Our visas are expiring, we are all leaving Kathmandu, back to Scotland, America, Norway, Germany, Australia. I walked with my friend to the airport shuttle bus this morning, at the small hour of morning when the bandha has not quite set in, and people rush around shopping and doing the necessary things before all momentum is halted.
We arrived, burned and bruised, a quick chiya at the bus station in shanti bazaar, and then one last push, a 30 minute walk up the hill with unnecessarily heavy bags. I would have packed lightly, if only I'd known it would be so hot, it would not rain, and there would be little time for reading, writing and the like. Up and up we walked, until at last we reached Archale, a quiet place with no dogs. Red and clay and straw coloured were the houses, green green were the trees, the sky was a vast rich blue and the sun added a subtle bleach to everything.
Every house had buffaloes, cows, goats, or chooks. There were supposedly about 400-500 people in the village, but it was so spread out that it felt like much fewer. We'd long since heard about the river, I probably even talked to you about it when you were here, so excited I was about it. On that first day, we met with the principal, outlined our plan for the week of workshops, made timetables, met our host families, put our things down, did all of those necessary things with as much haste as possible, and then made straight for the river. It was a short walk around the mountain, over the bridge, past the mill, and hopping up the rocks, and there it was the little paradise. I made that journey almost every morning, the cold, clean water more than made up for lack of coffee. I didn't miss coffee at all, cloudy and vague and headache-prone as its absence made me.
I drank in the silence greedily. I would wake around 6 or 7, drink chiya, go to the river, come back to the house for breakfast, and then by 9 or 10 walk down to the school. There were 6 classes a day, from 10am. until 4p.m. and the children were aged from 3 until about 10 years old, although age categorization is not so strictly adhered to. We had a lot of work to do, when we realised what we were up against. We sadly dropped the youngest class, and cancelled the idea of doing a big show for the village. It was enough just to get the 5 classes a day to play games in the hot sun(the classrooms were tiny), draw animals, make shadow puppets out of them, and then play with them.
We came home to our different families each day, beaten, welcomed by the most delicious chiya. Most evenings I would drink chiya and then drink water and just stare out to the mountains in silence, a common pastime in the village. Most people would wake at around 4:30, so there was not much going on at night time. It was a Brahmin village, which meant that no-one was supposed to eat meat or drink alcohol. Lucy, a girl from the UK who had been volunteering as an art teacher there for some time, told us about how people would sneak down to shanti bazaar to get drunk, or have clandestine night time chicken-slaughterings. The night I arrived back in Kathmandu, I found myself at that private party where I juggled with the circus kids (this, by the way, was so lovely), in front of a table heavily laden with different meats, and found myself voracious for it after a week of dal bhat. I am so impressed with highly-active vegetarians, it's hard to get what you need.
I still don't know the names of my host family, only the daughter, Ambika, who teaches at the school. Whenever I asked them their names, they would just say 'mother' or 'father' or 'sister'. Names in general were hard, they're just not used so often here. We had a lot of trouble initially, playing 'name jump' with the younger ones. The most popular game by far was 'fire on the mountain', which was unfortunate after a few days of the heat, and with a headache, I would have much preferred grandmother's footsteps.
What else? I could not stand up straight anywhere. I banged my head several times a day, dazed as I was, and had to constantly stretch out my back from all of the stooping. Most of the time when I walked around outside the village, I would come across people with baskets ridiculously laden with grass and leaves and other such things. Sometimes they resembled nothing so much as walking trees, and yet, seeing their expressions, I realised that I was the strange one, the great lumbering whitey, clambering up and down the steep-paths, too used to flatness, whilst they stepped deftly, like mountain goats, from purchase to purchase, unheeding of the giant weights on their backs.
Back in Kathmandu, we are in day 3 of the worst bandha I've experienced. The effect of coming back from the village to this has been profound. Today people are hot, bored, and subdued, but yesterday was bad. Ambulances and media vehicles were stopped on threat of violence from excited mobs. As I walked, I saw several people forced to get off their bicycles and let the air out of their tyres. Men with sticks yelling at the daughter of the family who run my favourite grocery store. They waved their sticks and yelled at the poor girl until she closed the shop down, after which they marched on with self-satisfied smiles. I wanted to scream at them, "What are you doing, and why? Do you even know?"
In three days, I will fly back to a more developed city. How developed? Problems are more developed, as is the general notion that everything's ok. I will miss Kathmandu, the ramshackle kingdom that is too untidy and disorganised to be anything but honest.
The word bandha, meaning 'close' or 'obstruct', is used for a kind of enforced mass-strike, where no businesses are allowed to open and no vehicles are allowed on the roads (not even bicycles). And people walk around waving flags for whichever political party or organisation was responsible for it, or using their sticks and threats to make sure no-one breaks the bandha by, say, opening up their little grocery store. Now that the deadline for the new constitution approaches, the bandhas are coming in thick and fast, as everyone wants their piece of the pie.
