Category Archives: Culture

A Note from the Field

August 4, 2009

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-

Also posted in Adventure, Creatures, Forestry, Forests, Research, Self-Discovery, To Be a Scientist, Travel, Uncategorized, Yale and FES – 1 Comment

Out of the Woods (for now)

July 18, 2009

Whew. Where to start? It has been one hell of a week, to be sure. The last 9 days have been almost completely filled by all-day stretches of forest sampling, bookended  by rushed laundering of my field clothes (which right this moment are soaking away some of the grime in a bucket in my bathroom), charging of batteries, a lengthy shower, and at least 8 hours per night of sleep. Add to that the 19 leeches, two troops of monkeys, one give-or-take six-foot-long snake, approximately six vertical falls down hillsides (or off of slick, well-traveled pathways), and 5,200 square meters of government-protected forest sampled and yeah…you could say it has been a busy week.

First, the gist. This week we planned on hammering out six of the twelve forests I sought to sample, as all six are ten hectares or less in size, and therefore considered “very small,” even for a community-managed forest. A hectare is 10,000 square meters, which sounds like a very odd amount of land for any society to delineate, until you realize it is 100 meters on a side. So when I say I sampled ‘x’ number of hectares, what I really mean is I sampled a 100 by 100 meter square, that many times over.

At the beginning of the week, however, a series of small things went wrong which maligned all my carefully made plans, and sent us to Rani Ban instead. Ran Ban is the largest forest I planned to sample, a government-managed chunk of forest near several key pieces of Nepali infrastructure (the massive dam that Pokhara depends on for electricity, in part, and the former king’s holiday retreat, just to name two), and has been “protected” by the government for quite some time. I say “protected” not to belittle the efforts of the Nepali government, but to emphasize for you the size of this forest, and the sheer scale of the operation that would be required to truly protect such a gigantic piece of forested land in a country where so many people desperately need the resources forests provide. Rani Ban (Ban means ‘forest’ in Nepali) is a 210 hectare forest, which means 2,100,000 square meters. It covers most of a medium-sized “hill,” this being the Middle Hills region, but keep in mind that I’m climbing around in the trees at somewhere between 800-1,000 meters of elevation – not quite a hill for the average east coaster of an American…

To put it in perspective, when I hit 1,000 meters of elevation on my GPS earlier this afternoon, I was only a couple hundred feet shy of the elevation of the biggest mountains in the Catskill mountains of New York, the thirty-five 35ers (or 3,500 footers), where I somewhat regularly hike. So I effectively spent the last five days in particular climbing up, over, and down the flanks of a mountain the size that you’d find in the Catskills – and then repeating the process over and over again 400 meters along the way as I began each transect, which start at the base of the hillside. It was hard, hard work.

Although we had decided to save the biggest forests for last, we shifted our focus to Rani Ban this week when a series of glitches involving weather and staffing (of my field crew) prevented us from working in first one, then another of the community forests we had already visited, and I fell back on Rani Ban (which is extremely accessible from Ban Campus, although only relative to the accessibility of the other forests) by default.

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. To take an adequate sample from Rani Ban we had to do a tremendous amount of sampling (we have at least 52 10 x 10 meter plots sampled, with 4 1×1 subplots, and 1 5×5 subplot per each overall plot), which gave us the opportunity to hone our technique and approach, while taking statistical refuge in the safety of numbers. What I mean by this is that by letting our roughest plots (our first few) happen in a big forest, we probably hedge our bets that any errors in sampling would come out in the wash (the wash being basic statistical analysis of so many data points). Although we tried very hard not to make any errors from the time we began work in Rani Ban, they are almost inevitable at the beginning of any field sampling, and could include reading a diameter tape at the wrong place, creating a plot not quite 10 x 10 meters, incorrectly or inconsistently identifying plants, or estimating tree height. We carry a myriad of tools with us to avoid these kinds of errors, but – mistakes happen – all you can do is do your best, put forth a good faith effort, and in the words of a wise field ecologist “sample till your feet hurt.”

Which, in fact, is exactly what we did.

