A few people have asked me if it will be hard to adjust to life back home after being here. Nope, I say, not at all, thinking about the friends and family and fresh salads waiting for me at home.
It used to be. At the end of my semester in Brazil we had a whole session on re-adjusting and dealing with culture shock. I remember being shocked by the variety in the supermarket, the hot water right out of the tap, and the clean, quiet streets. But the harder part was being overwhelmed by my own wealth and privilege after seeing such desperate poverty and trying to grapple with how unfair it all is and how big and complex the world’s problems are.
I don’t think it’s that I’ve become immune to these things. I spent the bus ride to my field site listening to This American Life’s take on the hopelessness of fixing Haiti and I started crying because I was looking out the window at pretty much the same hopeless story, halfway around the world. Talking with impoverished farmers about the challenges they face, watching flies crawl all over their children, wondering how we can possibly fix everything hasn’t gotten less sad – if anything, the more I learn, the harder it gets as I realize just how much we’re up against.
But some self-preservation is necessary. I have to be able to walk away from it sometimes and enjoy my own life or my career will be very short-lived. That means going to the fancy $7 dinner expat restaurants here sometimes, and it means not bringing all the weight of what I see here with me when I go home.
So I’ve gotten used to going back and forth between two worlds. It’s like I have one self that walks into traffic and brushes my teeth with bottled water and one that expects youtube videos to load instantly and eats raw vegetables. And a 34-hour flight will be more than enough time to switch back.
I’m looking at this project, the one helping farmers make money by selling tomatoes, or goats, or whatever, and asking the question – what can make a project like that be successful and sustainable in five years, ten years? Part of the answer is this other buzzword, capacity building – not just throwing money at farmers but actually teaching them to fend for themselves after the NGO leaves. As I’ve mentioned, the project I’m looking at focuses on building local institutions and training farmers to manage them on their own. Will it work?
One of the things I noticed that farmers had learned is how to identify their needs and whom to ask for support. Farmers’ groups register with the District Agricultural Development Office, a government body whose role is to assist farmers with technical and even material support. At first, I thought, “Great, just pass these farmers on to someone else, keep them dependent on external aid.” But maybe it is a step in the right direction. Sustainability doesn’t mean they have to do it alone – look at the university ag extension system in the US. If farmers can figure out what kind of help they need (harder than it sounds when the development model is too often handouts with little input from the beneficiaries) and know where to go to get it, maybe that is a good model.
Except that the district ag office is incredibly underfunded and understaffed. So do we just move international donor money to the ag offices? That isn’t any more of a long-term solution than keeping NGOs in these villages forever. Nepal has a long way to go before it’s free of its dependency on foreign aid, but someone needs to be thinking about what a Nepal without foreign aid might look like. How could Nepal fund its own ag offices? Taxes? Have farmers’ groups pay for the services they get? Neither option seems feasible now – the government has almost no tax-collecting capacity, and these farmers who are barely scraping by couldn’t possibly pay enough to keep the offices running. But now it’s like the country is living paycheck to paycheck, just focusing on where the next source of international aid is coming from.
They need the aid. They need more of it. But eventually, someday, the goal has to be a country that can sustain itself without all the foreign aid and INGOs. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I think it’s worth trying to figure out – if we have no idea of where we want to go, we’re never going to get there.
After making three trips to the airport, changing my flight itinerary, sitting in a crowded micro for four hours from a city with a functioning airport, and sleeping in a dingy guesthouse with a loud fan and someone else’s old toothbrush in the bathroom, I have to say I was kind of wondering why on earth I do this. The last few days reminded me why.
On Thursday morning the area manager for the project who would be showing me around picked me up on his motorbike and we road off through the jungle. All I had to do was watch the mist rise over the mountains. I love my job.
We visited eight villages in three days, meeting in each one with a group of farmers who have participated in the project. If you’re just tuning in, I’m looking at an agricultural development project that helps farmers capitalize on a newly constructed road corridor by cultivating and selling high-value products like vegetables. I’m trying to understand what are the factors that can make a project like this successful and sustainable. In each village I heard about their success story: higher incomes from their tomatoes or goats that allow them to send their kids to school and stop going to India to work for half the year, better health from clean drinking water and fresh vegetables, the community groups they’ve created to manage all of this. Overall, pretty impressive.
But then they would go on to tell me about all the things they need to keep it going – more trainings, another irrigation canal, more technical support – and I have to wonder what’s going to happen when this project runs out in two months. Who will they turn to when they want to expand their irrigation system but can’t get a loan to do it, or when their tomatoes get some disease, or when tomato prices drop? This project has focused on the capacity building that development people talk about all the time, by creating farmers’ groups in villages and giving them training and support so they can carry on after the NGO leaves. But there is obviously something missing, because the people I’ve been talking to don’t think they can do it alone.
I have spent a lot of my twenties living and traveling in, to use some jargon from the office, “Challenging Contexts.” I’ve slept on dirt floors, bathed in icy mountain streams and the piranha-infested Amazon, squeezed into old school bus seats with entire families and their livestock, eaten insects and probably worse – often because it’s the only choice, sometimes because I'm a cheapskate, but probably most often because it’s more fun to travel and eat with the locals than to take a taxi and get pizza at a tourist restaurant.
