My Life Lately

I haven't blogged in a VERY long time, so here is a quick update of what's been happening in my life lately.  ("Lately" here having the generous definition of "for the last 6 months.")

December

The holidays can be a hard time to be overseas, but a little trekking in the foothills of the Himalayas was a perfect antidote to the Christmas blues.

I also spent a week working on communications for MCC's partner organizations, Koshish, whose mission is to rescue and rehabilitate vulnerable women with severe mental illnesses.

January

After a very cold and rather miserable month, my friend Laura and I took a weekend getaway to Nagarkot for my birthday.

February

It was a very busy month at work but not a lot else happened.

March

The month started out with a 5 k fun run for International Women's Day with my colleagues.

I spent a week traveling in southern Nepal with staff from one of our partner organizations, visiting projects that MCC supports in the area of HIV/AIDS.  Field visits involve a lot of work and meetings, but also the opportunity to see some beautiful scenery and interesting places, including, this time, a sacred cave and the birthplace of Buddha.

While driving between villages, we passed through some of the most spectacular scenery I've ever seen.

Ganesh summons you to enter the sacred cave.

We took a break during a very long day of driving to pick rhododendrons, Nepal's national flower.

A village where MCC supports a self-help group for people living with HIV/AIDS.

Meeting with a self-help group for people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS, and other marginalized or poor community members.  When meeting with groups like this one, I am often invited to give a short speech.

Siddhartha Gautama, or the Buddha, was born here in the plains of what is now Nepal.

A Tibetan monastery near the site of Buddha's birthplace.

April

At the beginning of the month, we went to India for a short retreat with MCC colleagues from across South Asia.

After that, I went on another long field visit in the far west of Nepal to visit HIV/AIDS and food security projects.  This was the most remote area of Nepal I've visited yet.

The gateway to Achham, one of the most undeveloped districts in Nepal.

Meeting with a group for the wives of migrant workers, a highly at-risk population for HIV/AIDS. 

Traditional dancers in Dhanghadi, Nepal.

Meeting with members of a self-help group for people living with HIV/AIDS.

Taking a rest during the hike into one of our project areas.

The day after I got back, the earthquake happened.  I'll write more about that another time.  For now, suffice to say, it was awful, but I survived, as did my host family and all my friends and colleagues.

I slept outside with the MCC team for three nights after the earthquake, one in a garden and two in this basketball court.

May

MCC sent me to our regional head office in Thailand for some stress leave. 

Pad thai in Thailand... what can I say?

After that, I went to Taiwan to visit my brother and his girlfriend before returning to Kathmandu on the emptiest flight I've ever taken.

June

This is the last month of my term.  I have a couple of big projects to finish up before I go home, and a lot of people and places to visit one last time.  Sadly, Kathmandu has suffered a lot since I arrived, and the city I am saying goodbye to now is not the same city I greeted with such bewildered enthusiasm ten months ago.  And I am not the same person, either.  It's been quite an adventure, and not always the fun kind.  But through all the challenges, I have found joy, peace, and strength to continue the journey.  I'm looking forward to going home a month from now, but I will always keep a special place in my memory for this beautiful country and the remarkable year I spent here.

My beautiful walk home from work.

Ethical Dilemmas of a Semi-Photojournalist

 I take pictures.  Specifically, I take pictures of development projects run by the Mennonite Central Committee and our partner agencies in Nepal.  Then I send those pictures back to North America, with the hope that they will be used in promotional materials, magazine articles, and giving catalogues.  A good photograph will educate people about what we’re doing here and inspire them to donate so we can keep doing it.

I believe this is good work, and I feel honoured and excited that I get to do it as part of my job (it’s not my whole job, which is why I refer to myself a “semi-photojournalist” in the title of this post).  Nonetheless, sometimes when I go out with the camera I feel a sort of ethical discomfort.  I come to the villages with a small delegation of foreign and Nepali development workers from Kathmandu, with my fancy camera, and I take pictures of poor people who have been the recipients of western generosity.  And then I leave, and they remain.  Our partner agencies, of course, are all Nepali, and they are committed for the long-term to the communities in which they work.  I have no criticisms to make about MCC’s approach to development – it’s admirably sophisticated and sensitive to the huge web of difficulties inherent in western humanitarian aid.  But I wonder how I as an individual appear to the people whose lives I’m photographing.  And I’m always acutely aware that the camera I’m using costs more than most of my subjects earn in a year.

