I opened my eyes. In the room was Bidro's dad, a young man in his twenties (Bidro's youngest brother), a boy of about 18, a girl of maybe 12, along with a child (Bidro's nephew). All were staring at me - a mound of redness and perspiration. On the bed next to me also in a mass of sweat I was surprised, and rather glad, to see Achut and Bidro. Bidro's dad looked as if he had been out on a Sunday afternoon walk. I was pointed towards the window, a breeze was blowing in from here, and I moved to sit there, and for the first time took in where we had arrived. It was absolutely amazing. Outside was a land of green: maize, banana plants, rice paddies, ginger, okra, coffee trees, pumpkins, cucumbers, forests. At the bottom of the valley the Bagmati flowed. The green hill-scape was scarred with grey and brown intermittent landslides, though a lot less than in the Annapurna region due to better forestry management. Around us, insects screeched and clicked, the family goat was bleating - oblivious to its impending slaughter for Dasain - and the gentle sound of the wind rushing through the trees. Surely this was paradise.
The view from the window
For the rest of the evening, I remained in a state of semiconsciousness. All the things that happened occurred around me. People talked. Visitors came and went. I think we ate. And I finally succumbed to the sleep that was enveloping me.
I woke in the morning. My back end was going to explode. I rushed to the toilet. The news was not good. When I walked to the tap to wash afterwards, everyone saw me and knew. After a brief bite to eat, we went down to see the micro-hydro project. As we walked down to the hut, I noticed that most of the people here were not the standard Hindu castes. Instead they were Tamangs, of Tibetan descent. According to Bidro, about 90% of the people in the surrounding areas were Tamang, with the rest being the Hindu castes. (According to my guidebook, 1 in 5 Nepalis are Tamangs as well, making them the largest ethnic minority in Nepal). I had met some Tamangs in the Terai before, but this was their original homeland before moving out of the crowded hills for the new farming land created by the government in the Terai in the 1950s.
A Tamang girl
A pair of Tamang boys
We walked down through the fields, and began to be followed by some boys in their school uniform. They said the school was shut for the next week, but didn't seem to really know why. We reached a small stone hut in one terrace, Bidro went to the edge of the terrace and shouted. After 10 seconds a reply came. Bidro made his reply and came back up. Someone was coming up with the key. Shouting was the traditional way to talk in the hills I found. As you walked around and spotted someone you knew within a mile of you, you shouted at them to say hello. After 5 minutes, a head appeared through the paddy terracing, soon to be accompanied by a body, and brandishing a key.
As Bidro opened the door we walked in to a room of about 6 ft square. It seemed almost empty. On the back wall was some electrical distribution gadgetry, and through the wall the 2 inch poly-pipe appeared. This led down to a small converging nozzle and a pressure gauge connected to a blue box. The blue box, located in the middle of the room, was where the turbine was housed, and a 2.5 kW motor cum generator stood on top with a wire leading to the back wall and the distribution board. I have to say, I was slightly disappointed. I don't know quite what I expected, but it wasn't this. I suppose I had thought there would be a mini-dam and lake with a complex system of gates and valves controlling the water. But no. All very simple. And perfect for what they needed. A simple design solution.
The (perfect if slightly disappointing) micro-hydro project
Bidro explained to me about the project. It cost 300,000 Nepali rupees (NPR), about £2,500 - the initial quote was 500,000 NPR. Bidro sourced all the equipment himself and then arranged it to be transported, managing to save the project money. The community runs the project - the 12 households that it serves - and pays 30 NPR each for its upkeep. Compare this to if the national grid was put to the area, By a conservative estimate for the hill region, it is £60,000 per km of electrification. The supply is neither reliable or safe, subject to numerous power cuts and thieves stealing the valuable cable. Also, for the same electricity as provided by the micro-hydro project, the households would be expected to pay at least 200 NPR per month for the supply, a price that most of the families just could not afford. It is true that the micro-hydro line provides only 2.5 kW for all 12 houses, and is only used for lighting, but this is a great step forward. Previously, either batteries, kerosene or fire provided light. Batteries and kerosene required to be brought down from the market an hour up the hillside, and with the increase in oil and fuel costs, both were beginning to become only available to the richest families in the area. Using the micro-hydro project and energy saving lights, which are guaranteed for a year and cost a few hundred rupees, life has changed in the village.
