Shangri-La Liz: Shiny Happy Caste System

I'm sorry it has been so long... my access to the internet is sporadic. The connection actually goes to one server from Kathmandu to a server in Bangladesh... you know just down the street. They have this thing called power sharing, where every couple of days the power will randomly go out for a few hours. This is why I brought a head lamp. So, a lot has happened in the last few days... I will try to cover it all.

My Nepali language classes are daily. Sabin is a good teacher, but he likes to get off topic and talk about life. Yesterday we were having a practice conversation about the caste system. I asked a simple question, which turned into an hour long discussion about the caste system. Sabin is Brahmin, which is the highest cast... the ruling caste. He asserted that there it is an old custom no longer in effect, but when I asked him if he could marry Nabina, a girl Chhetri girl who works in the VSN office, he said no. Nabina and I also had a long conversation about marriage. She cannot be outside after dark, and do other things all to make make her a good marriage prospect. She wants an arranged marriage because she believes or knows that they have a higher success rate. About 50% of the marriages here are still arranged. Nabina says she doesn't believe in love and that money is the most important part of marriage because if there is struggle, it will fail. These two conversations are coming from the “upper class of Nepalese culture”. The lower classes adhere to this as well. Caste stay with castes. In my family's home, we have a servant who does all the cooking and cleaning. Her name is Goma. She is not allowed to eat with the family or do anything... she is a servant. She is so sweet and so beautiful. But of couse she is from a lower caste. In the morning she makes me my breakfast and I try to talk to her in my broken Nepali... she is great to practice with because she doesn't know English. She will bring me tea (hot water with lemon) when she hears that I wake up, and then inform me that my meal is ready in the morning and at night. We eat two meals a day here. One at 9:00 am and one at 8:00 pm. In between they stuff our faces with “snacks”. I am getting fatter! Tomorrow I start volunteering at 7:00am, so I am hoping that I can skip that morning meal and just eat a piece of fruit or something... but I doubt it. Goma will probably be instructed to fix me something when I return, no matter what I say.

Anyway... my days thus far! Day 3 I had my language class in the morning. It lasts 3 hours. It was intended that I be taken on a sightseeing trip to some temple, but plans were changed. There is a displaced person's community nearby. It is really a refugee camp consisting of over 5000 people (3800 under the age of 18) who were driven from their homes because of either Maoist rebels, floods, landslides or because they were sharecroppers who never had homes to begin with. They established “camp” in this river bed, and in the past 3 years have established their own community. They are squatting on public land, from which they will likely not be removed. The conditions of this community are abominable. The homes are makeshift sheds... it is a shanty town about which I have read in books only. Because it is in the bed of a river, they have no water system or waste management system. Raw sewage is running down the middle of the “streets”. And hundreds of children play in the streets.

They've established their own government. I met with the leaders, who I call the elders, about the needs of the community. It was actually, Sabin, Sujan, myself, Karstan, a volunteer from Germany, Abe, a volunteer from Maine, and Nabina, my translator. They emphasized the obvious. Their need was clean drinking water. VSN has never worked on a project like this, so they were trying to offer other resources like health care, education, income generation, etc. But the hard truth is these things will be obsolete is everyone contracts major diseases from drinking the same water they use for urinating and defecating.

We also met with the principle and superintendent of their school. This community has at least 3000 school age children, and 100 of the local school. 100 go to nearby public schools.

I'm off to an Nepali class... but I will finish these thoughts and add lots of pictures later.

Namaste!