           

We tend to think of photographs as magical windows into other places, allowing us to see with our own eyes a village in Bolivia, a school in Chad.  But every photograph has been taken by someone who has chosen to represent reality in a certain way, consciously or unconsciously cropping out much that is essential to full understanding. This is crucial to keep in mind when looking at photographs of poverty and people who are poor.  Far too often, photographs in the aid genre depict their subjects as exotic tribespeople whose pitiful sufferings can be alleviated only by the charity of westerners.  We as donors are distanced from the objects of our pity so that we have to reach down to “help” them instead of walking and working together with them.  Stripped of their humanity, they become a means of serving our own self-satisfaction.  Photographers can unconsciously perpetuate these harmful perceptions, and I feel the weight of all these considerations every time I take a picture in the field. 

I’m thinking in particular of a visit I made recently with colleagues to a family that had received a one-time gift of food support earlier this year.  Most of our projects in Nepal involve working together with communities to develop food security, offering support and training rather than straightforward gifts of food, so this visit had a distinctly different feel than the others I’ve been on.  It was a chilly day up in the hills south of Kathmandu, and we stood outside this family’s modest cottage, shivering in the cold and the clouds that almost engulfed us.  The father of the family patiently answered all our questions about the aid he had received, about his children, about how hard they all had to work to make ends meet.  I pulled out my camera and took one picture.  Then I put the camera away, unable even to contemplate taking more.  I felt, frankly, foolish.  It wasn’t that I was ashamed that my organization had helped to alleviate this family’s hunger – not at all.  But I was very keenly aware of the enormous gulf of experience that lay between their lives and mine, and I felt that it shouldn’t be so.  It seemed suddenly wrong to take pictures of them from across the gulf, and share those pictures with people who were also on my side.  Image 1: Poor family grateful for food we gave them.  Good job, us. 

I’m trying to express my discomfort as clearly as I can.  I think it’s excellent and admirable to donate to organizations like MCC and that more people should do it.  And it’s excellent and admirable to try to educate people in North America about the realities of life in other parts of the world.  Taking photographs of development work helps to accomplish both these goals.  It’s a good thing, but also a difficult thing.  I don’t want to be a spectator, either of poverty or of its alleviation.  I want to be a partner, and I think that most people who support humanitarian aid and development work feel the same way.  Yet photographs, while essential for engaging people in this work, necessarily create both spectators and spectacles.  And taking photographs makes me – if only for a moment – a bystander who coolly observes and documents human grief.

I don’t have a solution to this dilemma.  I’m certainly not going to stop taking photographs, except in the moments when conscience pricks me to put the camera away.  To those pricks of conscience I’m going to try to become more sensitive, rather than less.  And I’m going to try to be a more repsonsible and ethical semi-photojournalist.  Nonetheless, I think the feeling of foolishness won’t go away – which is probably a good thing.  There is a sort of ridiculousness about what I do, if you think about it.

In The Field

The house we stayed in

A few days ago I woke up in a little house on stilts, in a tiny village at the top of a high hill in the middle of the jungle, and asked myself: "How on earth did I get here?"  Well, here's how.

Early Wednesday morning, I took a flight from Kathmandu to Biratnagar (Nepal's second-largest city, in the southeast) with four colleagues from MCC and one of our Nepali partner agencies.  Our purpose was to visit some projects MCC is supporting in villages in Morang District, in the areas of food security, vocational training, and rural education.  It was my first time going on a field visit, and in the future I'll be going on many more.