Paradise it may be, but life is hard. The only industry here is farming. Over the many years, families here have grown and gradually terraced the land all the way up the hillside to provide enough food and income for the ever expanding families. This is a major problem suffered by many Nepali families. For a family of multiple sons, when the father of the family dies, or cannot support himself any more, the sons divide up the land equally - normally. So, for land that was able to support one family now has to support many families, and it just isn't able to. As the generations pass, this problem gets worse and worse. So many Nepalis move away, some to the city, some abroad. For example, in Bidro's family there are 7 sons and no daughters. This would mean that the land would have to be divided into 7 and support each family, so Bidro and five of his brothers have left the village, leaving the youngest to tend the land with his father. They now live all across the world, from America to the UAE, a story that is repeated in families across Nepal. For those families that remain in this village, their children can go to the local government run school, though this is an hour away up the hill. However, many just can't go as their parents could not afford them to go. The children are needed to look after the goats, pick weeds and other chores around the house and farm.
After some food, and another rather painful visit to the toilet, we went for a shower. This was no ordinary shower though. We walked for 20 minutes up the hill and reached a waterfall, then as best we could, recreated the Herbal Essences advert. What they don't show in the advert though is how cold the water is, and how slippery the rocks are, and how to deal with peeping toms that are always a problem. I think we did an admirable job in imitation, although the advertising agency still haven't called. After being pummelled by water plunging 3 or 4 metres I was becoming relaxed, and I felt what I hadn't for the last 24 hours. Good.
As we returned from the shower we stopped in at a house for some tea and I met a man who was 96 years old. He asked me the usual questions: How old was I? Was I married? What was my caste? He told me that he had lived through the reigns of 5 Kings of Nepal. He had also lived through the most turbulent times in Nepali history since the unification in the 1700s: the 1951 revolution, the two democracy movements in 1990 and 2006 and now the new Federal Republic of Nepal. I looked around and wondered how much had changed in the village over that time. My guess would be very little.
Returning to the house, more visitors had arrived, and proceeded to sit and stare at me. We ate, and I visited the toilet for a 3rd time. At that point the lights went out. Bidro grabbed a torch and ran up the hill saying something about the intake being blocked. 20 minutes later, light returned, and soon after Bidro did. The intake for the turbine was near where we had showered earlier, and had a stone stuck in it. Once this was removed everything was fine. This was the beauty of the project, very little can go wrong with it. And if anything does, then it is usually easily fixed.
Bidro gave me a Nepali version of Immodium, so that I wouldn't need to go to the toilet overnight. Unfortunately it didn't work, and after 2 visits during the night, I was feeling quite angry. Why do I always have to ruin things with being sick? I lay in my bed and stewed in my own self-pity and anger.
The next morning, things were slightly better. Bidro asked if I was up for a short walk, and not wanting to show any further weakness, said yes. We walked down the hill, past the micro-hydro project, and through the recently planted rice paddies. People were in them picking out the weeds by hand, the green rice plants still as vibrant as ever. In a small shack, the falling water was also being used to turn mill-stones, grinding maize and other crops into powder, these little shacks being run by small boys. As we descended, a nasty smell invaded our nostrils. Even here, many miles downstream of Kathmandu and diluted from the mountain rivers, the Bagmati river reeks.
The rice paddies
We walked along the river bed, reminiscent of the beaches in Cornwall and made our way through more rice paddies to another village. Bidro announced that he would like to build another micro-hydro project for these people, around 20 households. It would cost between 1 to 1.5 million NPR, £10,000 or so. However, Bidro was finding the same problems as we were, no-one wanted to support a small project.
