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Today you get some of my more serious journal entries (or at least, entries about more serious matters) - hopefully it willl give you a taste of the realities of rural living in a developing country.
March 16th
International news is non existent on a daily basis out here. In Kathmandu you have easy access to the internet and s couple of English language newspapers. Here, the outside world is a total irrelevence it seems. Even on the odd times when the electricity is stable enough to run the TV, the only programming is pop videos and Bollywood movies. National news (listened to avidly by all) is all via battery operated radio. However, it's patchy - we often don't know about national strikes or fuel stoppages until word of mouth reaches us on the day. Local news (the general Chitwan area) is a combination of radio and word of mouth - for instance, on the day the strikes lifted no one was really sure what was going on with transport or shops, so Sushila rang Deba's second cousin's auntie's best mate's son (honest) who has a shop in Naranyangaht to find out if buses and shops were up for business or if the trek in would be a waste of time... Village news is broadcast by a man on a bike. For really important stuff (free medical clinics, rampaging rhino) he uses a megaphone.
March 27th
Much village tooing and froing through the garden and the river path. Deba went to find out what was happening. Sushila says a child has drowned in the river.
Later - they bought her body up to the gates at Sitamai. Then carried the mother up from the river, on the back of another woman. Broken. The children had followed her to the river instead of staying at home when she went to cut grass (the villagers are allowed to cut crass in the jungle, many of the poorer people do this - wade across several times a day with huge bales). They tried to ford the river after her, the little girl was swept away. Deba says he'd been down to the river earlier, many of the class children were there. We had no one turn up for class at 12, presumably because that's where they were. He says this is part of the reasoning behind the community school - to provide the kids with somewhere else to go other than the river or the jungle, when their parents can't afford school and have to leave them all day. We don't know if she was one of our regular ones.
April 2nd
I was thinking earlier that for all the cultural differences, human nature is really much the same everywhere. In the village there are families with nothing, but they have pride, dignity, and the kids are clean, and their premises always swept and spotless (not easy in a thatched brick and mud hut, with dust, goats, chickens etc). Then there are families with the mud hut equivalent of rusted bikes and abandoned cars outside, with kids bringing razor blades to school, fathers drunk in the middle of the day on the local roksi and chav mums with a packet of fags tucked down the front of their grubby saris.
Occasionally there are cases of child malnutrition, but through parental ignorance rather than a lack of food (the daal bhaat diet, while monotonous, does provide carbs/vitamains/protein - just giving your kids white rice does not). True cases of destitution get picked up really quickly through the community - here, someone will let Deba and Sushila know if a family is struggling (parents get arrested for stealing wood in the jungle for instance) and ways and means are found to help. Sushila and I had a long conversation about the need to educate the parents in order to make headway with the kids - the last time she tried adult hygiene classes, the only way she managed to get people to turn up clean was bribery/reward, and even then she couldn't get them to see it was necessary for their children too.
March 30th
Many of the men of the village (and of Deba and Sushila's extended family) work abroad. Malaysia, Dubai, Australia, UK, India. Deba told me that early in his and Sushila's marriage, he worked for 5 years in Malaysia. I asked why. Was it purely money? He said at that time (15 years ago), his other choices were pick up a gun and join the Maoists, or be shot. He chose neither, but had to leave Sushila and their 2 young daughters behind. These days, reasons are primarily economic. There is 70% unemployment in Nepal. Tourism is seen as a major area, and Deba's passion is building the Sitamai Community Forest into an ecologically sound and sustainable source of income for the village. He spends a lot of time convincing them not to chop down all the trees....
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