Mental Basement

Arjun’s note: Here is part 3 of my good friend Dougal’s description of life in Nepal. You can find part 1 here and part 2 here.

My host family is awesome.

There’s a baa (dad), aamaa (mom), hajurbaa (grandfather), a 14-year old bahini (younger sister), a 9-year old bahini, and a 2-year old bhaai (little brother). At first, it was hard to get any communication through, but every day, there’s been slightly more than the day before. Playing with my bhaai was also critical on the first day, as was showing the family calendar with pictures of all the relatives on my mom’s side. My baa’s daai (older brother) lives about forty feet up the hill with his family — a wife, a 16-ish son and 18-ish daughter, and another student on the program. My Nepali name is Suman Khetri and his is Saman Khetri, which is a little ridiculous, but they didn’t coordinate it beforehand or anything. My baa works for the recently-privatized drinking water company, and my aamaa is an elementary school teacher.

We live in a village called Jygata, which is pretty rural, on the foot of some hills that in the US would be mountains. With the Himalayas in sight when it’s not too foggy, though, they’re hills. It’s about a 40-minute walk from the program house, which I thought might be a problem, but it really hasn’t been at all. The four of us who live in the village walk together, and the fields on the way are beautiful.

I’ll upload pictures at some point, but I don’t have my camera with me. I’m in Kathmandu, at an internet cafe that’s faster, but also more expensive. (About two hours ago, I used one that was slower than the slowest one I’ve used in the village here, but just as expensive as this fast one….couldn’t even update my Facebook status.) This is also the first one I’ve been to that isn’t running IE6, which is nice. (It’s an actually-updated copy of Firefox 3!) Plus, this one I can set to use Dvorak, which means I don’t need to stare at the keyboard the whole time! All the computers here have been exclusively Windows XP, though; the standard matches in the program house and at the store are these crappy plastic ones with the Windows logo on them.

This cafe is probably so much better because I’m in the touristy area, called Thamel. All the students on the program just ate really good Italian pizza at this place called Fire and Ice, supposedly the former king’s favorite restaurant. Actually, one came in to Kathmandu with us but is still at the aforementioned internet cafe, working on some scholarship thing, which is horrible when the rest of us had a good time.

Yesterday was the first family day, where we’re required to hang out with our families, doing what they do. For me, that meant washing clothes, bathing, peeling vegetables, and playing with the kids. The first two are made significantly more complicated by the fact that our house doesn’t have running water. We washed clothes in buckets at a little stream, which was thankfully pretty clean, but we had to walk almost a mile to get there. It took a long time, though — the washing machine was a good invention, and whoever was the actual inventor, I salute you. Bathing meant using a mug out of this bucket — which, since it had been in the sun for a while, was actually much warmer than the water in the program house’s shower. I had to do it relatively in public, though, ie on the porch which is in full view of the (not-frequented) road that goes by our house. Nepali modesty customs make the whole deal somewhat complicated. Other than that, though, not having running water really isn’t as big a deal as I thought it would be. There’s a tap relatively close to the house, and though of course I can’t drink the water that comes out of it without boiling, it’s fine for washing and the like.

I saw some big animal in the fields the other morning. Because they had warned us that leopards sometimes come down from the hills, I thought that’s what it was, and so that’s what I told people at school. Seeing a leopard is apparently very auspicious, and since my house is kind of low in the hills, it was kind of a big deal — nobody that low has seen one. Turns out, though, that it was actually a jackal — not auspicious.

My room is the nicest in the house. There are mice that make noise at night, but my bed is covered, so they won’t fall onto me (as happened to my “cousin” Saman on the first night).

Next week, we’re going down into the Terai, the lowlands. First, Chitwan National Park, where we’ll ride elephants, and probably see both tigers and real leopards. Then, we go somewhere completeley the opposite — Buddha’s birthplace.

I’m out of time now — need to get back by around five, since that’s what the family dictated I be home by.