I’ll get more into the sampling process, and some of the nuance and questions I’m seeking to evaluate (as well as newly developed obstacles to some of the answers) in a blog post tomorrow, when I’ve gotten some decent sleep, but here are the lows, the highs, and the “meh: I can do betters” of this last week of fieldwork.

Lows:
1. Being stymied by logistics. I was stunned by the amount of entreating, cajoling, organizing, and arranging it took to get to my field sites, and to get the requisite field crew there with me at an early enough time in the morning to make a serious dent in the plotwork. Between spotty buses, a field assistant oversleeping, me forgetting to photocopy the datasheets one morning (::cough:: this morning ::cough::), taking the bus in the wrong direction, the Range Post Office’s Forest Guard “volunteer” changing every.single.day, and the timing of the Nepali meal schedule (10am? WTF?), it was damn hard to get two solid chunks of time per day to hammer out some fieldwork. And oh did I learn a whole helluva lot about entreating, cajoling, and double-checking bus destinations in the progress….

2. The first two days. We started in the field a week ago this past Thursday, and the first two days I was miserable. Miserable for a couple of reasons, all of which I very intimately understand, but they were bad enough that I pulled the plug for a day last weekend, to mull things over and make changes in my process. I even wrote a blogpost after my pull the plug day, in which I talked a lot about how maybe this wasn’t the field for me after all, and how perhaps I had outgrown my desire to do fieldwork, or to sample anything. That has since changed, but I was coming down really hard on my abilities as a manager/employer, as my sampling protocols felt really out of control in the hands of my first two field assistants, and I felt extremely isolated being the only one of three people spending the whole day together in the forest but not speaking Nepali fluently.

3. Cultural differences in understandings of the following: “work,” “workday,” “hard work,” “good data,” and “work late.” This is not a knock against Nepalis – there are legitimate, important differences between the conceptualization of these terms between our two countries, and in short order I realized all the good reasons why I couldn’t just steamroll through and organize my dad as if I were working in American. I don’t have a great resolution at hand, at the moment, but I’m working on it.

Highs:

1. I feel sheepish saying this, but let’s be honest – it was the monkeys. Yesterday at around 1,000 meters of elevation I was leading the group up a sheer hillside in order to set the next plot up before they got there, and as I bushwacked upslope through the underbrush, following a bearing on my compass, I realized a troop of Rhesus monkeys was passing overhead. As I watched they actually descended from the treetops quite a bit to scope me out, and then to my utter amazement actually descended all the way to the forest floor(!), where they proceeded to walk the trails about 20 meters ahead of me for a short while. Only a few did this that I could see, but when they did it absolutely took the forward motion right out of me.

I have seen monkeys and baboons in several countries, but there was something truly tremendous about seeing them descend down to the forest floor, and my own plane of existence. It spooked me a little bit, to tell the truth, and it was breath-taking to see them walking along the path on all fours. It was reminiscent of the large, tawny-haired cat I saw around this time last year, in Costa Rica, if only for the way the muscle rippled below the fur, as it prowled along through this particular stretch of protected forest. Other troop members descended to low branches and simply hung out there for awhile, mouths agape, trying to discern exactly what it was we were up to in their forest. And I myself returned their gaze in full – eyes wide, mouth agape. Monkeys!

2. Finishing a forest! It felt so good to know we were done today, and to think of the (piles of) data I now have at my fingertips, both to enter into my laptop and to sort through (ahem: plants in bags). Halfway through the week I found out that Rani Ban has never before been inventoried, so this is the first ever description of the forest resources available to be harvest, managed, preserved or protected. I thought that was pretty cool, and am glad that the data I gathered will provide a baseline for reference by the Nepali people who manage it in the years to come. A few of the forest guards were equally jazzed to see the outcome of my data, and to read the report I draft up. My research is on forest management instead of forest ecology (although to be truthful, I’m measuring forest ecology as an indicator of the effect of different types of forest management) because I wanted to do something applied for my project, and create information and knowledge that would benefit people in the country in which I work, beyond myself. So check that one off the list!

