In the Clouds

I’m sorry; that’s where my mind is.  Today’s post won’t feature much text.  Then again, any time I make it to the computer lately, I somehow end up writing blocks of text, so I’ll throw in some pictures for a change.

I really am putting together a folder of pictures to show some contrasts and similarities between Nepal and the US.  In the process, I stumbled on a bunch of pretty clouds.

Here they are, in random order, from all around the world:

Kathmandu

Clouds move in to conquer--I mean, cover--Kathmandu

The Pacific Ocean, Near Tokyo

The sky continues glowing over the Pacific Ocean just after sunset.

Somewhere Over Malaysia

Okay, who's setting off an atom bomb now?! Oh... wait. Those are just random pretty clouds...

Chicago

From above it all--including the clouds--patches of Chicago emerge beneath patches of clouds.

Super Bandh Bandh, Super Bandh Bandh, Super Bandh Bandh…

(I’m sorry, it’s stuck in my head, just like that, to the tune of Ricky Martin’s “Shake Your Bon-Bon.”)

Well, so much for my one year anniversary celebration.  That must be put on hold, like everything else in the city.  It was paralyzed today by the largest bandh I’ve seen.

(Yes, Kathmandu, happy anniversary to you, too.)

I’ve already explained this story twice today, but here goes again, for the final time:

We woke up this morning with the streets deserted.  Except, there were more pedestrians than normal.  But cars?  Buses?  Tuk-tuks?  Even bicycles?

I think not.

A massive bandh had been called by the Young Communist League (commonly known as YCL), which is essentially the youth wing of the Maoists.  Other Maoist-affiliated groups supported it.  And that meant that everyone with any sense abruptly closed their business, or abstained from moving their vehicle from wherever it was parked.

For most of the day, I didn’t really understand the reason for the bandh.  I heard that even people on bicycles were being stopped–the bandh called for no use of vehicles, at all.  That struck me as completely ridiculous.  Especially as I heard the news abruptly, as it pulled me out of a dreaming sleep.  I hollered at the air about the absurdity.

I’m very uncomfortable with bandhs.  I strongly believe in the right to protest.  I support the right to form unions and political organizations, and to strike.

But when you use force to compel everyone else to join your protest…  Well, frankly, then you’ve turned the tables in an ugly way.  Assumedly, most protests are directed at what the protesters perceive as a misuse of force.  It seems the height of hypocrisy to then exact force on innocent bystanders to compel them to support your cause, however temporarily.

Though, apparently, the cause this time was pretty bad.  A district committee member of the Maoists apparently died on Thursday under mysterious circumstances–the bandh was to protest that, and to protest that no one was informed of his death until Sunday, despite how he’d been missing for a week and apparently had been taken to the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital for treatment, where he died and was found in their morgue.  Worryingly, the YCL are blaming youth members of the UML party, which is the current party leading the government, and the party of the new Prime Minister.  They claim the death was a murder.

I really could have called this post Nepali Politics 106.

But since I have little to do with the politics, I had a 3-day weekend.  I read books and magazines; I couldn’t teach my English class.  I sadly looked out the window at the moldering garbage by the road and wished that someone somewhere in the world would invent the notion of protesting by ignoring the “establishment” and single-handedly fixing small problems–like trash beside the road.  On the other hand, it was very quiet.  No beeping, or sounds of passing vehicles–they’re never very loud here, anyway, compared to probably every other national capital, but it still managed to be more peaceful with the utter lack of vehicles.  The songs of the birds were very clear and pretty.

I watched my neighbor’s children clustered on a balcony of their house, playing, and shouting down to pedestrians in the road.  Apparently they didn’t have class, either.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, apparently protestors were burning tires and pitching stones, or vandalizing vehicles that defied the bandh.  Apparently police fired tear gas at one crowd pitching rocks at them.

And above all, it’s apparent that Nepal needs some resolution to its political problems.  If the man was murdered, police need to be gathering evidence and interviewing suspects.  Instead they’re kept busy firing tear gas.  If no one trusts the police, then legislators need to be working hard on putting together a new constitution and discussing how to confront corruption–instead of being kept at home, unable to move forward with running the country.  If everyone is on edge right now (as they usually are) because of electricity shortages, water shortages, unclean water, lack of sanitation, and spreading diseases, then people need to be coming together to end all those problems.  Instead they can’t even go shopping, or sit by the side of the road and sell their produce.  Or attend school.  Or do anything else.

So I sigh, and read about Nepal’s ancient history–birthplace of Gautama Buddha, site of the establishment of awe-inspiring stupas and temples, built in time out of mind.  I read about the modern diversity of the people, with dozens of ethnic groups and over a hundred languages… languages from completely separate language families, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Austo-Asiatic.  I realize that the ancestors of all those people wandered here from thousands of diverse places, and they decided to stay, carving out a life not only in some of the most awe-inspiring natural beaty in the world, but in some of the most difficult conditions–on the sides of hills that would be classified as mountains and left uninhabited anywhere else on Earth,  or living even higher, on the himals themselves, where people patiently cultivate crops or graze their yaks even above the treeline.  They survive drenching monsoons and baking droughts.

And I read the newspapers, and sigh about the current problems:  murders, impunity, disorder, political fighting instead of compromise…

Maybe it’s sadly appropriate for the country of the Himalayas to have gargantuan problems.  But this isn’t Zimbabwe; this isn’t Somalia.

And if the people of this country can conquer the Himalayas, surely they can conquer anything else in their way, as well.

But in the meantime, I’m afraid, there will be bandhs.

