The Old and The New

Another candle lit room in a guest house in semi-rural Nepal, on a ridge which overlooks 2 small lakes and 2 villages. This is my second time staying adjacent to Nepalese villages; the first being the 9 days I spent last week in Sarangkot, about 15 km from here.

The guest house where I've been staying is on a high point, I have a 360 degree view of the surrounding area. Just below is a village. As a westerner, the term “village” used to conjure a very different image. One of neat houses and a few (modern) stores, perhaps a gas station.  A “one street town” if you will.

I’ve seen or walked through a number of villages the past few weeks and these are not that.

The village below, similar to the others I’ve seen, consists of some structures where people live. The buildings are worn, occasionally missing part of a wall, sometimes made of stone or brick, sometimes made of what I guess to be clay or hardened mud. 

Often there are very large conical heaps of drying straw, by large I mean up to 12 feet high and 5 feet wide. The straw is used for the goats which are often part of the household. And oxen are not an uncommon sight. 

Often the goats and oxen are tied to a stake in the ground by a piece of string, although I’ve seen many goats and oxen wandering freely too. When the Nepalese people call the goats they say “la-la-la-la-la”; it seems to work.

Most households have either a plot of land where food is grown or they have terraced fields, which they use the oxen to plough. I’ve grown accustomed to the sound the men make to spur the oxen, and the sound of sticks hitting the oxen when they are not bending to the men’s will. Makes me sad that sound, they hit the oxen hard sometimes.

There is no running water in these village homes. What I’ve seen in the parts of Nepal I’ve visited, even in Kathmandu, is a common water source where people get their water, bathe and wash clothes. 

In Sarangkot I watched women lug big metal jugs of water up very steep hills; watched women do a family’s worth of laundry by the side of the road. At Rupa Tal (lake) this morning I watched a woman haul a huge pile of clothes to the lakeside and proceed to wash them (no soap evident) on a rock.

I stand on the balcony outside my room here in Begnas Tal and look at the village below, and I get a sense of another time. Standing on the rooftop, I feel like I’m standing on the deck of a time machine.

Here in these villages there are no stores, no infrastructure and limited transportation (meaning your feet). What you eat is what you produce. The milk comes from the goats. The vegetables come from the ground. 

I asked the guest house wife/mother who handles the food to make some food for me. Boiled vegetables and “gundruk” a Nepali soup made with dried spinach and garlic. A few minutes later I watched her pull a few carrots out of the ground. 

This is how life is here, so different from the world I left behind. And these people are relatively modern and well off so they have some way of getting into town to buy things like rice and dal for keeping on hand. But I sense many villagers don’t have the resources to go to town much.

What strikes me as I gaze at that village is that, for the inhabitants, this is the whole world. 

How does one transcend that circumstance? Of what import is the outside world?  I think about social life in the village. How does one find a partner from such a small number of choices? And what if you’re gay? I can really see the isolation of it, just the village and its environs, that’s all there is.

Walking through the jungle the other day I passed a woman carrying a big bundle of sticks on her back, tied across her head the way they carry things here. Passed other women with baskets on their backs and small scythes foraging for plants. What there is is what is here; use it wisely, use it all.

I really had no concept of that back home. We have everything, anytime.

The reason it was so easy for me to eat meat, long after I knew it was ethically wrong to do so, was because the package in the store (or food served on my plate at a restaurant) was so far removed from the actual animal. It simply was not the same thing.

All of my food was that way, I am a “city person”. I go to the clean, well lit store and select attractive, sterile packages of food products. Or select produce from pretty, rainbow colored heaps without a thought as to how far that fruit has traveled. Or how it got there. In my world what there is is everything.

I’d heard the term “developing country” many times before, but think I now understand what it means in a real-world sense. Nepal is a “developing country”. It is the old sitting side by side with the new.

The old… the village life I described, the lack of infrastructure i.e. unpaved roads, limited electricity etc.

The new… the zip line in Sarangkot that you literally have to walk through the houses in the village to access. 

The new… the city of Pokhara 15 km from here, which is the gateway to the Annapurna circuit, a major trekking destination. Pokhara caters to Westerners and is by far the most affluent area I’ve seen due to the influx of tourist money. Affluent being a relative term of course.

The old and the new all in one… I met a young man as I was sitting in the jungle yesterday. He lives in the village and spoke English very well. I sat on one rock, he squatted on another. He goes to school in Pokhara, studies commerce, aspires to own a guesthouse someday and employ the village people.

Earlier this evening I realized that I too am developing, I too am the old and the new.

The old… My life is my commitment to the ancient wisdom and practices of the Buddha and the Hindu traditions; meditation, pranayama, asana, study.

The new… the freedom, mobility and resources to be typing this blog entry on my laptop in a candle lit room in Nepal.