3. Seeing the forest users in action. A few days ago we saw an old woman, bent low with the weight of the huge basket of freshly cut “dead” branches hung off her forehead and lengthwise down her back, and with her permission, I took her picture. These are not “bad people” who are using this protected forest illicitly – rather, they are members of adjacent communities whose survival is inextricably linked to the products they can pull out of the local forest system, but who in some cases they are using the forest unsustainably, taking out more than the forest can replace or give back. Helping women like the one we saw continue to rely on the forest while not irreparably damaging it is one of the central tenets of community forest management, and is also the motivation for my field project.

Yesterday in the forest we saw two different old women illegally harvesting timber and non-timber forest products (an example of the latter would be firewood, lokta, a plant used for paper, or mushrooms), and although we were in the company of the forest guard, he did not arrest them. He called out to them in an emphatic manner, told them to stop removing material from the forest, and be on their way, but he did not intervene, or even look closely to see what they’d taken. As it turns out, I learned later, he does not have the authority to arrest the women, or to fine them. The only authority vested in him, as one of the main patrolers in the forest, is that of bringing the women in to the Range Post (sort of the equivalent of a remote field office for the Forest Service), where the Range Post Officer could fine them, should he so desire.

But put yourself in his shoes for a second here – you are approximately 2,000 meters (2K!) away from your range post office, and it’s a sweltering hot, buggy day, with leeches, biting ants, and mosquitoes rampant. Your options are traveling back to the range post, dragging along an unwilling, loudly complaining and potentially physically aggressive little old lady just trying to get some firewood to cook dhal bhaat for her family, along several hundred meters of elevation, through dense forest, or else simply calling her out through the trees, but leaving her be to decide what she’ll do next. Do you haul her in?

Yeah, me neither. So is there protection to be had in this protected forest? Only the data will tell. But it’s some crazy tasty food for thought, we’ve just stumbled across here…

4. Looking at the map on my GPS unit tonight, and seeing four mostly straight little flag-riddled transects crisscrossing their way across my Nepal map. We did that!

5. Hitting my stride. After those first two shitty days and my personal day of reckoning, I kicked ass. Okay maybe not quite, but I worked hard, I moved fast(ish), I climbed high and I took the goddamned data until it was done. Day Three I woke up ready, and remembered how this works: you put your life, and everything in it, on autopilot (or perhaps I should say “an out of office reminder”) and hone in on what matters. Data.

“Mehs”

1. My field crew. It’s constantly evolving. I’ve been told that I work like “a soldier,” “a man,” and “too hard.” I can’t keep the same ‘Dai’ (older brother) from the Range Post office, from one day to the next. These are the folks who should be most familiar with the forest, its terrain, and the leg muscles it takes to get them into and across them. Instead, I am roaring through forest watchers and lower forest office staff. When I was finally given a former army officer the other day, I thought, “at last!” Someone who really knows how to work. And although the dai worked easily throughout the day, and was the first here to scale a hill slope faster than my own legs could accommodate, the next day a different ‘dai’ appeared at the agreed upon meeting place, and shared that the previous day’s dai had twisted an ankle. “When?” I wanted to know. “When he was working with me?” Although answers were not forthcoming, I later ascertained that by “twisted an ankle,” what was really meant was “his legs hurt.” “And he was very tired afterwards!” the new dai added on, as if in his friend’s defense. To my mind, he might not have been so tired if he didn’t pause hourly to light a joint. Yes, a marijuana joint. But, hey, that’s just me…

2. Being in charge of the field crew. Now that’s different. Let me just say here – to my memory, I was an exceptional, motivated, hard-working, precise and accurate fieldworker. This probably isn’t possible or even totally true, but damn if I didn’t work my butt off in those jobs. I look back to my former boss Donie’s interview process (an hour long! It was epic) for a simple field assistantship, and appreciate her thinking much more deeply now. Man, that woman is smart. It is one thing to be a field crew member, and another thing altogether to be boss, friend, guide, field crew member, and project director. Every inattentive measurement taken is a personal, deeply felt slight, every whining complaint (too tired, to hot, too hard, too hungry) injurious to my heart and my ego. Worst of all are the quiet comments in Nepali, not so insidious as they sound, but worst because I can’t understand them and all parties involved know this. And worst because you don’t need to speak Nepali to understand tone.

