Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Working for the Weekend


There has been no shortage of things to keep us occupied here in our first month in Nepal. So much has happened that it feels more like a year than a mere month. Every weekend is too short (that’s definitely the same as at home) with too many things to see, do and explore. Two weeks ago, team JPC (Taryn, Sean, Jess, Tanya, Micah and myself) decided to get out of the city for a day and check out a rice planting festival. We hoped on a bus bright and early on the morning of Saturday, June 29th, along with a number of our new Australian friends, and within 45 minutes were bumping along down washed out country roads amongst a sea of green rice paddies.

When the monsoon rains begin to fall on Nepal in the summer every year, the rice season commences. Rice is not only a major dietary staple for Nepali people; it is also an essential means of livelihood for many farmers across the country. Traditionally, the last Saturday in June is the first official day of the rice-planting season, and the famers celebrate the return of the new season by planting, and playing in the mud. Unfortunately, we learned that the tradition of playing is dying out now, but we did our best to keep its spirit alive.

When we first arrived three busloads full of foreigners sidled up to the edge of the empty paddy, all wondering what we were supposed to now. As we all tentatively made our way through the muck, local women tried to instruct us on how to turn up the “soil” by scooping up bits of debris dropping them in a pile and stomping them deep beneath the mud.

Seriously?

Based on the fact that what appeared to be the entire population of the small village had gathered on nearby rooftops to gawk at us, it seemed equally likely that this “weeding” technique was usefully as it did that they were screwing with us. However, this didn’t last long, because it was only a matter of minutes before the first of the mud started to fly. This quickly gave way to all out mud wrestling matches. Once I was dirty I became fully committed to the cause of ensuring every other participant became equally mud-covered. In my mission, I suffered an especially amusing defeat against Tanya’s husband Micah, as immortalized on video by Sean, here:

I felt a bit guilty about getting side tracked from the “weeding” at first, but when I started to notice just how smooth the mud was getting I realized that it might have been part of the master plan for turning up the soil after all.

Once the paddy was in the right shape to be planted we were called away from our games and handed bundles of rice stalks. The next 45 minutes were occupied by trying to stick the individual plants up in the mud without royally screwing up these people’s future rice harvest. I do not think I have ever heard “No! Like this!” (followed by a demonstration) more times in my life than during that period. It didn’t help that everyone seemed to have a slightly different version of like this. When my rice bundle was all (or at least most) stuck upright in the mud I happily retired to the waiting snacks and rice beer. I can say with complete confidence that the local women were relieved to get us out of the way. They were literally reaching over me to plant in front of me I was going so slow (oh yeah, and to re-plant a few of my first attempts at times as well).


After snacks and beer it was time for the real games to begin! At first we were reluctant to hop back into the mud, but the organizers soon had a fairly sizeable group divided into two teams for what I can only describe as a combination of capture the flag, tag and ultimate mud wrestling championship. In reality, the game is called Kabaddi and what happens is one person crosses the centre line and attempts to tag a player from the opposing team then dart back across the line to safety on his or her own side without being taken down by the opposing team. If you get taken out by the other team, you’re out. However, if you manage to tag someone and get back across the line the person you tag is out, and someone from your team gets to come back on. It got a little intense at times....


But it was definitely fun!











After the mud wrestling had run its course as we had all managed to “shower” under village water taps and streams we loaded back onto the buses and went to a local restaurant for a traditional Newari (the native people to the Kathmandu Valley) meal, followed by a relaxing stroll through the hills before arriving, exhausted, back in the city a few hours later. That might have been the deepest sleep I have had since arriving.




The only really low point of the day came when this conversation transpired:
Tanya – Hey, did anyone else notice that as we got closer to the edge of the paddy it started to smell like poo?
Micah – Yeah, I went to use the public washroom at the end of the day and it was basically just on the edge of the paddy.
Bronwyn – WHAT? Oh my god! I got it in my MOUTH!!!

