Roads Revisited

When people heard I was going to Nepal, their first response was generally something along the lines of "it's going to be so cold!"  After all, Nepal is home to 8 of the world's 10 tallest mountains.  It's also at a similar latitude as Florida and varies in elevation from 70 to 8,850 meters.  I'm in the middle part that has relatively moderate temperatures year round.  What they really should have warned me about was monsoon season.  Although it typically doesn't rain all day, it generally rains every day.  For three months.  It's been a little rough on the fields and roads.

If you're lucky and have enough money, a tractor will clear a landslide within a few hours and life will go on as normal.

The rest of the time... you walk more.   And life still goes on like normal.  Now that monsoon is starting to wind down, my villagers decided it was time to have a community work day to make the length of road between my village and the next village up drivable.  Landslides and erosion had kept it impassable since the beginning of monsoon.  I may have mentioned it before, but one of the things I love most about my community is their unity.  Representatives from nearly every household showed up with digging tools and a cheerful attitude and spent the entire day working in the hot sun to fix up the road.

 

 

 

One, two, three... Push!

Now what do we do?

While we were working on the road, I overheard a conversation that reminded me how fast conditions in Nepal are changing.  It went something like this:

"You know, if we were to have work days like this once or twice each year the road would never get this bad."

"True.  And even women can do this work.  It used to be a few of the old men would just get together and say lets go dig the road..."

I heard another conversation awhile back in a tea shop.  A group of people of mixed cast and ethnic groups were eating a snack and pleasantly chatting together after a meeting.  The shop women commented:

"Just a few years ago something like this would never happen.  You simply didn't talk to someone outside your cast.  Maybe you could get away with it with an older man, but no one else."

I recently attended a Gurung meeting, in which it was decided that intermarriage between Gurungs and Magars (two of the ethnic groups of Nepal) is acceptable (not encouraged, but acceptable).

The signs are subtle, but things are changing here.  From improving road conditions, to changing gender roles, to decreasing social class discrimination.  I am very curious to see the Nepal of 10 or 20 years from now.  I think it will in many ways be a very different place.

Rice Feeding Ceremony

In the Gurung culture, babies have a special ceremony the first time they eat rice.  For girls it's at 4 months old, for boys it's 5 months.  My niece just turned four months old.  The ceremony involves placing a tika on the infant and then feeding her a little rice.  There was some chicken there too, but no one actually tried to feed her that.

My niece was remarkably well behaved, for the most part.  I guess an infant can only handle people stikking rice on their foreheads and shoving food in their mouths for so long.

This is also the time when a little girl starts wearing bracelets.  They were so small!  Good thing baby hands are flexible-- my experience with putting on similar bracelets (adult sized) was excruciatingly painful.

Honestly, I was really not excited about this ceremony.  Babies should be exclusively breastfeed for six full months.  My sister-in-law knew this, but it's hard to abandon deeply rooted traditions just because you know better.  I am very happy to say though that my sister-in-law kept the ceremony simply symbolic-- she is still breastfeeding exclusively.