My blog goes multi-media!

Want to know what it's like to commute in Kathmandu? My roommate Kate made this video of her walk to work the other day. As a bonus, you also get a little tour of our fancy shmancy apartment.

Adaptability

I consider myself to be a pretty adaptable person. It’s a job requirement. I managed to get a full night’s sleep on a few blankets on top of some wood boards in the field the other night, I went a week without a hot shower, and I’ve even managed to eat okra a few times. But there are some exceptions:

The food in Nepal is awesome. Most Nepalis eat nothing but dal bhat tarkari: lentil soup, rice, and some kind of vegetable curry – if you’re lucky, two curries, and if you’re even luckier some cucumbers and a papad. My guesthouse in Surkhet also throws in fresh homemade yogurt with dinner. So I could eat dal bhat every day, easy. What I can’t get used to is when they eat. I have yet to finish the mountain of rice they give me – really, it’s an astonishing pile of starch – and most Nepalis get seconds. And because they eat so much, they don’t even snack between lunch at 9 or 10 and dinner at 8. That’s 10-11 hours between meals. I’m glad I brought some clif bars.

I’ve picked up enough Nepali for basic needs, but language isn’t just about learning the Nepali words for what I want to say. An example: there is a word for “thank you” but Nepalis don’t say it except for very big things. So when I get my food at a restaurant or change in a store and respond with “danyabad” they think I’m a huge weirdo, unless I’m in a tourist area where they’re used to such strange behavior. But I am just incapable of not saying anything because I feel so rude, especially living in a foreign country where I want to be so polite and nice to everyone. I’ve taken to just saying thank you in my head so I don’t feel like a jerk.

I think my ears are the least adaptable part of me. I cringe every time I hear the hacking flemy coughs that everyone in Nepal is afflicted with. And the honking. Is it really necessary to announce your presence to every car or motorcycle or chicken or rock you pass?

Lastly. I’m all about the baggy pants, but they just don’t cut it on a bike. My deepest apologies to anyone who has had to witness the sight of my knees.

Wait, you lost me at tomatoes

By request, a quick explanation of the project I've been looking at:

Roads tend to help people. If there's a road near your village, your kids can get to school faster, you can get things like medicine and seeds more easily, and you can get the produce you grow to markets. But the road by itself isn't enough. Many of these farmers, because they have never had good access to markets, have no idea how to take advantage of this new opportunity. They don't know what people want to buy, at what prices, what new crop would grow well in their soil, where to get seeds for these crops.... you get the idea.

That's where this project comes in. NGO staff come into these villages and say "Hey, you have this road now, so why don't you grow something that you can sell to markets that you can get to now? You have good soil for tomatoes, you could grow them in the rainy season and get a high off-season price in Nepalgunj. What do you think?" As you can expect, it takes a little longer than that - distrust of outsiders, fear of taking risks (if you had half a hectare and kids to feed, wouldn't you be a little conservative about planting some unknown crop on your tiny plot of land?), and inexperience with markets mean that it takes a lot of visits to get a whole village to switch a bunch of their land from rice to tomatoes.

But a bunch of them did it - usually a few intrepid risk-takers at first, then more joined in when they saw their neighbors' success. The NGO taught them all about how to grow tomatoes, helped them find buyers, even built irrigation systems for some of them. And it's working. I talked to a woman who built a big beautiful house and sent her kid to English school with her tomato profits. She seemed pretty happy about it.

And then the NGO leaves. They always do. And then what?

Field work pictures

I just spent a week in Surkhet District in mid-western Nepal, talking with a few people at NGOs and government offices in Surkhet and with a whole bunch of farmers in villages outside of Surkhet who had participated in the project I'm looking at. Like usual, I took a lot of pictures. Here are a few favorites.

First days in the field

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.

Just kidding!

I'm still here! Yesterday I spent about four and a half hours at the airport waiting for the rain to clear up in Surkhet so we could fly. Today they were at least nice enough to cancel the flight only half an hour after I got there.

So I'm back in the office, and taking advantage of my nice internet connection to upload some photos from my biking adventures around Kathmandu Valley. Mostly from my roommate's and my overnight trip to Dhulikel, a long and difficult 32 km from Kathmandu.

To the field

Fascinating as Kathmandu is, I don’t do what I do so I can sit in an office in a big city halfway around the world. I’m in it for the fieldwork.

Initially I hoped to go to the western highlands, where the project that IWMI is studying, the Western Uplands Poverty Alleviation Project, is being implemented. But planes can’t fly over the cloudy mountains and vehicles can’t make it on the muddy landslide-ridden roads during monsoon, so instead I’m visiting a different project, the Local Livelihoods Program, that I can actually get to this time of year. Both are funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development, who has asked IWMI to do an evaluation of the institutional context of their interventions to help IFAD improve their project impact in what they call “challenging contexts.”