Other fun weekend activities that we have kept ourselves busy with have included a great hike up part of one of the local mountains, a Canada Day barbeque and (of course) flip cup tournament and some regular Saturday brunches at a beautiful oasis like restaurant and organic farmer’s market.
1905, our new regular Saturday morning brunch spot
Last weekend we took a jam packed micro-bus (Jess counted 22 people at one point) all the way across the city to Budhanilkantha, at the foot of Shivapuri national park and hiked up the mountain to Nagi Gumba, a female monestary, and back. Even though we ended up getting monsoon rained out on our hike back down it was incredible to get a few hours of fresh air and relief from the Kathmandu dust and smog, as well as take in some amazing views of the city from above.
Inside Nagi Gumba
Beer Pong Team Russel(l)
POUTINE!!!

JPCs overlooking the valley from Nagi Gumba when the skies were clear, and a random man claimnig shelter under Jess and Sean's umbrella.






On “Canada Day” (actually June 30th because it was a Sunday and no one had Monday off) we took a cab across town to the home of two Canadian girls who are in Kathmandu for an internship with Mines Action, and did they ever put on a good, authentic Canada Day celebration! It was so nice to see their patio full of red and white outfits (worn not just by our Canadian friends, but the Aussies, Germans and Americans as well). With all the changes in my life recently, I hadn’t given Canada Day a second thought. Dressing in red and white and walking around downtown Ottawa on July 1st seemed like another world, another life. But I’m so glad these girls reminded me of it, because it was a really fun time, and two great seeds were planted here. One has to do with a conversation Tanya and I had about potentially collaborating to write an article about the ways in which our two units (disaster risk management for her and poverty alleviation for me) could both benefit more deeply from collaborating on a few key aspects of programming, and another was with a new friend who works at a school for children who have been rescued from forced labour in carpet factories. Unsurprisingly these children have very few belongings (perhaps two outfits each) and no toys. I think this is the kind of place that could use a teddy bear or two! Stay tuned for breaking news on both these fronts, coming to you soon!
A few Canadians enjoying some shade on "Canada Day"
Quite a good turnout for a Canadian national celebration in Nepal

Friday, July 5, 2013

Life In A Ticking Time Bomb

It is said that a major earthquake in the Kathmandu Valley could dwarf Haiti. In fact, according to the recent security briefings all us UNDP Nepal newbies just received, Kathmandu is the most at risk city in the world to earthquakes. Geological history indicates that an earthquake of such scale will occur every 75-100 years (a pattern which has held for about 1000 years). We are currently on year 79. Analysis: I have moved to a time bomb. 

So we’ve been getting the earthquake preparedness rundown. You know, the whole: drop cover and hold business. We’ve been instructed to have our emergency “go bags” with essential supplies, medical kits, water, travel documents, etc. ready to grab and get out when the looming earthquake does hit. We’re to stay indoors, wherever we are, and cover to the best of our ability until the shaking stops, then grab our go bags and get out, heading to the nearest open space where crumbling building, falling trees and power lines cannot harm us. Now, I don’t know if you have been paying attention to my photos of Kathmandu, or if you have ever been to Kathmandu, but I can assure you that in this cramped Asian city NO such place exists! 

Not exactly structurally sound
The new apartment is quite close to the UN compound, and that’s the “safe” area we’re supposed to try and get to. So, basically, what I have garnered from the massive download of information of the past couple days is that, in the event of a major earthquake (which experts estimate would level at least 60% of the buildings in Kathmandu and cause upwards of 300,000 casualties) I am to cover myself, and if the structure I am in remains standing, and I survive the initial shock, I am to grab my bag, get out and run down the street (likely while aftershocks roll across the city), trying to dodge the intensely sketchy and shoddily constructed building that will surely be falling all around me and hopefully make it to the UN. Through from there, who knows. The city of nearly 3 million has…8 fire trucks, not all of which are functional (some of them were “donated” from the U.K., which after seeing them I take to mean: dumped here from the 18th century), and few ambulances. Telecommunications will nearly all be down, and bridges connecting the city will likely have collapsed…meaning getting out of the city by air or land may not be possible. Long story short, this is the message we have gotten: “If we get a huge earthquake, which, by the way, we will, SOON, we are all screwed. Good luck! And welcome to Nepal, we hope you have a wonderful experience!”

