Motorcycle Diaries

Earlier this month, I concluded two months of field visits across Nawalparasi and Kapilvastu districts, conducting fifty client and three savings and credit cooperative interviews. While a car, busses, and our own feet were frequent modes of transportation, most of the visits were done on motorcycle. If it had been spring, it would have been marvelous, but, at the peak of winter in Nepal, all I can say is, never again.

Interviews were conducted in some of the most unusual settings, which were often the places of work and/or habitation for the clients. They varied from roadside fires to restaurant-cum-single room homes of thatched straw, where animals for the menu’s meat dishes scuttled around freely until placement of the next order. I struggled to hide my alarm when a chicken was grabbed by its feet from under my seat, bokking cacophonously, during an interview. In another instance, I couldn’t help disrupting the entire interview when the mother of all geckos, the size of an infant alligator, appeared from behind a client’s couch as it made its way up the wall at a snail’s pace. I suppose some things just take getting used to!

Interview with client in her restaurant, started up with a Binai loan

Conducting interviews with Binai SCC clients outside of the office in Dhumkibas VDC

Tea or chai holds a very dear place in the heart and palate of Nepalese, as it does for most Asians. From Sri Lanka to Afghanistan, chai plays a vital cultural and social role and is the first offering made to guests, customers, and clients alike before commencement of a meal or meeting. Consistent with this, many of our clients, some of the poorest in their communities, served us chai mixed with milk and sugar, during the interviews. Though I had to be conscious of what I was putting into my body, considering that most of the water consumed by these communities would not be considered potable by UN standards, I still forced myself to take a few sips in order to welcome their hospitality and shed a little bit of the unspoken barriers between me and them.

In all honesty, 60-90 minute interviews are not nearly sufficient to get a true sense of both the financial and social conditions of individuals living in rural communities, and this is for several reasons. Trust is one of the most obvious barriers to overcome, and this can only be built with time and regular interaction with the clients in order for them to share the irregular or intimate details of their lives. For example, when assessing how savings and credit and cooperative membership has empowered women in communities where women have traditionally been viewed and treated as subordinates to their male counterparts, only rarely have they felt comfortable enough to share their stories of abuse, both verbal and physical, and any transformation that has occurred as a result of becoming financial contributors to their households. In this same context, the defining of concepts and methods of perception are a second type of barrier. How does one assess whether these services have served as a catalyst for social empowerment? In such instances, language and tact serve as critical tools. When discussing these issues with Dalit (“untouchable”) and female clients, we often try to assess changes in ‘empowerment’ and ‘leadership’ by gauging clients’ participation in community activities, community and household level decision-making, and perceptions of respect from the community, the family, and the self. While completion of the questionnaire is a requirement in the data collection process, the most invaluable information flows from the stories and reminiscence of the clients as they ponder over the most significant transformations that have taken place in their lives.

The third most noteworthy challenge has been the level of financial literacy of the clients. Household (HH) income is an aggregate figure that takes into account the multiple sources of income generated by rural, poor, and/or disadvantaged HHs. Individual income from daily wage labor or a regular salaried job has solely comprised HH income only in a minority of cases. Most clients in Nawalparasi and Kapilvastu districts cultivate land for agricultural production that is consumed by the HH and/or sold in the market. Similarly, most clients, regardless of their microenterprise, generate an income from livestock production and its byproducts (e.g., meat, milk, ghee, etc.). Collecting this information individually involved clients having to conceptualize income in the same manner as the interviewer, which proved to be a painstaking exercise. When it came to questions on savings, most interviewees didn’t know how to respond when asked how much money was put aside as savings and where these monies were kept. Some may have been kept in a savings and credit cooperative, but what about the small notes sown into a mattress or tied inside the pallu of a sari? Again, language and tact played a crucial role in collecting this information, and I am grateful for having a translator accompany me on these interviews.

At the conclusion of the last day of field interviews, the team made its way back to Gaindakot, this time in a crowded public bus that had exceeded its capacity in both weight and density. After being upgraded from standing amidst an uncountable number of individuals, strange heads resting on my shoulders, to an aisle seat full of confrontations with wailing babies and elbows, it gave me an unexpected opportunity to reflect on all that I have seen and experienced in these last few months. What I have been exposed to is not the exception but a reality for most of the world’s population, and I don’t think I ever fully grasped this until I was actually thrown into its tumult.

It’s been an unforgettable ride, and the experiences derived from it all comprise my life in Nepal these last four months, my motorcycle diaries.

Life and Times in the Village

After some time, what were once perceived as extraordinary feats, gradually become the mundane functions that keep the wheels of life well oiled in the village. Initially when I moved to Gaindakot, my half-hearted attempts to acclimate to a simpler lifestyle were met with my own resistance to the required input of ever more time and effort to implement the most minor of tasks. Life in the United States can be characterized by what John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hitman, refers to as the corporatocracy, which traps citizens in the clutches of capitalism, where the culture of mass consumerism-I want the fastest, the latest, and the best- prevails. We are all victims of it, and in our self-indulgence, we often forget that most of the rest of the world knows not such a life. What we define as basic necessities are defined as exclusive luxuries for the majority of the world’s population. When friends and family press for details on what life has been like living in semi-rural Nepal, my response is that it must be like what Jaffna must have been before the occupation, but just without the beach.