Nepali of the Day:

raajnitik:  national

samasya:  problem

banda garnu:  to close

vidyarthi:  student

pasal:  store

padhnu:  to read, to study

siknu:  to learn

padhaunu:  to teach a subject (literally, to cause to read)

sikaaunu:  to teach a skill (literally, to cause to learn)

kinnu:  to buy

One Year Anniversary!

No, not for the blog.  For my time in Kathmandu.

(Oh, yes, BTW, I know, “long time no see” and all that.  No, for once I haven’t been sick.  Just busy.)

As I’ve mentioned, I actually spent a few weeks back in the United States earlier this year.  But otherwise, in two days, I will have lived here for a year.  And since the flight around the world takes so long, it was actually almost precisely one year ago this minute that I boarded a plane to fly from DC to Tokyo, Tokyo to Bangkok, and Bangkok to Kathmandu.

I’d never been to any of those countries before.  I was anxious and excited and nervous, bouncing up and down.  Yes, I’d seen Canada.  I’d lived in Mexico for six weeks.  I’d visited Spain, and even Morocco… but that was all.

I was fluent in Spanish, and had a glancing knowledge of a handful of other languages, from French through German to Arabic.  But as I sat bouncing on the plane, petting anxious cats from time to time, I was clutching my “Teach Yourself Nepali” book and wondering why on earth the language was proving so hard.  For several months, lacking any other Nepali resources, I’d been studying the writing system from books about Hindi, and naively hoping the smattering of Hindi vocabulary and grammar that I’d picked up would also help with Nepali.

I’d been interested in other cultures for years, and I’d read histories about Anglo-Saxon Britain; Medieval Italy; ancient Judea; post-Incan, newly Hispanic Peru; the Arab world in the 700s AD; the Cherokee nation; the Hittite Empire; the Assyrians… but somehow I’d never really learned much about south-eastern Asia, until the months leading up to the trip, when I tore through the memoirs of Babur and the Dalai Lama; widened my eyes at the Bhagavad-Gita and the Tibetan Book of the Dead; and gazed at pictures of Himalayan Salt Caravans and the bizarre, mysterious sites of this crazy place called Kathmandu.  The type of place that would have been stamped on the outside of a box Garfield had trapped Odie inside of and was about to set out for the mailman.  The place I was going.

I listened to comments like “Kathmandu?  Is that in Tibet?” and “Nepal?  That’s part of India, isn’t it?”  (By all the powers of goodness in this universe, do you have any idea how badly that notion ticks off the Nepalis?)  And I kept bouncing around, semi-patiently explaining that Nepal was its own country in between both places–a fact I’d also been shaky on when I first heard I might be going to Kathmandu.  Mostly I sang the old “Kathmandu, that’s where I’m going to” song and, more and more often, gaped at pictures of an alien land and somewhat wondered if I was literally getting as close to traveling to another inhabited world as I could conceivably get in my lifetime.

I gaped for a long time after I got here, too.  But lately I’ve realized that it’s become passe.  After a mere glance, (and maybe a brief, “That’s a pretty cow,”) I look away after noticing a cow or two or three grazing freely in the neighboring fields.  I accept it as perfectly normal for people to walk down the street with impossible loads (including full-size refrigerators!) strapped to their backs.  I’m unfazed when cars pass me on narrow roads, their tires crunching inches from my toes; I and the driver hardly glance at each other, and that’s enough to judge the distance so that each of us can just marginally get out of the other’s way.  I weave through Thamel with no heed for the hucksters calling, “Ma’am!  You look!  Good price!  Where you from?”  And they actually seem to swirl around me less.  I feel like there must be a difference in my eyes, in my stride, that mark me as different from the tourists who just stepped off the plane.  True, I don’t gape so much anymore.

Taxis are easier to.  I step up, name my destination, insist “ek sae”  (regardless of destination; I’ve learned that I never travel far enough to justify paying even that much, as far as Nepalis are concerned, and if the driver tries to charge any higher he’s egregiously ripping me off) step in, and off we go.  The drivers hardly try to argue with me anymore.  Instead they nod, and along the way we discuss the route in a blend of Nepali and English, and then I get to practice the same Nepali conversation for the umpteenth time by explaining where I’m from, where I live here, that I teach English, and what my classes are like.

Too, when my husband’s driving our car, and a motorcycle comes up around us when we’re stopped in traffic, and rams into the side of the car, I merely sigh in aggravation as my husband slams on the horn, and the motorcycle keeps going, and I roll down the window and reach out to pop out the side mirror yet again.  And then we return to our conversation.

I do still stare at the hills, though.  They’re awfully pretty.

So.  Back to my earlier comment about recently visiting the US.  Even more recently, I was looking through pictures from the trip, and it struck me as hysterical how I could accept both environments as perfectly normal, in their own ways…  the US just looks like the US, and Kathmandu looks like Kathmandu.  And they have their similarities.  But even in those, they’re wildly different.  Honestly, it’s no wonder I used to gape.

I’ll post some examples, in the coming days, if I can get myself to sit still at the computer and NOT edit novels or write lesson plans or read the entire wikipedia.  And every interesting news article posted in the last minute.  Hmm, looks like the Iranian election results are in…

Nepali of the Day:

ek:  one

sae:  hundred

din:  day

haptaa:  week

barshaa:  year

bhashaa:  language

naya:  new

purano:  old

-ko:  equivalent to ’s; marks the possessive

subakamana:  Congratulations!  Happy… Merry… (used in phrases like our “Merry Christmas!  Happy Birthday!)

Ek bharshaako subakamana!