But am I starting to outgrow this? When it took me an hour and a half in two different vehicles, both with far too many people in them, to go a few kilometers across town yesterday, I wondered whether I should have coughed up $5 for a taxi. I had the money (though if you’ve been reading this blog you know that I could spend that $5 on a whole lot of mangos) – so why not take the taxi? Because it’s more fun and adventurous to take the bus? That was my answer, but really, once you’ve done it a few times, cramming into a micro to creep through noisy smelly traffic it doesn’t feel fun and exciting. It just feels uncomfortable and slow.
Rather than outgrowing my adventurous streak, I think I’m just getting more selective about my adventures. Finding hidden local restaurants and remote villages: worth it. Cold showers: been there, done that. I think I had to prove that I could do it – I could stay in the cheapest hotels and travel in the back of pickup trucks and eat who-knows-what at bus stops and get as far off the beaten tourist track as possible. But now that I’ve done that, maybe it’s time to shell out the $5 for a taxi so I can get to where I’m going and have more time to explore and find something crazy to eat once I get there. Because food will always be on the worth-it-adventure list.
Today I made it out for my first real bike ride in Nepal. I can't believe it took me so long.
I got up at 6am so I could get a little riding in before it was blazing hot, and headed out of the city and towards the hills. Traffic is a little quieter earlier in the morning (on Saturday at least), and I soon made it to my first village and my first confusing intersection that required asking directions. (Yes, I have a map. No, maps are not very useful here.) Fortunately most people knew what I was getting at when I said the name of the next town I was looking for and made my best lost gringa look, and they pointed me in the right direction.
I was surprised when a group of cyclists zoomed past me (not the zooming past me part, that was no surprise), so when I saw them resting at the top of the hill I joined them for spicy chick peas and chai and learned that they ride every day and that for just $7.00 I can rent a real bike and join them – or I can join them for free but get left in the dust with the piece of junk I’m riding around. We’ll see how often I can get up to meet them at 6am in central Kathmandu.
The real cyclists took off on their real bikes for a ride far beyond the ability of either me or my bike, but they gave me directions for a loop that took me on windy, bumpy dirt roads through small villages where children shouted various English phrases at me and I think I pushed the limit of mountain biking with zero suspension. And I even got a little glimpse of the Himalayas through the clouds. It’s amazing that in just a couple of hours on a bike you can get to villages that are barely accessible by car (I saw a few try) and where tourists are a pretty rare sight. Especially tourists with helmets.
Patan, where I am living, is home to the Rato Machhendranath Festival, the longest festival in Kathmandu. Machhendrenath, whose statue spends half of the year in Patan, has powers over rain, so this festival is a plea, at the beginning of monsoon season, for generous rains.
At the beginning of the festival, Rato Machhendranath’s statue is placed on a giant (like towering over buildings giant) wooden chariot and pulled around Patan for a full month. Sometime before I got to Nepal, they started pulling the chariot around Patan. I first went to see it a few blocks away, in a busy intersection full of people selling everything from samosas to bedsheets. People were lighting candles and praying as motorcycles tried to make their way through the crowds – a fairly typical scene of religion mixed with the big loud mess of everyday life.
The chariot’s final destination was right outside of my office, so my coworker Anisha and I went to see the procession on its final day. As expected, it was a complete zoo of a million people pushing and crowding and waiting for the very slow procession of this huge precarious statue. Power lines had to be removed to let it through, and I was surprised it didn’t crash into any buildings as it wobbled through the narrow streets (this has happened in past years). In front was a guy who was trying to get the crowd riled up about something, I will probably never know what, and groups of drunk men and (hopefully not drunk) teenaged boys pulled on ropes in what I assume was an attempt to keep the whole thing upright.
The chariot moved about a block per hour, so we left to get momos before the chariot had made it all the way to our corner.
Here are some pictures:
Trekking in the off-season has its positives and negatives. On the upside, I didn’t see what I can only assume from the quantity of guesthouses must be an army of trekkers during peak season. But off-season trekkers pay for the peace and quiet by dealing with cloudy skies and heavy muggy air. We were spectacularly lucky not to get rained on, but the clouds rolled in every day around 10am – a good reason, in addition to the heat, to get up and start hiking at 6am. On my second day, I woke up pleasantly surprised to find that our guesthouse had a breathtaking view of the snowy peaks behind those clouds. Who knew?
On Day Two we stopped in Jhinu and visited what is now on my list of Best Hot Springs in the World, right on the edge of a rushing river – just what I needed after a day of walking up and down steep stone steps looking at beautiful mountain views.
We started hiking on Day Three and were soon joined by a handful of middle school-aged girls in school uniforms. I gasped for breath and struggled to keep as I watched them sprint up the steep trails in their cheap plastic shoes, even offering to carry my guide’s bag for a while. My lazy-American feeling was reinforced when my guide told me they were going to school in Gandruk, our destination for the day, and at the end of the day they would hike all the way back. But I felt better about myself when they gave me some berries they picked on the trail and I was able to say they were delicious and ask the girls their names.
I think these girls were the first people we interacted with on the trail. It’s interesting, hiking in an area that gets so many trekkers, how uninteresting we are. Here I am, hiking around in what feels like pretty remote rural Nepal, with my transparent skin and funny boots, and everyone pretty much ignores me unless I walk into their restaurant and ask for a dal bhat. From what I can see, it seems that trekkers are the primary economic support for the region, so it’s not like a white person with a backpack walking through your village is anything new or exciting.