A village in the river valley
This short walk was turning out to be a bit a bit longer than I thought. After an hour and a half of walking downhill and through the fields we sat down outside a house, where a girl brought us some water. Then we turned right around and walked back again. Along through the fields of rice, stopping at a couple of houses for Bidro to say hello to people he knew and then making our way back up the hill. By the time I reached the top, I was once again ready to die. This time however, I had the added problem that I forgot to put my suncream on, so my arms resembled highly coloured coconut ice. Excellent.
In the afternoon I lay down and watched the world through the window and thought about things. Nepal may only be 12 hours flight from the UK, but in reality it is worlds apart. This was not the world I lived in. The world I lived in was, relatively, easy. I just couldn't reconcile how I lived to how these people lived. And it wasn't just that. What I did affected these people. The more oil I burnt, food I ate, pollution I created, caused life to be harder for them. For the rest of the evening I sat in quiet contemplation. I watched the food being cooked on the wood stove in the kitchen, whose ceiling was covered in soot from the fire. I saw Bidro's father carrying nearly 50 kilos of grass he cut on his back to feed the buffaloes. I watched the two children playing, wondering what kind of life they would lead. Would they stay and farm like their father, or would they go off into the world and never return?
That night, I didn't sleep. I couldn't. I was worried about the next day, when we were going to walk back to catch the bus. I was worried about this village, would life be able to go on in this age of electrification, hi-tech communication, consumerism, environmental destruction and the erosion of traditional values - values which I believed many to be discriminatory, but had held the communities together over the past hundreds of years. And then I thought about the old man I had met. He had lived through so much, and was still here. Maybe there was still hope. And with a slightly happier thought I closed my eyes.
Seconds later I was raised from my rest by a tapping on the door. Bidro, as promised, there to wake us up. We needed to leave early in the morning to miss the sun and ensure we arrived at the bus stop in time to catch the bus. We said our goodbyes and headed off. I was feeling a lot better. Part of me wished I didn't, so we could stay a few more days. But I knew two things: Bidro had work to do, and Achut really wanted to go back - he was never very good at being away from home. We headed out the same way we came, through the irrigation channel, crossing the river in the most inappropriate of places, adding more thorns to my still painful hands. Instead of following the larger road we took a small path that seemed to scale the side of a rather high hill. Bidro assured me that this was going to be an easier route than the one we took before. As we set out climbing, I was sceptical, but what could I do. After 30 minutes of climbing, we stopped in a village and I once again collapsed in a ball of sweat. However, I felt fine. Tired, hot - yes - but fine.
As I sat down I felt a small wriggling in my shoes. I pulled back my sock and saw three leeches attached to my ankle. I must have picked them up in the irrigation channel. I was surprised how small they were, they look rather cute almost. Not like the huge ones I had seen in nature programmes and films. I let them feed for a while, Bidro had a look and then proceeded to pluck them of, throwing them in the dirt. I watched them make their escape. Soon after I noticed another 3 crawling along the ground, they must have attached themselves to my shoes without managing to get a feed. The size difference to those that had eaten was incredible, the fed leeches were at least 3 times the size of their starving counterparts. And these fed leeches hadn't had their fill yet, as they hadn't dropped off on their own free will.
The road was straight and level, following the shape of the hill until we reached the point where we needed to descend to the bridge across the Bagmati, before climbing again to the bus stop. Here there was no bus. The thought crossed my mind, had the truck that had been broken before been fixed yet? Would we have to walk all the way to meet the bus? I hoped not, the sun was out again in full force, and my sunburn from the previous day had begun to ache already. We went to the shop and enquired to the bus. Yes, it had arrived the day before. It would leave today at 11am. It was now 9 o'clock, so we found some shelter from the sun and waited. I looked in my sock again, and noticed another pair of leeches, these had obviously had a good feed as they were very fat and dropped off with ease. After some time, the bus arrived, passengers and goods disembarked, we climbed aboard and were heading back to Kathmandu. On the way back we passed the landslide where 11 people died recently, everyone holding their breath again, and was pointed out the mountain where the Indian Airlines A320 crashed on descent into the airport. Nice.
