Small town girl in Nepal : May 2014

Please forgive me

As time approaches for me coming home I fear I may have picked up some bad habits during these last 8+ months living in a Nepali village. So things such as…..

I may spit an abnormal amount in public settings and not think twice about it.

Burping while eating is totally acceptable and thought of as a compliment.

I may ask you how much things cost (purses, shoes, cloths, jewelry ect), super inappropriate but so normal here.

Meeting new people one of the first questions I ask might be have you eaten or are you married and if you haven’t married why not?

When I hear my name I may holler “Hajur!”

I will probably talk about poop way more than anyone ever should and it might get brought up while eating as well…..common topic of conversation with other volunteers and Nepalese.

When drinking water I might not touch the bottle to my lips, I ‘waterfall,’ because touching your lips to a glass or bottle is “juto.”

If you touch something with your left hand and I give you a mortified look please just point out that you don’t wipe your ass with your left hand as I do in Nepal.

If I walk around without shoes wherever I go and walk around your house with dirty feet, stop me at the door and tell me to wash them.

If I call myself fat way too often, I am not feeling sorry for myself, I simply have adapted to the understanding that my fatness is the root to most of my issues. Aka: I get hot at night because I am fat, I sweat because I am fat, I like spicy food because I am fat, I drink a lot of water because I am fat, ect. Nepalese definitely have made my skin a bit thicker.

If you complain about a petty issue I might call you out and not sympathize like a normal human would. I have adapted a harder exterior and have become even more blunt (if you can believe that was possible).

I will flip my words around and sometimes not make sense because this language is completely backwards from English.

Forgive me if I cannot eat with silverware properly and lick my fingers and wash my mouth with my drinking water after my meal.

I may break into tears when I see a full menu and will not be able to make up my mind on what to eat for quite some time.

Our Capital Get Away

Wedding cooking food

Eating the food at the wedding with my two closest volunteers

Buffalo meat, buffalo intestines, goat meat, rice, potatoes, lentils, and alcohol

Little girl who likes to practice her english with us

The hot months have begun. Afternoons easily reach 100 degrees and I am so thankful for living near a big river that I can go swim in whenever I please. I have started to adapt the slow/laid back lifestyle of working from 7am-11am then napping in the afternoon and then working from 4pm-6pm; having a real job when I come back might be a slap in the face for a bit. But along with hot days I now shower daily because the cold water feels amazing! But ironically as I had started showering daily I got scabies and ring worm within the same week-I guess daily showers only go so far in this country.

I am still making lots of cook stoves, makes the time pass quite fast. Also I have introduced my family to strawberries that I purchased while at the last group training we had. Unfortunately I generally don’t get to eat them because they pick them prematurely when I am gone and steal them away. I can’t even be mad, totally understand, they are delicious!

I also made some organic pesticide for the garden so the bugs will stop eating all the veggies. It is called jholmol. Made of leaves, cow urine, cow poop, ash, and then a liquid form of bacteria that you would find in yogurt. Smells absolutely terrible! This stuff better work wonders!

I also started worm composting, seems to be the easiest/least amount of work to make compost possible. And my host mother looks at everything as profit; after the worms reproduce she is excited to sell the extras-haha she is always thinking of a way to make a rupee or two.

Before the rainy season comes I am planning on conducting a plastic house training with the farmers cooperative. We (the other two volunteers in the neighboring VDCs) are trying to form a weekly farmers market: it’ll encourage farmers to produce more vegetables, increase varieties (they like new things to plant/sell), increase income, also can sell crafts, and then people don’t have to walk so far to the only farmer who, for example, produces mushrooms. Another project we are thinking of working on is introducing moringa olifera trees – so healthy and everything can be used. It’s referred to tree of life! Its pretty spectacular if you have time you should look it up.

How to deal with situations that make you uncomfortable:

When your host mother thinks you should be doing even more chores around the house on top of all the other things you have going on you should vomit in the middle of the garden while watering all her plants. She will then realize this American person cannot take the heat and should remain indoors during the hours of 11am-4pm and shouldn’t be doing so much of her work.

If you end up getting served food with a lot of oil, after words just tell them it gave you diarrhea and the next time you will be served with less oil. (Talking about poop is just normal and any time you have diarrhea the entire town will know anyways).

When talking on the phone with a Nepali person try to take over the conversation as much as possible-they have just as hard of a time understanding me over the phone as I do understanding them, so eventually they will stop calling so much because it sucks on both ends for understanding the language.

When constantly asked why you are not married point out all the positives of a single life (they start to feel jealous and really have never contemplated the single life): My money is my money, I can wonder off to visit other countries, I don’t have to cook for a husband, I can have boyfriends and then throw them away when I decide I don’t like them anymore, I don’t need permission to do what I want, and I don’t have babies-aka A LOT of work feeding them, cleaning up poop, cooking for them, holding them, listening to them cry. In the end they generally understand why I enjoy the single. But of course still want me to marry and live in Nepal.

When constantly told you are fat and yet they don’t understand why I don’t want to ever finish my food and I want to exercise explain to them. When I go to America and I get off the airplane my family will see me and say, “Who is this fat person? This is not my daughter this person is moto (fat) and kalo (black).” They hate that my skin is getting dark and when I explain to them people in America pay a lot of money to get dark they are just shocked. Tanning beds and self-tanner are mind boggling to them.