trainee volunteers reported similar problems at their houses too and nobody was feeling good about it. It didn’t seem to be a problem for the locals though.

After dhal-bhaat on the second night the power was on and most of the family retired upstairs to watch TV. This had just about the same level of surprise to me as the cow dung from the night before. Here are people with no running water, nothing but a fire to cook on and a toilet situation that’s making Everest seem like a small hill yet they have a TV!

Sarah and I spent some time ruminating on this. It is not our place to judge their culture unduly and, being Americans where not owning a TV is considered unconstitutional, it is certainly not our place to criticize their TV habits. This leaves us in a moral quandary. These people clearly have a sense of family and duty and tradition that makes the USA seem like the school shooting, crack addicted, self obsessed culture it’s trying so hard to be yet the families in this village seem to have problems with the most basic of skills required for human survival. At first we thought it was a general shunning of items outside their traditions but they have a TV and another host family have a computer. Then we thought it was a lack of infrastructure but other houses in the village appeared to have running water and more than one light bulb. Then we though that old wives’s tales might be true. Perhaps cow dung really is an antiseptic and washing dishes in cold water with no soap works great but then they all use shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste. Next we moved onto the economic theory that maybe these people are too poor to buy the things they need but the TV, computer and jeans came back - besides, soap is cheap everywhere in the world. So in the end, we were left completely stumped. These are no doubt the kindest, poorest, most proud and most welcoming people we have ever met we just can’t understand why they appear to deprive themselves of the cheap basics in life that would not only make their hard lives a little easier but also help prevent illness and disease that could make them live longer. Every family member acted and looked ten years older than they really were. The mother looked in her seventies even though she was in her mid-fifties, only two years older than Sarah’s mom. I guess having eight kids might have something to do with that. I’m not saying that soap is the answer to Nepal’s problems but our trainers repeatedly told us how proud everyone is of Nepali culture and how we must observe and not criticize, however, when a lack of the basics in life are hidden behind a mask of culture then one should take a closer look. Cultural change is not always for the worse.

We leave for our real placement in Chitwan tomorrow. It’s in another part of the country and with a different caste of family. You can be sure that a follow-up to this post is in your future.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 2:11 am and is filed under Global Travels, Nepal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.