After our first village experience of 3 days in Sindrawati last month, I thought we were “hard core”, living with the locals, eating meals with families, sleeping in their homes...
Moving in to our new home in Mahadevbesi last week I now realise that was really still just a visit, a brief glimpse of village life through the rose tinted glasses of tourists. One week of village life in our new home hardly gives me much more credibility to comment, but already I think we have had a little taste of what’s behind the picturesque village life that at first glance seems so pristine, simple and almost blissful.
Watching us, 7 “bedesies” (foreigners) traipsing up the hill that first day with our massive backpacks, rugs, cushions and gazillion other little bags strapped to every corner of our luggage and bodies must have been quite a sight for the locals, who other than the Tevel be Tedek (TBT) groups, don’t see many white people, kind of like “the circus comes to town”. Mahadevbesi is a little “town” about 2 hours from Kathmandu (although that really means at least 3 hours), on the main road to Pokhora. Basically the “town” consists of the main Bazaar; a bunch of shops selling odds and ends, fruit and vegetable sellers, dalbud and chiah shops and most importantly a lassie store selling the best lassies in Nepal. (This is for sure one of the greatest advantage of Mahadvesi and lassies at 20 rupees/ ie 1 sheckel a glass are part of our daily diet).
Our home is a little mud house (actually a pretty big house by local standards) 15 minutes from the main Bazaar. When we arrived we discovered a family still living in the house that would only be leaving in 10 days once their new house was finished in the Bazaar. (10 Nepali days could mean anything, for all we knew the family could still be living there in three month’s time.) After much discussion we eventually came up with a solution, the family would move into the downstairs room and we would stay in the main house (meaning four of us in one room for the first “10 days”). This arrangement has worked surprisingly well and the family has effectively adopted us. On the first night we had dinner with our pariwaar (family) and every night they come watch us eat dinner (literally the mother, father, kids and uncles/aunts come in each night and inspect what we are eating for dinner), chill with us in our kitchen (we play cards, teach them songs, taste each other’s foods, and have deep conversations often without understanding a word), and stand around and observe (I think disapprovingly) when we clean our dishes. But they definitely like us, everyday they offer us some sort of food (usually different variations of fried dough and sugar that we pretend to enjoy) or add free tangerines when we buy from their little shop in the bazaar. It’s also pretty useful having them around, we order fresh milk from their cow that lives outside our window and the kids in particular are super useful. When we wanted to clean the water tanks it helped having a little kid who insisted on helping us climbing into the 500L tank and shoutinged orders at us while he scrubbed inside (and TBT is meant to be opposed to child labour).
Pretty much every moment has been an experience I now know that I can cope with literally everything. From mice to maggots, spiders, geckos and who knows what else will surface in our house in the next two months. Cleaning on the first day we had began removing layers of dust with the straw brooms they use here, we soon realised that the dirt was alive with spiders, literally everywhere! We turned over one of the beds (or more like wooden frame with loose planks connected to it) and spiders just crawled out of everywhere (the best imagery I can think of to describe it is the Harry Potter where the spiders attack). The second room had slightly less spiders thank goodness as the clay floor had just been redone and we kept being warned not to run as the floor may break. This simple instruction is not so easy to obey when you are jumping each time another spider surfaces from somewhere. (We have since had to repair a hole in the floor, so they weren’t joking). In the cleaning process we found everything from socks to banana peels, sharpeners, apple cores, mice, geckos, tissues and god knows what else that was found by others without my knowledge.) We couldn’t believe the dirt and the rubbish in this house which belonged to an upper class, relatively well off Brahman family. It made us realise why hygiene and sanitation is such a central focus of TBT’s work in the area. Although we cleaned as best we could and sprayed well, on my third night after dinner two of us were sitting in our kitchen/living rooms (which has actually become quite cosy with a little table and the mats and the cushions we schlepped from Kathmandu) when I saw one, then two, then, three mice run across the kitchen floor. If that’s not enough, on our first night one of the girls comes distraught from the toilet (i.e. hole in the ground) and announces there are worms all over the toilet. Indeed the toilet was filled with Maggots; the reason though is pretty cool. The toilets here are used for bio-gas. Our waste along with the dung from the cows (which live just outside our window) flows down into a bio-gas cylinder underground where it gets turned into bio-gas for cooking. The maggots help the process and a partial solution is to put on the bio-gas (we also have normal gas as apparently we don’t produce quite enough shit to be reliable). So in the interests of reducing the maggots in the toilet, we boiled up some chiah tea and finished our first day sitting with the Nepali staff and our neighbours sipping chiah.
It’s funny how you adapt though, even since the first day I have been happy, I never ever would have thought I would be ok with such a situation, we now find spiders and I hardly batter an eye-lid what can you do, and even on the first day, the house had to be cleaned so we did it, simple as that. Even the initial lack of shower, you grow more comfortable with your own dirt. You also learn to appreciate things, the two guys in the group who are possibly the best people to be stranded on a desert island with (or for that matter in a remote Nepali village, with few more facilities than a desert island). By the third day they had build us a shower! We can now fetch water from the well about 150 metres down the road, heat it on the stove and have a bucket shower!!!! After my first such shower I felt like a million rupees! They are also going to build a compost toilet which is great for two reasons; 1. It means we don’t have to suffer the maggots. 2. It means we can use toilet paper!!! This is for me probably the best development- (although I’ve gotten used to the idea of pouring water down my butt to clean myself- I still don’t love the idea of spending all day with a wet butt!)
So basically life has been crazy but I must say I love it. I think it’s beautiful here (although our madrich describes the place as the armpit of Nepal), I love walking to town in the mornings to get milk (when the cow lets us down)and looking at the hills covered in different shades of greens and yellows, and the river and the little villages. Granted this beauty is only on the surface, living here you begin to realise how difficult things are just under the surface. The air is not clear and fresh as you would expect, trucks are constantly driving up and down the dusty roads to the stone quarries causing unbelievable amounts of dust comparable to Kathmandu and many walk around with face masks. Although the river is beautiful, the plastic covered shelters the people live in bare testimony to the difficult lives people live here. Even the people who seem happy, we begin to see how their lives are really not so easy (understatement of the year), the men drink each night and often beat up the women as a result, we have been warned not to walk out alone at night when the “march of the zombies” takes place, the stone quarry people are all in deep debt highly dependent on brokers where they are exploited in an almost slave like relationship, and although kids do go to school, not all go and even then, not all the time, dropout rates are high and even at the school the level is not exactly the most encouraging.
It’s the first week, so hardly ready to comment more (although by the time I have internet again to post this, good chance will be well into the first month). Anyway for now this is my life as a villager not easy but good and I guess relative to the people here I’m still living a privileged life: I don’t have to wake up at 5am to work before school, cut stones for 10 hours with my bare hands or get beaten up by my drunken husband, and I’m certainly not going to bed hungry. It’s a crazy thought but even living in a mud house, I’m still comparably privileged...
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