The whole thing just seems especially stupid, since I've just returned from a week in a beautiful village called Archale, where the 'Nepal bandha' was just a kind of distant murmur, only causing trouble for people who were trying to get a bus somewhere. Emma and I were there for a week, running a week of shadow-puppetry and theatre workshops in a little school. I wrote to someone about it recently, here is part of that letter.
(the journey there took about 6 hours, most of which we spent on the roof of the bus)
We wound up and down, round mountainsides and through valleys and little towns, ducking under branches whilst butterflies and swallows danced around us. The air is so clean out there, the water so clear, it's as though all of the country's pollution has been concentrated into one city, such a joy to escape.
(the journey there took about 6 hours, most of which we spent on the roof of the bus)
We wound up and down, round mountainsides and through valleys and little towns, ducking under branches whilst butterflies and swallows danced around us. The air is so clean out there, the water so clear, it's as though all of the country's pollution has been concentrated into one city, such a joy to escape.
We arrived, burned and bruised, a quick chiya at the bus station in shanti bazaar, and then one last push, a 30 minute walk up the hill with unnecessarily heavy bags. I would have packed lightly, if only I'd known it would be so hot, it would not rain, and there would be little time for reading, writing and the like. Up and up we walked, until at last we reached Archale, a quiet place with no dogs. Red and clay and straw coloured were the houses, green green were the trees, the sky was a vast rich blue and the sun added a subtle bleach to everything.
Every house had buffaloes, cows, goats, or chooks. There were supposedly about 400-500 people in the village, but it was so spread out that it felt like much fewer. We'd long since heard about the river, I probably even talked to you about it when you were here, so excited I was about it. On that first day, we met with the principal, outlined our plan for the week of workshops, made timetables, met our host families, put our things down, did all of those necessary things with as much haste as possible, and then made straight for the river. It was a short walk around the mountain, over the bridge, past the mill, and hopping up the rocks, and there it was the little paradise. I made that journey almost every morning, the cold, clean water more than made up for lack of coffee. I didn't miss coffee at all, cloudy and vague and headache-prone as its absence made me.
I drank in the silence greedily. I would wake around 6 or 7, drink chiya, go to the river, come back to the house for breakfast, and then by 9 or 10 walk down to the school. There were 6 classes a day, from 10am. until 4p.m. and the children were aged from 3 until about 10 years old, although age categorization is not so strictly adhered to. We had a lot of work to do, when we realised what we were up against. We sadly dropped the youngest class, and cancelled the idea of doing a big show for the village. It was enough just to get the 5 classes a day to play games in the hot sun(the classrooms were tiny), draw animals, make shadow puppets out of them, and then play with them.
We came home to our different families each day, beaten, welcomed by the most delicious chiya. Most evenings I would drink chiya and then drink water and just stare out to the mountains in silence, a common pastime in the village. Most people would wake at around 4:30, so there was not much going on at night time. It was a Brahmin village, which meant that no-one was supposed to eat meat or drink alcohol. Lucy, a girl from the UK who had been volunteering as an art teacher there for some time, told us about how people would sneak down to shanti bazaar to get drunk, or have clandestine night time chicken-slaughterings. The night I arrived back in Kathmandu, I found myself at that private party where I juggled with the circus kids (this, by the way, was so lovely), in front of a table heavily laden with different meats, and found myself voracious for it after a week of dal bhat. I am so impressed with highly-active vegetarians, it's hard to get what you need.
I still don't know the names of my host family, only the daughter, Ambika, who teaches at the school. Whenever I asked them their names, they would just say 'mother' or 'father' or 'sister'. Names in general were hard, they're just not used so often here. We had a lot of trouble initially, playing 'name jump' with the younger ones. The most popular game by far was 'fire on the mountain', which was unfortunate after a few days of the heat, and with a headache, I would have much preferred grandmother's footsteps.
What else? I could not stand up straight anywhere. I banged my head several times a day, dazed as I was, and had to constantly stretch out my back from all of the stooping. Most of the time when I walked around outside the village, I would come across people with baskets ridiculously laden with grass and leaves and other such things. Sometimes they resembled nothing so much as walking trees, and yet, seeing their expressions, I realised that I was the strange one, the great lumbering whitey, clambering up and down the steep-paths, too used to flatness, whilst they stepped deftly, like mountain goats, from purchase to purchase, unheeding of the giant weights on their backs.
Back in Kathmandu, we are in day 3 of the worst bandha I've experienced. The effect of coming back from the village to this has been profound. Today people are hot, bored, and subdued, but yesterday was bad. Ambulances and media vehicles were stopped on threat of violence from excited mobs. As I walked, I saw several people forced to get off their bicycles and let the air out of their tyres. Men with sticks yelling at the daughter of the family who run my favourite grocery store. They waved their sticks and yelled at the poor girl until she closed the shop down, after which they marched on with self-satisfied smiles. I wanted to scream at them, "What are you doing, and why? Do you even know?"
In three days, I will fly back to a more developed city. How developed? Problems are more developed, as is the general notion that everything's ok. I will miss Kathmandu, the ramshackle kingdom that is too untidy and disorganised to be anything but honest.
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