3. Struggling with scheduling. Getting up at 5 or 6 am (as I did several time this week) is understandable if you’ll be at work at 6 or 7, but to wake that early and not get into the forest until 10 or 11 seems unthinkable. Trying to mitigate the meal schedule by feeding my field crew myself in the morning has been a black hole for our time and energy, although perhaps contributed to some amount of crew bonding (for the crew that returns, anyway). Lunch is incredibly inconvenient, but packed, non-warm/wet lunches are almost an insult in Nepal. Were I to be working alone I would take a snack-style lunch and work straight through the day, but instead we descended several hundred meters several days this week to eat a huge daal bhaat meal, which my field assistants consumed all the more zealously because the work made them hungry. But the food makes them exceptionally sluggish, and I’ve come to hate the first daal bhaat meal of the day. It interrupts our process, puts us back at the bottom of the hill (the worst!), and totally interferes with my own personal motivation. Everyone is grumpy about starting again, having cooled off long enough to no longer be literally dripping sweat, and perhaps a little unpleasantly full.

4. Unteachable moments. For the life of me, I cannot make my field crew love (or plain old appreciate) why we are doing what we are doing. I tried all week long, and have now come to an understanding with the futility of it all. When my field crew complains or drags their feet (the latter of which burns fantastic amounts of time – just stupendous amounts of time), I try to help them “see” the forest better, or explain the data analysis process more clearly, but so far I have had middling success. I point out the old bari (cultivated fields – what the Westerner envisions as a rice paddy complete with terracing) underneath the foliage, or how the vines are in fact crawling up intact woody stems which have sprouted new young leaves after being lopped by some errant harvester. I emphasize the differences in foliage on slopes with different aspects (the compass direction the plots face), dwell on riparian buffer zones (a fancy way of saying the land around streams and water bodies), and ask open-ended questions about tree form and quality, size, shape, and possible sources of disfiguration, galls, and multiple trunks in a given tree. I think I’m doing a good job, but for the life of me, I cannot get them jazzed the way I felt jazzed as a bushey-eyed young student, eager to learn and retain as much as I could. I don’t really ask that they love it (truth be told, even I do not love inventory) but I do ask that they understand and appreciate it, and that they prioritize the collection of good data. In fact, I might even be about to demand that last bit.

-M-

Also posted in Adventure, Creatures, Forestry, Forests, Research, Self-Discovery, To Be a Scientist, Trees – 0 Comments

Biha, Nepali Style

June 28, 2009

It all began with several meters of magenta pink gauze, adorned with a meandering line of golden thread, encrusted with hand embroidery and little shiny blue sequins, all stitched in together to mimic flowers and vines. Add one jumbly, bouncy-jouncy plane ticket, two arms worth of choraa (bangles), and spin. Slowly. While Kanchan’s mom wraps me in the most beautiful fabric I have ever seen. Gorgeous magenta. Tulle-like, almost a ballerina, without the big flouncy skirt. Gita efficiently and diligently tucks the top of the fabric into my petticoat, a small, plain skirt I happily wore as I secretly danced around Kanchan’s room, just the petticoat, the little tightly hooked top, size 8 high heels on size 10 feet, and me. I feel like a princess. A Nepali princess.

This is not the point, but this is where my recollection starts. I remember magenta gauze, and contemplations of love and marriage. Which, I’ll have you know, go together like a horse and carriage.

Sudarshan is getting married. Hitched, as it were. Sudarshan is my friend from Yale, a wonderful Nepali man who was one of several Nepali friends to help orient me to this country, his home. And now I am wrapped in pink gauze like a present sent straight from Barbie’s Dream House, and headed to his wedding. The world is so strange and wonderful. So  unpredictable.