Our bus, at the stop
It had been an amazing trip. Even for a few days, seeing how life is in a rural community where there is no tourism, just agriculture, is quite difficult for foreigners. I felt privileged. I had some new ideas. Maybe this was the kick in the backside I needed.
SAM
For the rest of the evening, I remained in a state of semiconsciousness. All the things that happened occurred around me. People talked. Visitors came and went. I think we ate. And I finally succumbed to the sleep that was enveloping me.
I woke in the morning. My back end was going to explode. I rushed to the toilet. The news was not good. When I walked to the tap to wash afterwards, everyone saw me and knew. After a brief bite to eat, we went down to see the micro-hydro project. As we walked down to the hut, I noticed that most of the people here were not the standard Hindu castes. Instead they were Tamangs, of Tibetan descent. According to Bidro, about 90% of the people in the surrounding areas were Tamang, with the rest being the Hindu castes. (According to my guidebook, 1 in 5 Nepalis are Tamangs as well, making them the largest ethnic minority in Nepal). I had met some Tamangs in the Terai before, but this was their original homeland before moving out of the crowded hills for the new farming land created by the government in the Terai in the 1950s.
A pair of Tamang boys We walked down through the fields, and began to be followed by some boys in their school uniform. They said the school was shut for the next week, but didn't seem to really know why. We reached a small stone hut in one terrace, Bidro went to the edge of the terrace and shouted. After 10 seconds a reply came. Bidro made his reply and came back up. Someone was coming up with the key. Shouting was the traditional way to talk in the hills I found. As you walked around and spotted someone you knew within a mile of you, you shouted at them to say hello. After 5 minutes, a head appeared through the paddy terracing, soon to be accompanied by a body, and brandishing a key.
As Bidro opened the door we walked in to a room of about 6 ft square. It seemed almost empty. On the back wall was some electrical distribution gadgetry, and through the wall the 2 inch poly-pipe appeared. This led down to a small converging nozzle and a pressure gauge connected to a blue box. The blue box, located in the middle of the room, was where the turbine was housed, and a 2.5 kW motor cum generator stood on top with a wire leading to the back wall and the distribution board. I have to say, I was slightly disappointed. I don't know quite what I expected, but it wasn't this. I suppose I had thought there would be a mini-dam and lake with a complex system of gates and valves controlling the water. But no. All very simple. And perfect for what they needed. A simple design solution.
Bidro explained to me about the project. It cost 300,000 Nepali rupees (NPR), about £2,500 - the initial quote was 500,000 NPR. Bidro sourced all the equipment himself and then arranged it to be transported, managing to save the project money. The community runs the project - the 12 households that it serves - and pays 30 NPR each for its upkeep. Compare this to if the national grid was put to the area, By a conservative estimate for the hill region, it is £60,000 per km of electrification. The supply is neither reliable or safe, subject to numerous power cuts and thieves stealing the valuable cable. Also, for the same electricity as provided by the micro-hydro project, the households would be expected to pay at least 200 NPR per month for the supply, a price that most of the families just could not afford. It is true that the micro-hydro line provides only 2.5 kW for all 12 houses, and is only used for lighting, but this is a great step forward. Previously, either batteries, kerosene or fire provided light. Batteries and kerosene required to be brought down from the market an hour up the hillside, and with the increase in oil and fuel costs, both were beginning to become only available to the richest families in the area. Using the micro-hydro project and energy saving lights, which are guaranteed for a year and cost a few hundred rupees, life has changed in the village.
