Category Archives: Culture

My Day in Short Form

June 10, 2009

With inspiration from Sara, my good friend and college roommate who has begun updating her Facebook status only in a kind of poetic short form, herewith is my day today, in glimpses.

So humid overnight I slept in my silk sleeping sack and nothing else. Feet and hands slathered with lotion to lock in what little moisture I had managed to retain on a steamily hot, sweaty day. Woke to birds and critters, the mouse in my room shitting little black pellets as he ran from the towering bideshi. To my misfortune I find him cute, so he lives another day. Again.

Class without breakfast because hot rice and lentils in humid heat is not my cup of tea. Last Nepali class in Lakeside, the tourist haven cum ‘Gringolandia’ of Pokhara. I ride on the back of the ‘scootie’, helmetless, as there is none available for me – they are expensive. Hair blowing in the wind and skin burning under the cloudless sky. American on a scooter – I am a rockstar. We part traffic like Moses parted the water – everyone stops to stare at the white girl on the back of a Nepali woman’s bike. Our journey becomes safer because I am strange. Thighs clenched around my driver and her scooter, the seatback digs into my palm, etching little triangles across it, but I don’t notice – I just hang on. I know the risk is foolish but relish the thrill of the breeze, driven by the machinations of engine and petrol. My Nepali ‘guru’ leads, as I wrap a huge American palm around her tiny shoulder, holding on there as well. I would buckle myself in if I could, and mentally rehearse how I’ll protect my head if we have to stop short. But we don’t.

This woman is so much more than I am, this diminuitive Nepali woman, who remains unmarried at 27 because she refused to marry her cousin, as her caste’s tradition dictates. She has turned down dozens of suitors but wants to be more than an obedient wife and a mother, to do more than fall into the mode of what Nepali women are supposed to want, per tradition. We are feminists of the same caste, but she is up against more than I could shoulder – they tell her to fear being an old maid, being left, being alone. I am luckier, perhaps – my challenge is simply to hold out for one who wants to be a truly equal partner, as well as a lover. She is so much braver, stronger. She says she does not care and will support herself alone if she does not find love, and I believe her. We skipped an hour of Nepali class last week to talk about love and relationships in and across our two cultures.

This is how I come to truly know people, I think. This is how meaningful friendships are formed. She said all Nepali women worry about finding a husband. I said all human beings worry about finding love. We are both right, although in Nepal love and a husband may not be the same thing. In America, I think, love and a husband may not be the same thing, either, sometimes. We will both hold out for love. We are both romantics, both feminists. The two go hand in hand.

I respect this woman – like Rekha, my first Nepali teacher, and Kanchan, my friend, she creates the change she wishes to see in her world, but does so quietly. The women of Nepal create change so subtly that it creeps in, and fend off traditional elements of sexism daily. But there are tremendously good men here, too, like the professor who interviews women in the villages beginning with questions about women’s roles in the home, getting his interviewees to open up by admitting that he asks these questions about equality and participation during the day, but that when he gets home he still wants his wife to serve him tea. I think this honesty begets change.

We zip through the chaos of Pokhara’s streets, dodging kamikaze motorcyclists and overbearing buses, chickens, a shitting cow. I grin. Nepal is all smells and sights and sounds, and if you are not receptive to it, if you don’t embrace it, and clasp it tightly to you, it could overwhelm. I like Nepal best by bus, scorching hot and sweaty all over, rattling, bouncing, crowded with people and smells and nails encrusted with little bits of daal bhaat that evaded being washed off after breakfast. Runny-nosed children grasping at something or someone foreign they cannot elucidate, mothers seeking seats, teenage boys talking smack. Chatter. In the buses on the good days they play Hindi music, and it feels like the soundtrack to the whole world. To a day in the life. Put to music the scenes and colors and smells and noises and cries are symphonic – they tell the story of a culture too profound and varied to summarize in a blog post. Or perhaps, in a blog.