Meeting with farmers at a food security project

We spent our three days in the field meeting with partners and visiting their development projects.  We met students in a vocational training program and heard about how their new skills have changed their aspirations for the future; took a tour around a food security project aimed at empowering landless labourers; and visited a remote village school to see firsthand the effects teacher training and parents' education have had on students' learning.  My job was to talk to people, hear their stories, and take lots of pictures.  Now that I'm back, I'll be putting these materials together into an article or two, with the intention of raising public awareness about the remarkable work MCC and our partner agencies are doing here in Nepal.

Meeting with students, teachers, and parents at Sagma School. 

For me, being in the field was almost like being in another country (again) - it was so unlike the neighbourhood where I live in Kathmandu.  The culture, language, and geography of Morang are very different from those of the capital city.  Moreover, the rural villages we visited were, as far as I could tell, largely free of western influence.  People carried on their lives - working, playing, hanging out with friends and relatives - in much the same way that their great-great-grandparents did before them.  And yet, as with all the places I've been so far in Nepal, the ancient and the modern coexist in the villages: while some village residents were doing a traditional dance for us, for example, some others were filming the performance on their cellphones.

I felt very privileged to be given a glimpse into the lives of the people we met.  I was struck by the resilience, dignity, warmth, and good humour that I saw in all of them.  I was especially overwhelmed at being given a gift - a little wooden model of Nepal - by the managers of the school we visited.  I really felt (and still feel) I'd done nothing to deserve such generosity.

We had some delightful misadventures along the way.  After spending our first day on the Terai (plains) in southern Morang, we traveled north to visit the school in the hills.  Once we left the plain, the road got very rough very fast, and after about an hour of bumping, jostling, pushing the jeep, and occasionally rebuilding the road, our driver refused to go any further, and left us by the roadside in the middle of the jungle.  Fortunately, we were able to arrange for a jeep from the school to come pick us up, but we had to wait there for two hours before it reached us.  In the meantime we ate bananas and befriended some lost goats.

Ditched!

When the second jeep came, we thought our difficulties were behind us - but after another hour of even rougher road, now with lots of steep switchbacks, the driver stopped abruptly, got out, and began working on one of the wheels.  Apparently it wasn't turning properly – no biggie!  He messed around with it a little, took it off the axle, put it back on, and then we continued on our way, feeling slightly less confident that we would reach our destination alive.  A bit later the driver stopped again, and - fortunately, from my perspective - decided it wasn’t actually safe to go any further with a malfunctioning wheel, so we had to call the school to send us another jeep, and killed a little more time in the jungle.  Finally we reached the village, all in one piece, and the return journey was smoother (in the sense of being less interrupted - the road was equally as bumpy!).

 So, I’m looking forward to getting a chance to go to the field again next week.  This is a side of Nepal that most foreigners never get a chance to see, and, much as I enjoy the creature comforts available in Kathmandu, I really appreciate the opportunity to visit the people MCC is working with in rural communities.  There are challenges – the ever-present language barrier, the risk of food poisoning, the leech-infested outhouses (!) – but the joys are greater.  Bumping and jostling down the jungle roads in that death-trap of a jeep, looking out over spectacular vistas of steep, misty valleys, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.

 

A Day in the Life

In case anyone is curious about what I've been up to for the last 6 weeks:

4:30 AM: My day begins with the sound of a rooster crowing very, very loudly outside my window.  I hate this bird more than words can express.  Since I love almost everything else about Nepal, however, it doesn't bother me too terribly much.

8 AM: Breakfast with my Nepali host family.  About three weeks ago I moved in to my permanent living arrangement - a little house on the edge of the city that I share with my Nepali parents and two teenaged brothers.  The house is small and simple, and the family is incredibly gracious and welcoming.  Breakfast usually consists of a boiled egg and some Nepali-style pancakes, but sometimes we have fried potatoes, chow mein, or rice and vegetable curry.

9 AM: I arrive at the MCC Nepal office for a morning of language study with my fellow volunteer.  There are five staff at the office: one Canadian, one American, and three Nepalis.  The main language spoken at the office is Nepali, so we get plenty of practical language practice as well as book-learnin'.