Talk about a warm welcome :)

"We are going down here, if the earthquake happens in the next half hour, we will die." Direct quote.
This place, like many others, is going down, for obvious reasons


Surveying potential damage during our earthquake walk

First impressions of Kathmandu

It has been three weeks since I landed in Nepal, and I think the time is overdue for me to give a few of my first impressions of my new surroundings.

When we first got into the UN vehicle and left the airport, taking in Kathmandu was a shock, to say the very least. My head swivelled restlessly from side to side as I surveyed the packed streets with no semblance of order or rules of the road, the tiny, makeshift huts that passed for shops, the precarious buildings in extreme states of disrepair and the rats nests of wires wound around every pole with wide eyes. What have I gotten myself into? I wondered, involuntarily.  
Are these the kinds of places I am realistically going to have to go to buy food? A six month hunger strike seemed more fathomable to me at that point. Our guest house was in a nice area of the city, surrounded by embassies and expat homes – it is located on a mud road, wide enough for one car at a time that swerves back and forth to miss pedestrians, scooters and massive potholes (along with a few uncovered manholes). 

Allow me to give you a run-down of a few features of day-to-day life in Kathmandu. Let’s start with the traffic, shall we? I can describe it in one word: insane! The major streets are fairly wide (enough to fit two and half-ish cars across) with no lanes to speak of, nor apparent rules of the road. Instead, vehicles just go where they want and weave in and out of one another to get there. The flow of traffic is: everyone goes at whatever speed they want to (all different). The main intersections have about eight different ways of coming at them, and no traffic lights (actually, I think I have seen one set of lights...I’m fairly certain they were non-functional). Traffic police are dispersed somewhat randomly throughout the city and “direct” the traffic...sort of. They have helped us cross at times though, so they are definitely appreciated.

Every vehicle that passes anything (pedestrian, other car, truck, motorcycle, scooter, cow, bus, etc.) honks at it. Every vehicle! Every time! All the time! (Yes Dan, you were right about this). Even when walking alone down the side of a relatively wide, completely empty street a single passing car or motorcycle will honk as it passes, giving me a wide berth. As this point I am not certain if the honk is meant as a way of saying: “G’Day Mate,” “Watch out, I’m here,” or “Get the F*** out of my way.” These nuances of the honk remain a mystery to me.

The accepted manor for merging from a side street (all of which are dirt roads, only slightly wider than a car and a half) is to just start pulling out and creeping across...people seem to stop for this. To be fair: the speed of traffic is actually quite a bit slower than we would be used to in North America, so it’s not as abrupt as it might seem. This is also the accepted manner for crossing the street. Just go! The cars and vans and motorcycles and bicycles...they will all just go around you (in theory; currently, my best practices for street crossing is to sidle up to a local who looks like they’re about to cross and walk in their shadow). For that matter, this is how animals cross the street as well. And are there ever animals in the street!

Thus far, on the streets, I have seen: ducks, chickens, dogs, lots more dogs, rats (sometimes alive, mostly dead, being fought over by the aforementioned dogs), a few cats, dead crows, monkeys, cows, goats, and this morning one of my fellow JPCs saw an elephant as she was walking to work. I am a very deep and unhealthy shade of green over her good fortune at this. The most common is dogs – lots and lots of street dogs. They mostly sleep in the shade during the day. We have taken to naming the dogs along our street. Names include: Pharaoh for this really Egyptian looking one, Tripod for the three-legged German Sheppard and Shenzi, after the hyena in the Lion King for an especially scraggly, long-haired one. When the sun goes down though, the dogs come out for their nightly mass street dog convention and ultimate fighting championship. Luckily, I am a pretty deep sleeper.