Tuesday night at 8:18pm I get this text:
“Hi Meredith, i tried to call u but with no success. I got engaged n getting married on friday. U are invited for friday and saturday. I’ll call later for details.”

I am intrigued. Perplexed. Elated! A wedding! In Nepal? But wait – to whom?!

An arranged marriage, I find out Wednesday morning, as I struggle with the moral implications of scratching field plans for three more days. I am a bad scientist, I think, but a good friend. I will have to remember to tell my advisor that, if he asks.

These are three short days, I think. Damn – there will be no sari for me. I told Kanchan to get married so I could wear a sari to her wedding, but she is as yet unpersuaded. Now there is no time to have my own made, and I’m mildly (very mildly) chagrined. I’m an outdoorsy, tough-girl, feminist who really likes to dress up. But after I decide I can’t afford to miss this amazing event, to which I have been so kindly invited, I realize I must fly tomorrow, to attend on the next day, which means there is no time to have my princess dress custom stitched.

Chaos. Bits of research mingle with a trip to Bagar at the other end of Pokhara – “Rekhadidi can I borrow a sari?” Tiny Rekha and I are optimistic until I try to cinch the top. No deal. My big American shoulders (and Grandma Trainor’s flabby upper arms) are not convinced that Rekha’s tiny blouses are meant for them. And in fact, they’re not. Rekha frantically buys me a plane ticket when I say all too calmly that I will pick one up tomorrow. No go. Thanks to Rekha I have the last ticket available to Kathmandu all day tomorrow, and got it by a hair. Crisis averted. I will be at the wedding, but maybe not dressed?

I pack a kurta suruwal, the traditional long shirt and trousers, but am quietly bummed not to dress in a culturally appropriate way (read: pretty). Like wearing jeans and a t-shirt to a black tie affair – maybe a visitor can get away with it, but it’s not exactly fitting.

The flight to Kathmandu is quick. You smelly, dusty, intriguing and complicated city – I am back. And so soon after leaving you. Ta-Da.

Glad to see Kanchan but she is busy –we both are. I buy much-needed topo maps before raiding her mother’s closet. Kanchan’s mother has a wardrobe full of saris. It is a little-girl-princess’ sweetest dream. I laugh and maybe even clap with elation. I was not the little-girl-princess – that was Rachie – but her nine year old incarnation would kill to play in this wardrobe. The fabrics are gorgeous, and the colors and patterns are vibrant. Just like Nepal.

I try on Gita’s custom-made blouses and they fit – it’s a miracle. None of us understand how, but we’re not too interested in trying. We find me a pink one (magenta!) and an orange one (creamsicle?) They are beautiful. Gita will help me put it on, so it doesn’t fall off, while Kanchan is at school and then work. Kanchan takes out all her gold jewelry and lends it to me so I will look like a real Nepali lady. I love her for it. She unwraps previously unopened packages of bangles for me, and lends me her favorite ring, made of an earring her grandmother had favored, which lost its pair. It is so beautiful I feel nervous. I never wear gold.

I am a perfectionist when dressing up. I want to replace my nose and ear piercing with gold like the Nepalis, but to do it right I’d have to switch the side (of my nose) with the piercing – Nepalis pierce on the left – I pierced the right. Someone should have told me that would be mighty inconvenient in Nepal someday, back when I went with a gaggle of first-year college girls to defy our parents and embrace our age. Bad planning.

I am swathed in pink tulle. Did I say that already? I take surreptitious photos of myself, which don’t come out right. I don’t care. This is fun, and I am so thankful to Kanchan and her mother for tolerating and enabling my desire to play dress up in their culture. Gita laughs that I am like a mannequin, I stand so still when she wraps the sari (itself just a long rectangle of fabric) around my waist and throws it over my shoulder. I am afraid to mess it all up, but they even have a matching bag. Cotton-candied-girly-happiness. I feel pretty.

Sudarshan’s wedding is phenomenal. I hesitate getting out of the car in the mud of the day (this is where I trip and fall, right?) but his cousin-brother proactively and kindly greets me and introduces me around. All male cousins are brothers, and all female cousins are sisters. This makes family introductions complicated but relationships sweeter. I walk into the venue, which has covered tent-walled patios, as well as a banquet hall. I am more nervous. Everyone is looking at me, I think, because I am a bideshi in a sari. Is it good or bad to want to look like you are of a culture from which you do not come?

I “Namashkar,” hands folded, until I’m pink in the face. Namashkar is Namaste with great respect. I don’t know who to greatly respect here, and so I greatly respect everyone. People are very kind to me about my “dherai sano” (very small) Nepali and pretty sari – they say both are “dherai ramro.” I think everyone else is looking pretty “dherai ramro” too. There are mostly elders there – we are waiting for the parade.

Forty minutes later a parade arrives. There are musicians – almost a drum core’s worth of drummers, brass, and a clarinetist who can whale. Or does he wail? They are amazing. I think they could school American professional musicians, they are so good. The drummers are just phenomenal, too. But they lose my attention. A white car drives up behind them, flanked and preceded by an extended family’s worth of women in auspiciously-colored red saris, all on foot. They come bearing gifts, like the three kings, except by the dozen, all foods carefully prepared and wrapped in red plastic wrap. And they are followed by Sudarshan.

The car is decorated with long strands of flowers and the initials ‘S & S’, written in streamers. Out steps someone whom I have never met before. He looks like a king, and holds himself like one, and it is just tremendous to behold. It is Sudarshan, and it is not. My friend who so innocuously wears jeans and American-style t-shirts is wearing a multi-colored (rangichangi!) pair of pants, shirt, and shoes, all made of the same woven fabric, the style of which is widely seen in topis (mens’ hats) here. He has a thick white band of fabric around his torso, from his upper ribs to the top of his hips, which seals the effect, emphasizing how lean and tall he is. Hair freshly cut, he wears a necklace made of grass around his neck, and another made of marigolds. His shoes are pointed and elfin slip-ons, and beneath the crest of his forehead, where his topi rests, there is a large tika, the deep red blessing his family, friends, and priest have begun to give him, which is made of rice mixed with yoghurt, red-dye, and other foods to make it stick. Sudarshan looks stunning. I am flabbergasted. It is unlike anything I have ever seen before in my life.

Perhaps nervous, he stands from the car and comes straight over to me, adoring friends and family watching with enthusiasm. I don’t know what to do – if he were American, or this were America, or any combination of the two, I would kiss his cheek, or hug him, but we are both in such very different roles from any for which I know the script. Does a woman in a sari hug a man about to be wedded? I play it safe and go with ‘no.’ Instead I stand feeling great fondness and awe and just gape. We talk about something that is nothing, like how I got there. I want to shout “Holy Crap, Sudarshan!” but smush it down inside. I attempt propriety.

Sudarshan gets married. It is a long process, and I am not supposed to be there. The women of the groom’s side (of which, on this day, I am one) are at his house, with his mother, who does not attend the wedding. They are wearing red in abundance, as I find out later, and they are dancing, and singing, and preparing the house for the arrival of the new resident – the bride. There are traditional tests to be set, foods to be put out, rice grains to be laid out in little piles on the floor. Ritual abounds.

Being a bideshi means I can stay at the wedding, though, and I watch rapt for almost all of the 5 hours it takes for the marriage ceremony to take place. I wish that I could write it out like the artist Maira Kalman would, and show it all in artistic glimpses, but I would never stop talking and my stories are already so long.

The rituals are glorious. There are relationships formed and broken; there are food and drink and tika prepared and drank and eaten and blessed and bestowed; there are tears on many sides, mine included. Ground is covered as the bride and groom walk around the center of the ceremonial space, with fire smoking in the middle; prayers read out at high speed by old Brahmin priests from both families; feet are washed; money given. The band trills and then builds with the emotion of the moment – I think they are playing my heartstrings like a movie would, as the music swells when Sudarshan puts an orangey powdery tika on the center of the forehead of his bride, the mark of a newlywed woman, which she wears only today – tomorrow it will be red. When he does it she cries. She left her family’s house this morning and will not return there to live again in this life. The transition, to my bideshi point of reference, is brutally abrupt. I think of how slowly I moved out of my own parents’ house, how unofficial the process is until the day when suddenly you realize that you do not live there anymore, and will not again.

The bride is gorgeous. She wears a red sari and copious amounts of beautiful gold,  her equally red veil flecked with shiny reflective sequins hanging low over her forehead, adorned by a gold ornament. Her hands are clasped much of the time, arms adorned with as many red and gold bangles as they can hold, and her gaze is fixed in a permanently downward direction, demure. I check in with Kanchan later – are Hindu women not supposed to look up or look excited while they are married? They are not. Oh good, I think. I didn’t know what to make of that. The next day I tell this to Sudarshan and his bride (who I see has beautiful eyes) and we laugh.

There is too much to tell. The wedding ends when the couple moves through a ritual to transition the woman’s primary relationship from her parents to her husband. She cries, and then when she gets into the car with Sudarshan, her mother sobs. Her daughter has left her home, and although she will see her again, this is for good. Sudarshan’s father brings a gorgeous, scripted, framed invitation to the young woman’s father, to invite him to the reception the former will host the next day. It is a formality, and the men embrace. Her father’s composure breaks at last, and my own chest shudders with emotion. The Nepalis are better prepared for this process –they anticipate the tears, even celebrate them gleefully as a critical part of the ceremony. I am crying silently between parked motorcycles, in a hot pink sari. It’s all so incredibly beautiful, and so devastatingly sad. I am so moved. I love ceremonies, although I don’t pay attention when I’m the one who is in them. My friend Anobha who is also from Yale and a Nepali tells me I will have to have a Nepali wedding, no matter who I marry. I tell her I’ll wear a red sari. It’s auspicious.

I’m a little obsessed with the saris.

I am invited back to Sudarshan’s house, and I go, although the sari is starting to feel like those party dresses my mother put us in when we were kids, with big silky bows that were so pretty until they were so annoying because I just wanted to be wearing pants. I remind myself to relish the opportunity to wear one, though, and I do.

I have no idea what I am in for at Sudarshan’s. We board a bus, rented for the occasion. I still hear the band. It reverberates in my head – god those drums were good. No, wait – it reverberates on the ceiling!! THE BAND IS ON THE ROOF OF THE BUS. I am ecstatic. I laugh out loud. Sudarshan’s extended family members grin at my pleasure, the young teenagers sing Nepali songs extra loud, and everyone we pass stops to look. Most smile and understand and share the joy. I can see a single black and white sneaker hanging over the edge of the bus’ roof, its owner trumpeting away as we sway and hustled through the bump and bustle of Kathmandu. This moment is surreal, I think. How phenomenal.

We stop at an intersection – everyone is getting off. I go with them. “Dance with me!” call Sudarshan’s bainiharu, his many cousin-sisters and cousin-of-cousin’s-sisters. We are to form our own parade, and walk behind the band, in front of Sudarshan’s car, to his home. What an event! I decide there will be a drumcore at my wedding. Where I will wear a red sari. And a tikka made of rice, dye, and yoghurt. And bangles.

I dance a bit with the bainis (little sisters) but feel sheepish, am afraid to step on my sari and inadvertently pull it off, am wearing shoes two sizes too small, and am already being stared at by everyone we pass. There is a GIANT bideshi wearing a sari in the procession! I think they must whisper. “She’s huuuge!” I tower over the festivities like the giant Uncle Sam on the 4th of July. I mostly don’t mind.

We have fun. The music is great. Everyone gets into it. Motorcycles roll by, dogs nip at heels, a cow eyeballs us and chews lazily. I stumble along the cobblestone road in my little heels, feverish with the immense heat, fun, and celebration. I am drenched in sweat. So is the sari. We get to Sudarshan’s house and we are dancing in the street, although it’s really a lane. I am pulled suddenly into the backyard by Sudarshan’s brother to do something that is a Nepali word I don’t know or catch. But I go willingly.