When there are about a zillion NGOs doing a bazillion development projects in Nepal and most of the country is still in desperate poverty, it’s pretty clear that these projects don’t always work. The bazillion dollar question is why some projects work and others don’t. Obviously not a question I’m going to answer with a five-day field trip, but I’m going to take a stab at it. The project I’m looking at is working with farmers to help them grow and sell high-value crops to raise their incomes. And they’re not just constructing irrigation canals and teaching farmers to plant asparagus; they’re forming farmers’ cooperatives and water user groups so that, ideally, farmers will continue maintaining the infrastructure and improving their production systems and adapting to market conditions after the project ends. Sounds great, but will it work?

Development is full of buzzwords: “participatory development,” “institutional capacity,” “sustainability” – all good things, we think, all things this project is trying to do, all pretty hard to define. We want to make people’s lives better (how do you even define that?) for well beyond the three years of the project, we think that if you involve farmers in the project and work with them to create the conditions to continue doing whatever it is that is making their lives better (i.e. selling asparagus), then we get something that can be sustained after the donors take off. We hope. But what does it really mean to involve the farmers in the project? And what are the conditions that will help them keep selling asparagus? It’s not just a road to the market and some pipes to bring water to the fields. That’s the easy stuff.

Maybe I’ll have some answers for you when I get back.

Protecting My Skull

A conversation I had with my landlord a few days ago:

Me: Kate [my roommate] and I are going to go on a bike ride as soon as she gets a helmet.

Landlord: You don't need a helmet.

Me: Well, I kind of want to make sure we don't die.

Landlord: But helmets don't work!

Me: [pause] ... um, of course they do.

Landlord: What do you mean?

Me: [in a slight stating-the-obvious tone of voice] Umm, well, if you get in an accident and you're wearing a helmet, you're a lot less likely to die.

Landlord: That's not true. Helmets are just to protect you if these little rocks hit you or something.

Me: umm....

So I told him of the people I know who would be dead if they hadn't been wearing helmets, blah blah blah, and he still didn't believe me, insisting that all helmets do is protect you from flying gravel. I'll keep wearing my helmet, he'll keep thinking I'm crazy.

Motorcycle drivers here always wear helmets, but their passengers (often small children...) never do, and I thought it seemed strange that they cared enough to protect their own heads but not their children's heads. The real answer is that they're not protecting anyone's heads. Apparently you can find real imported helmets that actually keep you safe if you look hard and pay a lot, but most people wear these $5 plastic shells that look just enough like helmets so they don't get stopped by the police, since it's illegal to drive without a helmet. As my landlord put it, all they do is catch everything if you get in a bad accident. And protect you from falling rocks I suppose.

Don't worry Mom and Dad, my helmet was not made in Nepal.

Touristing Around

I've made it to a few nice spots during my weekends here: Pokhara on my way to my trek and the Swayambunath, Pashupatinath, and Boudhanath temples here in Kathmandu. I spent this rainy weekend going through my pictures to pick out some of my favorites.

Empty Construction Sites

If you walk around Kathmandu, it looks like the entire city is under construction. It seems like every other building is a construction site. But if you look closer, you'll see that most of them are missing something: construction workers. I'm connected to the internet right now via an ethernet cord (remember those?) because our wifi isn't working (I know, cry me a river), and apparently there is only one internet repairman in all of Kathmandu.

Meanwhile, walk around on a weekday and you'll notice the streets are full of working-aged adults, not working. Nepal has sky-high unemployment, around 46% according to the internets. What is going on here? How can you have a labor shortage and high unemployment at the same time?

My coworker, who is trying to find people to work on her house, explained that if you have any construction skills, you can make a whole lot more in India or the Middle East, so all of the Nepali electricians and plumbers are in Qatar and Delhi. I ask myself why all those guys I see sitting around don't learn some construction skills. Could be a good project for one of the bazillion NGOs in Nepal. But what's to keep them from leaving for better pay just like everyone else?

So why don't wages for skilled labor go up here if there is such a shortage, maybe providing incentive for more people to join the market or to stay in Nepal? What happened to that nice little supply-and-demand graph? These guys are working on a dozen projects at once, showing up for a few hours a week at each one. But if my time on the buses here has taught me anything, it's that Nepalis are in no rush. So if you're willing to wait long enough, there is no labor shortage.

Photos from Patan

Here are a few pictures from around Patan, mostly from around where I was living until a couple of days ago. Patan Durbar Square, one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Kathmandu Valley, houses the ancient royal palace of Patan and a whole bunch of temples.

Nothing to Prove

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.

So, in the spirit of I Have Nothing To Prove, I moved into a deluxe apartment this morning, complete with soft furniture, wifi, hot water, and a DVD collection.

Life on Two Wheels

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.

Rato Machhendranath

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: