There is something…special about the perspective you gain in the moment when, struggling to walk along the sheer edge of a bari, or rice paddy, in a monsoonal downpour, boots soaked with water and riddled with leeches, and panic rising into your throat as you contemplate yet another day of not finishing even a fraction of what you set out to accomplish, you are able to pull back, up, and away from your little personal tragedy, like a dramatic shot from a helicopter in a docu-drama, and see the bigger picture of where you are, what you’re doing, and why. For me, yesterday, the big picture came into focus in almost the exact same moment as when I slipped off the sheer face of the bari, mud wall cascading down and flooding the plot I sought to circumnavigate, and fell into the six inch deep pool of rainwater, mud, and more than a few tadpoles and leeches it contained. Oh, for the love of god. What the hell am I doing here?
I wondered, in that precise moment, how exactly it had come to pass that someone so ordinary and (let’s be honest) in almost all ways unremarkable as myself came to be here in Nepal, having this epic adventure almost by accident, scaling bari walls, peeling off blood-swollen slugs, rain dripping in torrents down the length of my nose, datasheets tucked securely into a waterproof folder and under an armpit, in such a way which, were it put to film, would look like something straight out of National Geographic Adventure. Who am I that I thought I could do this? And why didn’t I ask National Geographic for funding??
If not National Geographic, at least, I and my dramatic fall from the rice paddy could probably qualify for a stint on National Geographic’s “Greatest Bloopers in the field,” were they ever to create that show.
As I extracted my right boot from the muddy water with a great sucking “sploosh!” and the displacement of more than a few fledgling rice seedlings, I saw with great clarity and more than a little bit of humility that in coming to Nepal I have found, and achieved, much more than I ever bargained for, or even ever contemplated in my wildest dreams. Even if I am only half done with my forest sampling. And even, in fact, were I never to complete any of my forest sampling. The point is I made it happen – I came, I saw, and I experienced. I was right in the middle of it, so vividly and all-consumingly engaged in the culture and the science that for awhile I stopped seeing what I was and being myself, and just got the work done. And I wondered, standing in six inches of soggy rice bari, if maybe that wasn’t the point, afterall.
We were rained out, in some manner or other, for three days this week, which felt a lot like the moment in softball right before you get hit by one of those wild windmill pitches that were so popular in high school, and yet so hard to throw. You see the ball is coming towards you and attempt to react and dodge it, but know deep down inside that the ball is going to hit you hard on one of the soft parts of your body, and leave a bruise. Most of the time when this happens, as I recall, you swing anyway.
So we swung away three days in a row, making the early morning trip to field sites, eating breakfast, getting all ready to go before having our plans crushed by the uncontrollable, by the weather. The first day we did all of the sampling in a forest called Puranapani (Old Waters) with the exception of three 10×10 meter plots, before we got rained out. We attempted to wait the rain out over tea, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t continue for three days, until this morning.
The second day we attempted a different forest, promising ourselves we’d return to Puranapani to finish in the early morning on our next “day off,” which is currently being pushed farther and farther away. This one was called Alaichibari Tin Khola Pari Pakha (which means something about the former Lychee plantation by the junction of three rivers), and were trumped by one of the rivers, which had swollen to a raging mass of gray water and tumbling stones. I felt mild trepidation at the size of the river, but was determined to cross it, until I turned around to see my entire team (which as I said, shifts personalities almost daily) huddled under umbrellas, ensconced in my raingear, and looking decidedly uninterested in crossing any river in that moment. As many Nepalis, including two of my regular assistants, can’t swim at all, I could somewhat empathize, but it was with great chagrin that I received word via Bina’s translation that the community forest president, a kind of contemporary village chieftain, was refusing to give me the support of any of his community members until the river waters went down. We weren’t going anywhere, and so instead I stood on the banks of the river, looking woefully across at the itty-bitty bit of forest we had hoped to sample (something like 10.63 hectares), and watched another storm, and more rain, roll in.
So we returned to the Hemja Rangepost from which we’d started, to regroup (as you may have noticed, we do a lot of regrouping in these parts), where after a long and circuitous conversation about potential alternatives, the forest guard offered to take us to one of my less accessible forests, Majuwa, where we could stay the night before beginning work early the next morning, rain hopefully notwithstanding.
I know I mentioned at the outset of my field research days that I was anticipating nights spent in the community forest villages, but there was a sort of – invisible barrier – preventing me from reaching this now overwhelmingly apparent-seeming conclusion, and from actually going to the community to take the data in the forests there. It took this Forest Guard looking me in the eye and asking me if I wanted to go (now?) to get me to actually articulate, and realize, that – yes – I do want to go now. Or at least, that I did.
What followed was stupidly expensive, exhausting, and productive. We three student-types rushed back to Pokhara to gather our things for the night, as the forest guard would only take us if we returned within two hours, in order to make the “two to three hour” hike in. Upon arriving we hurtled ourselves up the hill, until I began to drag behind a bit, and the pace slowed. We arrived at the community forest president’s home (a different cf president) in Majuwa in the early evening, and plopped ourselves down on the picnic table style bench set facing the modest shop that fronted his home, where we chatted like a bunch of casual hikers until the forest guard saw his opening, and asked if we could stay the night. It was that quick.
In Nepal, it is customary in the villages to be able to ask for a night’s lodging and food, without much eyebrow raising involved. It is difficult to get into and out of the villages, in many parts of the country, and monsoonal weather, bandhs (strikes), political unrest, landslides, and other uncontrollable events somewhat regularly necessitate a stay with people and families who are otherwise unknown. The Nepali habit of calling all older male family members “uncle” and the same of the women “aunt” means there is a much larger network of people who could generously be called one’s family, upon which a person can rely for lodging, but in the case that no one is known to you, you are not quite so out of luck as you would be in the good old U.S. of A.
So we knew we would find a place to sleep, but it is a strange thing to politely and conversationally invite yourself into someone else’s home, and to displace their teenage son from his room in the process. In the end, Bina and I took what was undoubtedly the nicer room in the two story, concrete slab constructed home, with two wooden bed platforms, upon which a mattress was constructed out of woven mats layered and then covered with the remnants of an old comforter – one so far gone and thin with wear that we in the US might be more likely to reserve it for the comfort and use of a pet than for people. The “mattress” was paired with a thick covering comforter, also made of old blankets folded into a kind of thin, cheap, and threadbare duvet cover of sorts. This kind of bed is fairly typical of Nepal, and despite the dramatic differences from what we are accustomed to in the States, it’s really quite comfortable. We had purchased a mosquito coil to burn on our way up the hill because the windows have permanent open slats at the top for ventilation, and it was thus that we spent the night. The young male student and the forest guard stayed in the little mud and brick house that was behind the building with the storefront, likely in similar accommodation but in a more traditional style of room.
Before dinner we walked down the hill to the forest’s edge with several important men of the community forest, who told us about the forest, it’s boundary, the number of strata (subdivisions made according to forest species composition, or management type), and provided other logistical information. Bina and our current student assistant were good about translating for me, and as we spoke little children seemed veritably to climb out of the bushes and down from the hills, until we were flanked by a little posse of children of all ages, twelve in number. They stood at our elbows and nosed into the circle to listen and peak at a map the cf treasurer was drawing, and a group of small girls stood at my right arm, running their fingers up and down my forearm as they admired the green glass choora I’m wearing at present, as this month in the Nepali calendar is a month in which women are especially reverent, and wear green glass bracelets for one of the female gods who cares for women, and red glass bracelets for the health, well-being, and good fortune of their husbands. I myself was gifted an armload of both red and green bracelets from a female Range Post staff member and so have been wearing them daily, but removed the red ones in a hurry after a male Nepali friend suggested that since I’m single, perhaps my red bracelets are ensuring the health, well-being, and good fortune of my ex-boyfriend! I’ll be having none of that, thank you very much.
And so the girls gigglingly perused my relatively pale white arms with their little tanned fingertips while I struggled to catch the details in Nepali, before making the trek back up the hill to kill time and wait for khana (dinner, or rice). While we were down there we had the community forest’s treasurer make a map of the forest and the different strata for us on a little piece of paper, something I’d like to explore the use of in future fieldwork. I’m interested in the relationship between what the community forestry members know or think is present, and what’s actually there, and have found so far (in a qualitative, not quantitative sense) that they are extremely accurate in their mapping, knowledgeable about their forests, and cognizant about the forest boundaries, despite their appearing to be one, big, contiguous forest to you or me. This indigenous knowledge is something we talked about a lot this last year at Yale, and it’s a compelling, fascinating element of understanding forest management, in my very recent experience.