I am stunned moments later to find myself in the center of a 3 foot by 2 foot rectangle of uneven sidewalk space, surrounded by more Nepali didis (older women) than I can possibly conceive of. Every inch of space from five feet off the ground to two or three feet off the ground is occupied by a continuous sea of women’s faces, each one of them beaming and expectant. There is every age, size, type of dress – the women might as well be dropping in commando-style from out of the treetops, there are so many of them. And they are all in motion. They dance to greet the bride, to welcome her home.

In fact, as I look, I see there are in fact aunties on the rooftops, lining them to take in the festivities. It is hot but now we are dancing – the women sing and drum, so well, and in the center other women dance. I dance. My shoes come off. The purse is taken away. I just flow with it. I mimic the movements of my hostesses, and am dancing with Sudarshan’s mother. She celebrates in style, a long rope of seaweed-colored green glass beads running over shoulder and down around her opposite hip, like the sash of a proud mother. This is her day, too, and you can tell.

Our arms are up in the air, and our be-bangled wrists twist in circles to make the choraa flash and clink in celebration, as we spin in circles and the long tails of the saris arc gracefully behind. The Nepali women I can see delight in my participation, so I let myself go. I stop watching, and I just dance.

A short while later I manage to escape the ecstatic circle of celebrants, and video the meeting of the parties – the men come from dancing with one another in the front, the women from the back, and they meet on the walkway between the houses, where we crush all of the plants with the steps of hundreds of feet. The music builds, the newlyweds walk through the mix, bride with head-bowed, groom narrowly avoiding being swept into the dancing crowd. Only his side and his family is present today – the bride’s family is at home, quiet, and a little sad.

There is more ceremony before the bride can enter the house, and when she does she steps from circular pile of rice and grains to circular pile, as if they were flagstones in a garden walk. When she enters Sudarshan’s room she must find her key to the home in a pile of rice, and Sudarshan’s mother tests her new daughter-in-law, kindly. I note with happy warmth the kindly way in which the women in particular receive the new family member – they have been here before. They know the fear and the hope and the excitement, and they are even gentler to the bride than the extended family’s men are, when they give the newlyweds their gifts. Every family member gives Sudarshan and Santa an envelope or a gift apiece. Santa’s job is to lay her forehead to the giver’s bare feet, in thanks, but many of those gifting catch her forehead in their hands, which both suffices and provides a reprieve, and also a benediction. The women in particular catch her forehead higher than the men, sometimes bowing to her instead, and smiling generously into her eyes. “Don’t be scared,” I think their eyes say. “We receive you with love.”

The gifts of the immediate family take a long, long time, and I am exhausted. I sit in the small room in a privileged seat, next to the bride and groom, that I may take it all in. At the end Sudarshan arranges a ride for me back to the road, and instead, I am taken all the way back to Kanchan’s. I am so thankful, because I am so, so tired.

And so the gorgeous day, full of so much mystique, intrigue, and ceremony, closes on me thus:

A bideshi, swathed in a length of pink fabric, now moist with the sweat of a hundred emotions and about as many dance steps, gathers her sari between her legs, clasping the extra fabric tightly there to prevent it from becoming entangled in the wheels of the motorcycle, and sits precariously, carefully, elatedly side-saddle, on the back of the young uncle’s motorcycle. Oversized feet peeking out of high heels are tucked precipitously sideways onto the slender platform for tiny, graceful Nepali feet, and off we go. Into the night, side-saddle, a blur of pink and pale white skin, heels hooked in wherever they’ll fit, one hand on the man’s shoulder, another on the back of the seat, holding on, hard. People turn to look in surprise at the bideshi in a sari, on the back of a bike, and away into the dusk and chaos of Kathmandu’s traffic we drive, fast, as my heart simultaneously clenches down with fear and leaps out of me with the sheer joy and elation of the moment, and the day.

And that, my friends, was the end of Sudarshan’s wedding.

-M-

Also posted in Adventure, Bideshi, Friendship, Nepali Clothing, Self-Discovery, Travel, Yale and FES – 3 Comments
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