Paradise it may be, but life is hard. The only industry here is farming. Over the many years, families here have grown and gradually terraced the land all the way up the hillside to provide enough food and income for the ever expanding families. This is a major problem suffered by many Nepali families. For a family of multiple sons, when the father of the family dies, or cannot support himself any more, the sons divide up the land equally - normally. So, for land that was able to support one family now has to support many families, and it just isn't able to. As the generations pass, this problem gets worse and worse. So many Nepalis move away, some to the city, some abroad. For example, in Bidro's family there are 7 sons and no daughters. This would mean that the land would have to be divided into 7 and support each family, so Bidro and five of his brothers have left the village, leaving the youngest to tend the land with his father. They now live all across the world, from America to the UAE, a story that is repeated in families across Nepal. For those families that remain in this village, their children can go to the local government run school, though this is an hour away up the hill. However, many just can't go as their parents could not afford them to go. The children are needed to look after the goats, pick weeds and other chores around the house and farm.
After some food, and another rather painful visit to the toilet, we went for a shower. This was no ordinary shower though. We walked for 20 minutes up the hill and reached a waterfall, then as best we could, recreated the Herbal Essences advert. What they don't show in the advert though is how cold the water is, and how slippery the rocks are, and how to deal with peeping toms that are always a problem. I think we did an admirable job in imitation, although the advertising agency still haven't called. After being pummelled by water plunging 3 or 4 metres I was becoming relaxed, and I felt what I hadn't for the last 24 hours. Good.
As we returned from the shower we stopped in at a house for some tea and I met a man who was 96 years old. He asked me the usual questions: How old was I? Was I married? What was my caste? He told me that he had lived through the reigns of 5 Kings of Nepal. He had also lived through the most turbulent times in Nepali history since the unification in the 1700s: the 1951 revolution, the two democracy movements in 1990 and 2006 and now the new Federal Republic of Nepal. I looked around and wondered how much had changed in the village over that time. My guess would be very little.
Returning to the house, more visitors had arrived, and proceeded to sit and stare at me. We ate, and I visited the toilet for a 3rd time. At that point the lights went out. Bidro grabbed a torch and ran up the hill saying something about the intake being blocked. 20 minutes later, light returned, and soon after Bidro did. The intake for the turbine was near where we had showered earlier, and had a stone stuck in it. Once this was removed everything was fine. This was the beauty of the project, very little can go wrong with it. And if anything does, then it is usually easily fixed.
Bidro gave me a Nepali version of Immodium, so that I wouldn't need to go to the toilet overnight. Unfortunately it didn't work, and after 2 visits during the night, I was feeling quite angry. Why do I always have to ruin things with being sick? I lay in my bed and stewed in my own self-pity and anger.
The next morning, things were slightly better. Bidro asked if I was up for a short walk, and not wanting to show any further weakness, said yes. We walked down the hill, past the micro-hydro project, and through the recently planted rice paddies. People were in them picking out the weeds by hand, the green rice plants still as vibrant as ever. In a small shack, the falling water was also being used to turn mill-stones, grinding maize and other crops into powder, these little shacks being run by small boys. As we descended, a nasty smell invaded our nostrils. Even here, many miles downstream of Kathmandu and diluted from the mountain rivers, the Bagmati river reeks.
We walked along the river bed, reminiscent of the beaches in Cornwall and made our way through more rice paddies to another village. Bidro announced that he would like to build another micro-hydro project for these people, around 20 households. It would cost between 1 to 1.5 million NPR, £10,000 or so. However, Bidro was finding the same problems as we were, no-one wanted to support a small project.
This short walk was turning out to be a bit a bit longer than I thought. After an hour and a half of walking downhill and through the fields we sat down outside a house, where a girl brought us some water. Then we turned right around and walked back again. Along through the fields of rice, stopping at a couple of houses for Bidro to say hello to people he knew and then making our way back up the hill. By the time I reached the top, I was once again ready to die. This time however, I had the added problem that I forgot to put my suncream on, so my arms resembled highly coloured coconut ice. Excellent.