After such a long and crazily energy intensive (but unproductive) day, we chowed down hard on dinner, and it was delicious. The food in the communities is generally produced by the family serving it, or by their neighbors, and you can taste the difference. I reveled in the delicious food, eaten in a smoky, mud-walled kitchen room in the back building while we were seated on the floor on little woven straw mats, Indian-style. The Nepali students eat their food extremely quickly, like it’s about to up and disappear in front of them, which is consistent with people throughout Nepal, from what I’ve seen. I attempted to the same once or twice, but found that all it made me want to do was burp, so have reverted to the slower, relish-the-moment style of American food consumption. Which means, of course, that when everyone else is finished slurping the last bits of Daal (lentils) out of their little metal bowl, I’m still sloppily scooping up wet bits of Daal Bhaat in my fingertips, achar and tarkaari mixed in for flavor.
On this night we went back to the room after dinner to chat a bit, and then retired early, anticipating an early morning of work to wrap the plot up promptly. I had brought the smaller of my two backpacking sleeping bags, which looked incredibly incongruous and synthetic in the very organic, rustic setting, but provided a soft, soothing, sense of home and comfort to me as I finished brushing the creepy crawlies off my bed. I love sleeping in a sleeping bag (and would do so all the time if that wouldn’t be such a weird thing for my friends to see!), so was glad to settle into the bag in the surprisingly chilly evening air, pulling the head part of the mummy bag up behind me and the sides close around my shoulders. I fell asleep in an instant, and awoke in the morning to the most delightful mountain chill (and copious amounts of fog) I’ve experienced in all of my time in Nepal. It was fantastic, and I dragged lethargically as I pulled myself from my sleep, reminding myself that it was my project we were there to do, after all.
What followed was a fairly productive, fairly enjoyable day in the forest, made more so by the community forest treasurer’s apparent interest in my research/me, and his funny, intrigued questions and thoughtful use of the English language in articulating them. The day passed almost effortlessly, in fact, and before I knew it we had wrapped up Majuwa community forest, had finished plucking a few lingering slimy leeches from our shins and toes, and were relishing one last delicious daal bhaat meal before tearing down the mountain, out to catch a bus and cruise back to Ban Campus, and home.
I wrote this post on July 30th after a long day in the field, but haven’t had a moment to do the editing since, which is why it’s only being posted now. I’m in Lakeside (again! I know, I know) for the day to do more data entry, in anticipation of our last, week-long blitz on the community forests of Nepal. By my count we are eight field days shy of done, and – please god – let those be some fiercely sun-shiney days. Eight days from now is one day after my personal deadline, and a little over a week from my departure flight, giving me some time to relax, explore the area some more, and maybe even have some fun(!)
I am awed by the pace of this experience, though, and by how much I’ve learned and how little I did, in terms of the original scale of my project (and the latter is not necessarily a bad thing). I knew it would need to be cut down in size and all-inclusiveness from the get-go, but find at the moment a certain wistfulness coming over me, a chagrin at all the good questions thus far left unanswered, and a hesitation to leave without doing so many of the academic, social, and recreation activities I aspired to, in my naïve early days in the country. At the same time I am pretty damn proud of my progress, how much I’ve learned, and even more so, how much I’ve seen. I don’t have any conclusive results, yet (in a personal sense), but I have a lot of new perspective, and anticipate taking some much-needed me time before heading back to the States, and determining my next direction and set of personal priorities.
I have two forests to go in terms of those that I absolutely must finish sampling, and four total. One is a tiny one-day affair, and the first two are sizeable. We’ll get them done, though, because where there’s a will, there’s a way, and I have nothing if not will power. In fact, some days I think I have nothing but willpower.
8 forests down, 4 to go, and 15 days (at absolute most) to get it all done in. 16 days to American food and my family and friends, 17 days to the beach, and 24 to Yale. I feel so content, so good, so ready. Let’s get this shizzle over with, eh?
Namaste,
-M-