To Lakeside where the tourists are, pink with sunburn in their refusal to carry an umbrella, one’s portable shade. I carry an umbrella, but turned down several with hearts, stars, and ruffles before I found one I could stand. ‘Too girly’ doesn’t translate. We shop and I practice Nepali, bargaining needlessly for my dictionary, for my coffee beans to be ground. Prabha, my guru, tastes the coffee, made fresh from Costa Rican beans. ‘Charko cha’ she pronounces, trying not to pull a face. It’s bitter. Strong. Perfect.

I write emails to friends in my head. You should come here. Join me. Let’s run away. Our culture exhausts me even as I miss it. Most days abroad I could almost never go home, except that home is where my life is. Friendship, I realize all over again while away, is what life is worth living for. Friendship and love. And yet I delay seeing and calling friends because life is “too busy,” and avoid starting relationships to focus on school. So strange, I think now. Life is not, should not be, work. But how then can I ever have a respectable “life’s work?”

At the same time, I crave the things we have. Beaches, woods, hot water, clean streets. Clean air. Sanitation. I lust after good sanitation. You can’t love it until you don’t have it, but once you know that experience, you will watch in utter amazement when the toilet flushes, clear water in, black water out, and know that what you’ve sent on its way will not end up in the river behind your home, or running alongside the border of your state, until it has been treated and all the little good bugs you could see under a microscope have eaten up all the little bad bugs. Sanitation.

I am chagrined that today is our last day, even as I’m overjoyed to turn to my research full force. I have been mentally lambasting myself for low productivity. But I always have low productivity.

Pokhara may be the most relaxing place I’ve ever been, perhaps because it’s so hot I can’t think to do much else. The white people at the place where I learn Nepali are struggling – it is a Christian group and I overhear them praying to their God for help here. I think that they cannot learn to love it unless they do it – learn Nepali, clean up after the sick, tend to the homeless, care for the children – for themselves, and for the people who need them, and not for God. I think to myself that their God would tell them that, if he or she could. I hear them quietly contemplate leaving and giving up, and hating their struggle with the language, and notice that they seem to marvel a bit at my contentment in our conversations. “But you are alone on Ban Campus?” they ask, and I want to declare loudly that I am not alone – I am surrounded by people.

There are students and faculty and staff and their families, and I could not be alone among so many if I tried. To be the singular white person, singular woman, or single bideshi, does not make you alone. To be white among brown does not equal alone. But everyone asks me that question, both Nepali and bideshi. It baffles me. You would have to choose to be alone among so many, and especially among so many people with such interesting life stories.

I wonder if the white people from the Christian group feel their aloneness so keenly because of the quiet struggle of their Nepali coworkers, who cannot possibly (to my mind) feel true friendship for those who would come to them and tell them in earnest that their gods are false, and that there is only one true god, and that they have deigned to bring “him” to them. I would take the Nepali gods any day, thank you kindly. My professor friend tells me I should be a Buddhist, because I will not eat the animals, and that I should be a Hindu, because I won’t eat the Chow Mein (ramen!) with Chicken flavor. As I understand it, in Nepal the two dabble in being one and the same, and the patrons of one religion or temple are welcome in both. As am I. The Nepali people welcome you to their religion, and would never tell you that yours is false. Their gods celebrate life, death, and all the events in between – enriching life, instead of limiting it, constraining it, reproaching the faithful. “Their god is not false,” I want to tell the bideshi. “Your reason for coming to Nepal is false.” But despite myself, I cannot resent them for their insincerity, somehow. Instead I feel a tremendous degree of pity, and compassion, and hope that they will find a reason (such as learning to care in earnest for others unlike themselves) to want to stay.