12 PM: Lunchtime!  Every day our office cook prepares a delicious meal of traditional Nepali food: daal bhat (rice and lentils), tarkari (vegetable curry), saag (boiled green vegetables), and achar (spicy relish).  My rice-eating capacity has probably quadrupled since I arrived in Nepal!

Taking a tempo (one of the many forms of sketchy but extremely fun Nepali public transportation). 

1-4 PM: My fellow volunteer and I have language class every afternoon.  In theory, I'm capable of having extended conversations in Nepali.  In practice, I tend to panic a little when confronted with the prospect of actually speaking it.  My teacher, my family, and my Nepali acquaintances are very patient with me as I practice speaking their language, although I think they also get a kick out of hearing my atrocious accent and some of the ridiculous things I accidentally say.  (For example, when I tried to say that someone had gone to the bathroom, but actually said that she was a toilet!)

Walking home from language school

4:30 PM: I arrive at home.  After having chiyya (tea) and khaajaa (snacks) with my host family, I have an hour or two to kill before dinner.  I sometimes go for an evening walk in the big open field below my house, or sit in the rooftop garden to read a book.  Sometimes I help my host mother with dinner (though my task is usually just to watch and learn).  

8:30 PM: Dinnertime!  Dinner is usually more or less the same as lunch - daal bhat and tarkari.  Nepalis say that if they go a day without eating daal bhat, they feel like they haven't eaten anything.  I thought that it would bother me to eat almost the same meal twice every day, but it's actually sort of comforting to always know what's coming.

9 PM: Time for a bucket bath before bed!  We have running water in the house, but water is very precious, and has to be carried in by hand to a tank on the roof, so I almost never waste it by taking a real shower (or by using the western-style toilet, which doesn't work anyway.  Instead there is an "Asian toilet" in a shed behind the house).    

9:30 PM: Time for bed - not only for me, but seemingly for the whole city of Kathmandu.  By this time the normally bustling streets are almost empty of traffic.  I guess everyone needs to go to sleep early, considering the roosters.

The view from  my street at dusk.

A Taste of Kathmandu

Kathmandu was described to me as "charmingly overwhelming", and I couldn't agree more. The city is crazy, thrilling, and full of wonderful hidden places to discover.  Everywhere we go there are a million things to look at, people and animals and signs and buildings, little vignettes of ordinary life.  Every morning and evening hundreds of bells ring as people make offerings to their gods, and the air is full of the smell of spices.  Walking down the street is an adventure, and crossing it is an adrenaline rush. (There are no rules - traffic will move around you, but it won't stop.) Despite the apparent chaos, there is little aggression - everyone seems pretty mellow.  Mellowest of all are the hundreds of stray dogs, who spend their days snoozing peacefully on the sidewalks.

Even if I never feel at home in Kathmandu, I think I'm going to like it.  There are some inconveniences - most notably, the rolling blackouts which leave us without power for several hours every day - but the city is colorful and exciting, the people are friendly, and there's so much to learn.  Already we've gone out for delicious dal bhat and momos - Nepali staple foods - hiked to a hilltop temple, and explored historic Patan Durbar Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  We even had our first glimpse of the Himalayas.  Here are some photos of our first few days:

Our first dal bhat! (Photo cred: Leah)

View from the rooftop - apparently this was the first time the Himalayas have been visible from Kathmandu since June

Chobar Hill

We climbed Chobar Hill (the small one on the far left of the picture) to visit a temple.  This is just outside the city.

The pagoda was invented in Nepal; the smaller temple in front is built in a style imported from India.

The pots and pans are nailed to the temple in memory of people who have died.

View from Chobar Hill over the Kathmandu Valley

Laura and me with Kathmandu in the background (photo cred: Leah)

Patan Durbar Square

This was where the kings of Patan (the city we live in, adjacent to Kathmandu) had their palace. Opposite the palace is a series of Hindu temples.

He had been feeding the pigeons.

The throne of the kings of Patan, designed to portray the king as an incarnation of Vishnu.

A parade celebrating the 78th birthday of the woman on the sedan chair.  Among the Newari people, who are native to the Kathmandu area, all 78th birthdays are celebrated in this way.