All these animals are not just found along the sides of roads or on tiny side streets. I have witnessed both dogs and cows literally laying down and resting in the middle of major roads, looking completely calm and unfazed as speeding cars pass all around them. Everyone just moves over for the animals, as for every other obstacle on the road. In fact, I watched two cows cross about six lanes of traffic the other day. I should really make an effort to try and ask them how they did that, come to think of it! 


So, with a traffic situation such as this, how does one get around safely? Well, safety is a relative concept around here, so let’s not spend too much time dwelling on that. There are several options for “public” transit here (I say “public” because they are privately owned and operated as there are no city busses). If headed into the centre of the city for some evening entertainment (about 5km from my apartment) you could take a taxi for around 250-300 Rupees ($2.75-3.25 Canadian). OR for a more colourful option you could stand along the side of a major road and wait for a jam packed white cargo van looking thing to drive by with a young boy hanging out the side of the open sliding door yelling locations quickly in Nepali, hope that you flag down the right one and squish in for 15 Rupees (16 cents).
Our group of six did this one evening. We got some weird looks from the locals, and I think I might have caught a touch of TB from the elderly woman hacking up her lungs 3 inches from my face, but it was sort of fun at the same time. The tension was broken when the driver tried to ask us for 900 Rupees and Tanya yelled out: “Noooo,” very good naturedly in a way that said You’re silly, and we’re not stupid! Everyone burst out laughing then, driver included, who told us it was worth a try.

There is also the Tuk Tuk, which is an even smaller, more packed, three-wheeled version. They look a lot like they could be cardboard boxed perched on top of slightly overgrown, motorized tricycles. We have yet to try this, but trust me: it is on the list!

In terms of getting where you are going, that is quite interesting and hilarious as well. If we were able to give cabs addresses and have them take us to said addresses that would be easy, but that’s not how they roll here in Nepal. Most streets don’t have names. People find their way based on regions and landmarks. On our first day we received directions that included: “Go west to the end of this street, then take a left. Follow it straight until the banyan tree, where you should go around it to your right...” So at this stage we can never truly be sure where we are going to get dropped off, and if we can expect to be able to find our way to our destination from there. It certainly makes getting around interesting.


Other features of the Kathmandu streets: they are hectic, crowded and incredibly polluted. I cannot tell you how many times a big truck has driven past me and completely coated me in thick, black exhaust. Besides the air pollution, walking often turns into a game of: can you avoid the mounds of animal feces and piles of garbage between point A and point B? The Bagmati River, which separates Lalitpur (where I live) from central Kathmandu, has 300 tonnes of household waste dumped into it every day. Every! Day!




Environmentally, this is horrifying, but even worse than that is the fact that Kathmandu’s poorest people live beside the river in makeshift huts, constructed mainly of old clothes, garbage, tarps, signs and other debris. Poverty is extreme. Nepal is one of the top 10 poorest countries in the world, with 25% of the total population living below the poverty line (on less than 63 cents per day). Of everything I have encountered here, it is the most shocking thing to be confronted with. Watching people working so hard, for such long hours to make so little gives you the kind of rotten feeling in the pit of your stomach that doesn't go away, especially when you think about the fact that most people at home pay more for their cable and internet in one month than a lot of people here could hope to make in a year.