-M-

Also posted in Creatures, Friendship, Self-Discovery, Travel – 3 Comments

Once Upon a Time in Ecuador

June 9, 2009

Once Upon a Time in Ecuador…there was a kindly older man in Quito, tall and thin with a sweet smile, named Fernando. Fernando worked for ACLAS, the Andean Center for Latin American Studies, and it was he who greeted 22 sleepy and scared American students their first night in the country, shuttling them off into the dark with Ecuadorian hosts they couldn’t understand, to begin semester-long experiences that would change their lives.

Once Upon a Time in Ecuador, Fernando and his kindly smile oriented us to the city of Quito, to speaking Spanish, and to Latin American culture. And I was so young, then. And so eager. I had no idea what  life had in store for me. To digress a moment, I thought yesterday, as we breezed through the streets of Pokhara, me on the back of a motorcycle, shadowed by the Annapurna Range of the Himalaya and speaking in Nepali, how startled I would be if I could travel back those six years, to Ecuador, and tell my younger self where I am today. I think I would have felt hopeful, and a little proud, but mostly terrified of all that laid ahead of me, of all the hurdles I’d have to surmount to get here, to Nepal. South America was, after all, the very first time I left the US.

But back to Fernando, in that far off land of Once Upon a Time. Fernando greeted us with a big friendly smile and a hearty “hola!” that first morning at ACLAS, and gave us a wonderfully eloquent, humorous speech that I now know will stick with me for the rest of my life. He spoke very formally and eloquently, but with a thick Ecuadorian Spanish accent, and he said to us, “When you hear the horns, and they are loud, and all of the cars are honking, do not think, ‘how annoying. How loud.’ You must think to yourself ‘Ah! It is like music! The music of the streets of Ecuador! How interesting! How different!’ “And when you see the dogs in the street, or the men who stop in the alleys to urinate, you must not think to yourself ‘This is disgusting, this overwhelms me,’ but think instead ‘I have never seen that before! How interesting! How different!’ “And when you go into the jungle or to the Galapagos and you meet the people there, whose lives are so different from yours, you must not let yourself think ‘how peculiar! How strange!’ but instead think to yourself ‘Ahhhhh…how interesting this experience is! And also how different!’”

And because Fernando was like none other, and could see his own culture and the way it was experienced by foreigners with such clarity, we took his words very much to heart, and made them the mantra for the duration of our trip. Cockroach in the hallway of the hotel? “Why!” we’d proclaim loudly, “that is a huuuuuuuge cockroach! What an interesting difference!” And when we all got sick from the water and took turns polluting the bathroom with our infirmity, out we’d come, sheepishly grinning with the awkwardness of it all “Interesting difference! What an interestingly different experience I just had.”

And so the message has stuck, and for me at least, transcended the bounds of the South American country from whence it came. I’ve reminded myself to cherish and value the “interesting differences” of four more countries since that day six years ago, and often share Fernando’s speech with other internationals I meet on my travels, some of whom originally lacked the insight needed to appreciate and engage with what they were experiencing. When I last came to Nepal I shared Fernando’s lesson about the interesting differences experienced during travel with Rekha, my first language teacher and friend, and she laughed with recognition.

When I first arrived and was struggling to formulate sentences in Nepali about people I knew, or ask basic questions, I often asked Rekha about other travelers or other students I had met, recognizing the “interesting differences” they’d failed to appreciate in their travels here. I shared the story of Fernando’s speech with Rekha when I was explaining in class how I had been slow to come to an understanding of some aspect or other of Nepali culture, and she embraced Fernando’s story from afar, as a kindred spirit to her role in Nepal. And so now, when I tell her that I was flummoxed when I met some teenage Nepali girls and that the first thing that they asked (before my name, country, anything) was whether I am married yet, she says to me with Nepali accent, conspiratorial smile and eyebrows raised, “It is an interesting difference, yes?” And I laughingly agree.

