I am finally back in Kathmandu. And I am sick. I think it mostly due to the garbage that was burned outside my window in Bastipur each morning at 3 am. Or it could bit some disease acquired from the rats that left poop on my bed every day. It may even been malnourishment from eating plain roti (bread), no protein or nutrients, and only horrible, overcooked, week-old vegetables once a day.
After a terrible 13 hour bus ride, Alicia and I went straight to Thamel for salad (real vegetables!), falafel, and, uh, coke… It was amazing!
Okay, it may not sound like it, but I really did enjoy time in Bastipur! Besides the smoke and the unappetizing vegetable curries, everything was really great. The family was wonderful, teaching was fun, but the coolest part was experiencing the true village life. It was even more real than the rural experience I had hoped for but never thought I would see! I have already mentioned some of this in my previous post, but here is a brief picture of Bastipur and my life while living there:
Bastipur is truly a rural village; there are more cows and buffalos than there are people! My family alone had three and they lived right outside my window. These creatures are useful because they are good for, well, everything! The houses are all made out of buffalo dung. The floors are buffalo dung. We cooked sitting (squatting, actually) on the dung floor, cooking over a dung fire pit, burning logs of dried dung. Buffalo, ox, and cows are also used for plowing, pulling carts, and even riding! I was lucky enough to ride a buffalo myself! It was certainly a unique experience.
If there is anything else as important to this village as cows, then it is rice! Rice to eat, rice to make flour, patty to feed animals, patty to make rugs, patty to make roofs. While I spent the mornings teaching, I spent each afternoon working in the rice patty. For the first few days I cut rice, and once that was finished we spent a few hours each day carrying the cut patty back to our home. It turns out, rice patty is heavier than you would think! It is also bulky and awkward, so carrying it on my head (which is the ONLY proper was to carry it!) was pretty challenging! I could only manage half as much as the Nepali women carry, but it was still exhausting. By the time we finished after dark, I was ready to make some roti (bread), eat, and go to sleep!
Bastipur is the most “backward” (I hate using that word) place I have ever experienced. The caste system still dominates the society. No one ever introduces themselves with out their caste, but it is visible even without their words: shaved heads, gold piercings, and tattoos make it pretty visible.
The lives of women are also pretty shocking. They do all the work (in the home, in the field), but the men get the credit. I’ve never seen such physically fit women. Even the grandmother at my home spent all day long in the field cutting and carrying rice. Young girls stay home from school to stay at home and work, then marry young, then move in with their mother-in-law to do more work. My home was actually a compound one big extended family: two grandmothers, their sons and their wives. My “neighbor” in the compound was the newest wife: an 18 year old Class 10 student (not that she attends school anymore…) with a new baby. To top it all off, the women do all of this work while wearing sarees! They cook, clean, cut rice, and even sleep in sarees. Seeing the women walk through the fields with their bright sarees over their head, carrying a baby in one hand and a sickle in the other, is just like the postcards. It is amazing!
To give a few more examples: One sister-in-law at the home had never heard of dinosaurs. And when money was stolen from the home, my family skipped the police and went straight to the “saru”- a medicine man/fortune teller- to help them solve the mystery.
I had fun experiencing village life, and I think the villagers enjoyed the presence of a foreiger just as much! I couldn't walk down the street without people coming out of their homes to watch me. I was even taken on a "tour" to a neighboring village so that I could sit in a chair and be watched (literally) by the locals! Yes, it was really uncomfortable, but what can you do? It was certainly neat to be somewhere so untouched by foreigners.
Of course, I haven’t forgotten about teaching. The school was tiny: a few rooms that are open to the outside, and about 180 students in nursery to class five. Teaching was difficult at times because the children, especially the younger ones, speak almost NO English. We also had few resources and supplies, but we did what we could. We had to draw our own world map, from memory, to teach geography; it wasn’t very accurate but at least it had the right number of continents, so it served its purpose! The students were sweet and I realized I really enjoy teaching.
In addition to the family, there were so many wonderful people in the village. Our last day there, some of our friends took us out for a picnic-the Nepali equivalent of a party- which was really special. We trekked 3 hours into the hillside then spent the day cooking chow chow and dal baht over a fire on the river bank. They even cooked chicken! [By the way, when Nepali people want chicken at a picnic, they bring a chicken. A REAL, LIVE CHICKEN. The whole walk there, I had NO idea we were carrying a chicken until one of the small boys pulled it out of small totebag, still flapping, and cut off its head right along the river bank. Woah.]
…So, I hope this gives a bit clearer picture of my time in Bastipur. If you are still curious, you can check out my photos in the link on the right margin of this page!
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