The biggest adjustments have been in the basics of living: food, water and electricity. We had a hard time at first figuring out what and where it was safe to eat (vegetables are generally out unless you wash them in iodine for 30 minutes yourself), but now we have a few local haunts for lunch and dinner. Despite the hygiene caution, we eat out a lot because everything is cheap. Lunch on a daily basis costs about $3 and we have relied on reputable restaurants for the most part since arriving as we’re just starting to gain confidence in our ability to properly wash and prepare vegetables without giving ourselves a bad case of the runs. Clean water is another concern we have been faced with.  Generally speaking: water is not to be trusted in Nepal. Even sealed water, in bottles from shops must have their seals carefully inspected so as to ensure they haven’t been refilled with filtered tap water.
Everything is dusty and dirty because of the air pollution, so the fact that your bottle is dirty looking when you pick it up doesn't necessarily say anything about what’s in it. As a matter of adjusting I have already gotten sick a couple of times from the local food/water. I think it’s all part of the process of slowing turning my stomach into a cast iron machine. It’s happening now though, I even ate salad at a restaurant without having to spend the entire next day in the washroom last week! Progress.The last thing is the electricity. The government of Nepal has a system of “load shedding”. This means that scheduled power outages roll across the city for about 8-10 hours per area on a daily basis. We are pretty spoiled at our apartment, and have a backup generator, which means we don’t often lose power for very long; however, we have, on occasion, had to prepare food or eat in the dark. Thanks for the headlamp Assia! It has proven quite handy at times.

Finally, how could I call myself Canadian and not talk about the weather? It’s bloody hot! The Nepali’s don’t seem to think it’s too bad, but I am from the great white north, and 30 degrees with 75% humidity every day has turned me into a sweaty, partially melted mess with an intense, frizzy afro most of the time. I have given up on the idea that I will ever feel truly clean during this monsoon season. Oh, and monsoon, that’s another thing entirely. It rains every day, even when it doesn't look like it will, trust me: it is going to rain! Hard! We made the classic mistake of going out for lunch without our umbrellas or rain boots on a particularly clear, lovely afternoon and ended up having to rush back to the office for a meeting amid a torrential downpour.
            “Close your mouth,” Tanya yelled to us as we ran down the street trying to dodge calf deep mud puddles. Best way to spend an afternoon, you ask? Slowly drying under an air conditioner over the course of a two hour meeting, only to realize you are coated in a thin layer of grit from the air pollution that washed down on you in the rain.  

You would think that with all these changes I would be hit with massive culture shock, but that hasn’t been the case. On the contrary: I LOVE IT HERE! One thing that really struck me within my first few days of arrival was that in spite of how incredibly different things can be from one place to the next, people are essentially the same. We humans all essentially need and want the same things. We haven’t been treated like we’re so different by people here, and I realized: it’s because we’re really not. We have been met with nothing but friendly attitudes, smiles, gracious hospitality and fabulous senses of humour. Everywhere I go Nepali people are smiling and giggling together and with others. Almost every conversation I have involves laughter. It’s hard not to be happy amid that.

Nepali culture is not abrasive. Perhaps I find that because we’re in the big city so people are more used to accepting westerners, or perhaps it’s their genuinely kind and gentle demeanours. It’s not as conservative as we were all preparing for. It is a conservative society; however, people seem very accepting of differences. They may think some things are strange, perhaps about the way we dress or act, but we don’t get harassed. I go out running in my lulu lemon shorts and people stare curiously at me, but that’s about it. The only thing I am not going to get used to is people calling me maam everywhere I go.
Good morning maam.
Hello maam.
Coffee maam?
Good evening maam.
I am not important enough to be called maam!

Perhaps I’m still in the honeymoon phase, but I find it amazing how quickly one can adjust to new things and come to love them. I already feel at home here. The mud road with massive pot holes, and a menagerie of dead and living animals along the side of it, is just “my street” now, the same way Lisgar or Woodland were my street before. The little huts with random samplings of dusty products and piles of veggies lining the precarious shelves are just my local shops where I buy eggs and beer now. Everything that shocked me and made me wonder what I had gotten myself into a couple weeks ago has come to be the new version of my cozy little existence.

I do get irritated by some things at times, of course – and the suffocating humidity and pollution that leave me in a constant state of sweatiness don't exactly help. Also, I have seriously started to consider Dad’s suggestion of just screaming “HONK” right back at cars when they wait until they’re just in front of my face and lay on the horn (as if I can’t see them approaching on the empty street or am even moderately in their way), especially when I've had a couple drinks the night before. However, at those times, retreating to the roof of my building and taking in the amazing view of Kathmandu with a cool beverage brings me right back to my happy place. All in all: life is good.