In the afternoon I lay down and watched the world through the window and thought about things. Nepal may only be 12 hours flight from the UK, but in reality it is worlds apart. This was not the world I lived in. The world I lived in was, relatively, easy. I just couldn't reconcile how I lived to how these people lived. And it wasn't just that. What I did affected these people. The more oil I burnt, food I ate, pollution I created, caused life to be harder for them. For the rest of the evening I sat in quiet contemplation. I watched the food being cooked on the wood stove in the kitchen, whose ceiling was covered in soot from the fire. I saw Bidro's father carrying nearly 50 kilos of grass he cut on his back to feed the buffaloes. I watched the two children playing, wondering what kind of life they would lead. Would they stay and farm like their father, or would they go off into the world and never return?
That night, I didn't sleep. I couldn't. I was worried about the next day, when we were going to walk back to catch the bus. I was worried about this village, would life be able to go on in this age of electrification, hi-tech communication, consumerism, environmental destruction and the erosion of traditional values - values which I believed many to be discriminatory, but had held the communities together over the past hundreds of years. And then I thought about the old man I had met. He had lived through so much, and was still here. Maybe there was still hope. And with a slightly happier thought I closed my eyes.
Seconds later I was raised from my rest by a tapping on the door. Bidro, as promised, there to wake us up. We needed to leave early in the morning to miss the sun and ensure we arrived at the bus stop in time to catch the bus. We said our goodbyes and headed off. I was feeling a lot better. Part of me wished I didn't, so we could stay a few more days. But I knew two things: Bidro had work to do, and Achut really wanted to go back - he was never very good at being away from home. We headed out the same way we came, through the irrigation channel, crossing the river in the most inappropriate of places, adding more thorns to my still painful hands. Instead of following the larger road we took a small path that seemed to scale the side of a rather high hill. Bidro assured me that this was going to be an easier route than the one we took before. As we set out climbing, I was sceptical, but what could I do. After 30 minutes of climbing, we stopped in a village and I once again collapsed in a ball of sweat. However, I felt fine. Tired, hot - yes - but fine.
As I sat down I felt a small wriggling in my shoes. I pulled back my sock and saw three leeches attached to my ankle. I must have picked them up in the irrigation channel. I was surprised how small they were, they look rather cute almost. Not like the huge ones I had seen in nature programmes and films. I let them feed for a while, Bidro had a look and then proceeded to pluck them of, throwing them in the dirt. I watched them make their escape. Soon after I noticed another 3 crawling along the ground, they must have attached themselves to my shoes without managing to get a feed. The size difference to those that had eaten was incredible, the fed leeches were at least 3 times the size of their starving counterparts. And these fed leeches hadn't had their fill yet, as they hadn't dropped off on their own free will.
The road was straight and level, following the shape of the hill until we reached the point where we needed to descend to the bridge across the Bagmati, before climbing again to the bus stop. Here there was no bus. The thought crossed my mind, had the truck that had been broken before been fixed yet? Would we have to walk all the way to meet the bus? I hoped not, the sun was out again in full force, and my sunburn from the previous day had begun to ache already. We went to the shop and enquired to the bus. Yes, it had arrived the day before. It would leave today at 11am. It was now 9 o'clock, so we found some shelter from the sun and waited. I looked in my sock again, and noticed another pair of leeches, these had obviously had a good feed as they were very fat and dropped off with ease. After some time, the bus arrived, passengers and goods disembarked, we climbed aboard and were heading back to Kathmandu. On the way back we passed the landslide where 11 people died recently, everyone holding their breath again, and was pointed out the mountain where the Indian Airlines A320 crashed on descent into the airport. Nice.
It had been an amazing trip. Even for a few days, seeing how life is in a rural community where there is no tourism, just agriculture, is quite difficult for foreigners. I felt privileged. I had some new ideas. Maybe this was the kick in the backside I needed.
SAM
1 comment:
A stunning journey - and rather brave all in all. The contrast between what you're seeing there and the stuff you're used to at home must be dizzying
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