International travel is precious to me for the lessons it teaches us about appreciating the interesting differences in our lives, and about seeing them for what they are. Sometimes it takes a moment, and the recollection of Fernando’s great grin, to appreciate those little things despite the deeply ingrained cultural expectations we carry with us, which they contradict, fighting occasional revulsion at or resistance to the small things to try to appreciate the bigger picture, and how it (and we) all connect. I love how travel of this nature pushes you to see yourself and your place in the world more clearly, and how it makes you struggle to come to grips (especially as an American) with how much of the bounty in your own life you fail to acknowledge.

And so tonight when I ate at a new friend’s house, a Master’s student who is very interested in social science surveys (and aren’t we both!), my mind went again to Fernando, and the beauty of the “interesting difference,” as we ate on little woven mats on the concrete floor of my friend’s kitchen, lit only by the light of my tiny maglite “torch” because the power had gone off again. His mother served us a brilliant and delicious pickled mango dish to go with the daal bhaat, which was itself incredibly savory. My friend (whose name is Deepak) shared after a few minutes that all of the food was made fresh by his mother that day, exclusively from plants she has grown in their small backyard. And so it was with the greatest reluctance that I declined the fresh buffalo milk (fresh as in she just came in after fetching it from the large animal moored in their back shed) because I am afraid to get sick again. But I almost tried it – I was so close. I think when you have a night like that, eating comfortably from your hands on the floor, underneath a starry Nepal night, sharing food and stories out of hospitality, kindness, and interest in expanding your world and that of others – it is then when you can really see, feel, and taste the “interesting differences” that Fernando didn’t want us to miss out on, all those years ago.

-M-

Also posted in Adventure, Self-Discovery, Travel – 0 Comments

The Not-So-Short Version of the Long Story of How I Found Myself in Nepal

May 28, 2009

*[Editor's Note: Remember that bit about not being succinct? I've broken this part into two sections, with the first part below, so read that first. I'm still figuring out how to order posts, so bear with me if things move around a bit. And I promise no post will ever again be as long as these two! -M-]

…

What I realized while sitting alongside my little stream, on the day in early April when I backpacked alone, was that I like thinking about how people related to the natural world, and specifically to the resources that we all depend on, and value aesthetically. I am partial to forests, myself, and am also very interested (particularly these days) in issues of access to clean drinking water and sanitation, and so for me it was clear that I was headed towards trees, and water.

Trees were perhaps my first love in the outdoors, from the cherry blossom tree that was planted in our front lawn at the time of my birth, which I’d grown up climbing, all the way through to summers spent wandering in the woods near upstate NY where my grandmother kept a cottage, with my Peterson’s Field Guide to Medicinal Plants in hand. I would study forests, forest management, and the way they relate to water (to be very simplistic, intact and generally undisturbed forests help to clean and purify water more effectively than disturbed or poorly managed ones do), and I would use the opportunity of returning to graduate school to do research on forests in another country, both so I could have intimacy with and expertise in a specific place, and so that I could leverage that technical scientific background to obtain a better, more influential, position in the international environmental non-governmental organization (ENGO) world I’d begun to claim as my own.

I knew that forest management research would be satisfying, and enjoyable to me, and that publishing the results of my research (which is required for the FES Master of Environmental Science degree, which I am pursuing) would be of great benefit to me as a professional. I knew that the international element would prove to be important personally and professionally, but decided before beginning school that I was reluctant to return to Latin America and so would look elsewhere, even though it was the most obvious destination for someone with a Latin American Studies minor, who speaks fluent Spanish, and who lived in Ecuador and Peru during study abroad to do her research. But I was afraid I would compartmentalize myself as a Latin American specialist, rather than being well-positioned for a Staff Scientist role or, more ideally, an Associate Director of Scientific Programs type of position at an ENGO, and so decided I would instead do my research in either Asia or Africa.

