Eating my way through Nepal

I've gotten some questions about what I'm eating over here. I thought I'd answer in pictures. There are a few long captions where I describe what I'm eating, so you should look at these full-size if you want to read those.

Transition

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.

Wildlife Sightings

I seem to have taken quite a lot of pictures of animals in Nepal. Here are some that haven't made it into the blog yet.

Sustainability and Other Buzzwords

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.