Each morning and evening, the mother fetches fresh buffalo milk from a neighbor for our chai. If the buffalo becomes pregnant (as was the case this past week), then another neighbor is approached to sell some of her buffalo’s milk. A boiled cup of this milk always follows each of the two meals of the day, which consists of rice and dhal (dhalbaat), a vegetable dish, and pickle, typically spiced with sesame seeds, turmeric, ginger, garlic, fenugreek, cumin, and cilantro. Nearly all of the inputs for the meals come from the kitchen garden behind the house, situated alongside the storehouse for wheat and rice. Rather than buy flour and cooking oil directly from the market, my host family prefers to routinely have their wheat freshly ground into flour by the local miller and oil pressed from mustard seeds grown in a field adjacent to the house. It’s an organic food lover’s paradise. Morning and evening meals are freshly prepared before each mealtime and served on metal or brass plates. When rinsing off the paste from our hands after meals, the saturated water is collected and dumped in a bucket that is fed to the buffalos with their rice grass. There is a system for nearly everything!

Laundry is most often hand-washed and hang dried anywhere that two ends of a cord can be tied. I usually give my laundry to the training institute’s laundryman because I don’t have the time, patience, or energy to pick up some new habits. Once washed, I hang the clothes on my roof to dry along with the undergarments that I wash at home. After literally buffing off layers of skin, I’m starting to get the hang of hand washing!

Like in Afghanistan, the working week is comprised of six days, while Saturdays are set aside for the weekend. After work, we usually sit on the balcony with a cup of tea, watching the neighbors’ children play cricket, badminton, and other small games, or I sit on as a casual observer as my host family engages in random chitchat with their neighbors. In the winter, since there is no heating system, we usually warm our frozen bodies around fires that are lit next to the field and fed with rubbish and dry leaves. Unfortunately, there is no solid waste management offered to residents outside of Kathmandu, so to take out the garbage, literally means to dump the contents of your bin in an assigned location near the field and set it alight. The two times a month that I do this, I’m wrought with guilt for partaking in this environmentally totally unfriendly practice.

The inconvenience most strongly felt is from the load shedding. Nepal is the world’s second richest country in water resources, yet, it is unable to generate enough electricity for its population, particularly during the months leading up to the monsoon. These days, we are forced to schedule things around a 12-hour daily load shedding schedule, and I hear that this will likely go up to 18 hours per day over the next few months. Lack of appropriate infrastructure aside, games that allow this condition to fester are played on many sides. Candle and generator salesmen make a handsome profit during these months, so what’s to stop them from giving the local electricity controller an “incentive” to prolong load shedding a little bit here and there. With rare access to power, productivity of businesses and other service providers is hit the hardest.

The second worst inconvenience is the effect of Nepal bandh on nearly everything. When bandh is called, as I discussed in a recent entry, businesses are required to stay closed, and motored vehicles are not permitted on the roads. Every time I book a flight out of Nepal, I’m sure to travel to Kathmandu a few days earlier in case an unanticipated bandh is announced and reluctantly prepare myself mentally for having to walk to the airport if a rickshaw doesn’t present itself in time.

I’ve, more or less, come to terms with this lifestyle, more so because I know in my mind that this is temporary. I value it because it is an experience in itself, but the perspectives that I’m gaining personally will hopefully help me to do my job a little bit better over the long run. What never ceases to amaze me is the peace of mind displayed by these communities. Maybe, simple is better after all.

View of Gaindakot village from my balcony

The Year of the Tiger

After two months of field visits in rural Nepal, I welcomed the idea of a brief R&R in Singapore when friends of mine suggested that a visit was in order, given my close proximity to the country. My last visit to the city-state was in 2004, and I was astounded by the many newly constructed shopping malls and skyscrapers that studded Singapore’s skyline, not to mention a little overwhelmed by the 180 degree turn in atmosphere and culture.

Sarangoon Road, home to Little India, was lodged in my memory as a somewhat chaotic bubble of cyclists, pedestrians, and cars, swarming around stalls and shops selling a variety of fruits and vegetables, spices, Indian jewelry and fabrics, and just about anything else one could want from the neighboring subcontinent. I remember holding onto my Amma’s hand tightly, as a kid, as we queued for an open table at Muthu’s Curry Place to enjoy mouthwatering fish curry and rice eaten straight from a banana leaf as is still done in northern Sri Lanka and southern India. I was surprised to find more order in this city within a city this time around, though admittedly, I began to miss the raucous of its old character, reminiscent of walking through the streets of Coimbatore and then-called Madras.

Chinatown was an absolute rush of color and aromas as we walked through its streets, as residents and shopkeepers prepared for the Chinese New Year festivities to be held in the subsequent week. We witnessed a prayer ceremony in a Buddhist temple, its walls studded with 100 golden Buddhas on the main floor and 10,000 miniatures on the roof, housing a tooth relic of Buddha and one of the largest prayer wheels in Asia. Blooming cherry blossoms lined Chinatown’s sidewalks, and temporary tents had been erected to house markets selling the colorful red decorations hung in every Chinese home, this year sporting figures of the tiger, the zodiac animal marking 2010. We treated our palettes to coffee-flavored, chocolate biscuits, flower-shaped cakes, the Chinese version of ice cream sandwiches, and coconut-infused gelatin sweets, washing it all down with fresh mango juice and lemon soda.

Singapore has somehow become a magnet for many friends, relatives, and colleagues of mine, mostly due to its high standard of modern living with access to rich cultures and flavors within and in close proximity to the country, providing a convenient balance of east and west. And, that’s a good enough reason for another visit to this tropical city-state.