When I was not selected by my first choice of academic advisors and was placed instead with a faculty member who focused on Nepal, Bhutan, and Thailand, I felt that the decision had serendipitously been made for me – I would go to Asia. Nepal and Bhutan were both on my short list of countries I was interested in doing research in (as were South Africa, Argentina, Kenya, and China), and to have a professor who specialized in this area of the world seemed the easiest route to making such a huge transition in geographic specialization in a well-supported way. I knew I would learn whatever language was spoken in the country I visited (I think this is very, very important, and will touch on it again in later posts), and that I would need to work that much harder if I was to be ready for an international field season relatively “by myself,” in a country I had never been to before, which I didn’t even decide on until the first week of October, a scant seven months before I’d leave for the field.

In the end, I settled happily on Nepal and learning Nepali, as I thought that the community forestry system in Nepal, where local community members who depend on the forest for their livelihood are put in the position to manage the forest as a committee, was fascinating, and I thought the lessons that could be derived from research there were more widely applicable than those in Bhutan. Bhutan limits tourism by a very savvy practice of charging an astronomical daily rate for tourism, and as such has a steady flow of income and less evident impact of external interference (as in, cultural pollution from other more developed countries as a byproduct of globalization and tourism), than Nepal does. It would be less expensive to do research in Nepal, and there was a strong community of Nepali students at FES who I was getting to know, and who I knew would help me to prepare for a summer in their home country.

So I decided on Nepal, and committed myself to it with determination. I read everything I could find, checked out every book that had Nepal and forest in its keywords across four or five different Yale libraries, and enrolled in Yale’s Directed Independent Language Studies program, to be paired with a Nepali student as a language partner for the spring semester, that I might begin to acquire language skills. I aggressively pursued and eventually was awarded the funds to travel to Nepal on a prep trip for three weeks over my spring break, and used the time to network with professors, make arrangements for my accommodations, and take a two-week long Nepali language intensive. I short, I did everything I could reasonably (and sometimes unreasonably) fit into a busy graduate student’s schedule, in order to be ready for this experience.

And so that, at long last, is how I came to be here. I’m studying community forestry because natural resource management by the people who depend on the resource appeals to my values, my politics, and my person, and because the kinds of questions you can ask about how such participation in management has impacted the participant’s perception of their world, and their role in it, are amazing. I love the idea of going into the villages and talking about trees and plants, and how they’re used, with community members, and I love that in research we have this unique opportunity to share knowledge in both directions – to learn from the community members instead of expecting them to just learn from us. I came here in part because I wanted to experiment a little with personal philosophies about international collaboration and field research in less-developed countries, as well, and will delve into that more in a later post. But I value about Nepal that on the subject of community forestry, the Nepali PhDs and professors are by and large the world’s experts, and I like how putting myself into the position of a learner in this country subverts the dominant development model oh-so-slightly.

Traditionally, the US and other developed nations have participated (and at times, intruded) actively in the development of countries like Nepal through USAID and other organizations, sometimes with mixed results. This has absolutely been the case with forest management, and it is interesting to see how now we have learned to step back just a bit, and see what is happening in the place we seek to help before we go in there and “help” them right into a dramatically degraded forest (this actually did happen). I think we have learned that we can no more institutionalize development abroad than we can “decide” to build democracies  – what we must do instead is support the work of the people in the countries where the work must happen, asking them what they need, and what they want, in terms of skills, ideas, and resources, rather than telling them what to do and how to do it, or that they must do it as we have. I cherish the way agency is daily restored to Nepal and Nepalis, and community forestry is a terrific model system through which to explore that transition.

There are many examples of how this has happened and how it has, at different times, succeeded and failed, but this blog post (or these two!) grow a little long in the tooth, so I’ll leave it at that, for the moment. Suffice to say that my coming to both Yale and Nepal was as much about a long, serendipitous sequence of events as it was about me knowing myself, and what I needed at the time when I was making the decision. It reminds me of that chorus of the song that always sticks in my head, about how “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”

-M-

Also posted in Research, To Be a Scientist, Travel, Uncategorized – 0 Comments
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