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.

Arjun’s Note: Here is part 2 of my good friend Dougal’s dispatches from his semester abroad in Nepal. I hope you find it interesting. You can find part 1 here.

- A story: One of the program directors is this guy from eastern Nepal. When his dad was like twenty, so maybe fifty-ish years ago, to get to and from Kathmandu, there was no way to do it but by walking…which took three or four weeks. Not an easy walk, either — a not insignificant portion of the people who tried never made it. His dad went, though, to look for a job. Once he finally made it there, he had to wait in line to actually get a job offer. The way they did it, apparently, is that they would have a wood-chopping or long-jumping contest — to get a clerical job. He did win one of those long-jumping contest, but then he couldn’t read or write, which makes clerical jobs a little harder. So, he went out and learned how to, and then by the time he retired, he was a judge.

- The temples are amazing, and we saw like ten million monkeys around one of them. Also some musk deer, which are tiny — there was a baby musk deer and a baby monkey running around next to each other, and they were the same size.

- Two of the kids on the program just walked past on their way back from Kathmandu. They were on the bus there and some guys were trying to collect money for some political organization. Nobody gave them any, so they got mad and started beating up women and old people, as in punching in the face more than once, before jumping off the bus. We drove past some Maoist youth group yesterday marching down the street.

- The caste stuff is pretty intense, though some of it I’m sure is just cultural differences that make it seem worse. We went on a tour of Patan yesterday, and the (high-caste) tour guide dude just stopped and pointed out things related to (low-caste) people’s cultural things — how some of them had tatoos on their legs, etc. He was grabbing at one guy’s ear talking — in English — about his earrings, and didn’t even talk to the guy until afterwards. He did know his stuff though, and it’s hard to tell whether that was actually really offensive or not. I just know that we were all really uncomfortable about it.

- We also saw these artist people, who make amazing metal statues, and saw a little bit about the process and stuff. So cool.

- There was a bat circling in our room the other night, and a giant spider outside one of the girl’s room’s today. Both left (or were coerced into leaving) peacefully.

- Prices here are weird — a 150ml soda, about the size of a can in the US, is 15 rupees; a 650ml beer, twice the size they are in the US, is 135.

- We’re moving into our Nepali families tomorrow, which could be as much as an hour’s walk away. I’m kind of scared — we really speak very little Nepali, and there’s so many little things I’m going to do that are going to be offensive. But we also went to a “village dinner” the other day with one of the host families, and that was a lot of fun, and the food was also amazing, so we’ll see.

- Apparently they teach us how to make traditional food stuff before we go — very excited about making that this summer, when there’s no Sharples.

Arjun’s Note: So I know I haven’t been doing a lot of my own writing lately, but I’ve had a lot of stuff going on. I recently brought you Federalist Paper No. 420, by my good friend Jeff. Now I want to bring you something entirely different; another one of my good friends, Dougal, is abroad in Nepal for the semester, and occasionally sends dispatches via internet cafe. Here is his first one.

Part 1

I’m in Nepal now; have been for almost a week.

We’ve been living at the program house, which is this awesome little courtyard with a few buildings in the middle of this pseudo-suburb — it’s like a rural village, sort of, but also not at all. On Monday, we move into our family stays; haven’t found out who it is yet.

The scenery is amazing, and it’s still too foggy to even really see the tall mountains.

We’re learning Nepali really quickly compared to a college class, but that’s probably because we do it two to five hours a day, six days a week, plus practice with each other and actual Nepalis outside of class. The class sizes of two to three also help.

Very different, in a lot of ways. The eating with your hand is fine (the food is awesome, so much better than Sharples — it’s amazing how much variety you can squeeze out of dhaalbhaat, rice with lentil soup), “charpi business” (charpi = toilet) isn’t as bad as you think. Nepalis don’t like dogs a whole lot but they’re all over the place, possibly with rabes, and every night they bark nonstop form nine to sometime after midnight. (I’m not really sure when, because I’m generally in bed before eleven, and up before seven.)

There’s way more demand for electricity than there is supply, so each of six regions gets only about eight hours of power a day. This is fine except for the computer / phone situation, because we’re busy all the time and the only internet access is at cybercafe type places (which actually aren’t cafes, generally, just computers; it’s way cheap, though, and there’s one right down the street).

The program has 13 kids: 7 from Pitzer, 3 from Pomona, one from Wesleyan, one from Colorado College, and me. Everyone’s pretty cool.

The caste system, officially illegal for the past 40 years, is still definitely in place. The low-caste (and poor) kids who live nearby, who some of us have made friends with, are uncomfortable coming into the program area because the landlord, who’s a highest-caste priest, would get mad.

Everyone is really nice, though, especially to Westerners. (Little kids wave and shout “Hello” as we walk down the street to get the bus to Kathmandu.) The neighbor kids are also fun; I played badminton with a few today. Karomboard (I think?) is also fun — similar to pool, but you flick little poker chip-type things. Much harder than it looks.

I’d post pictures, but the internet here is soooooo slow. Maybe it’d be faster from a place in Kathmandu. Kathmandu, by the way, is crazy — bustling city, tons of traffic and very crowded streets, vendors selling everything imaginable for way cheap, and then you turn a corner and there’s a sixty-foot tall pure white tower, a guard tower from at least five hundred years ago. I bought this cool touristy traditional Nepali shirt for 250 rupees, or about $3.25.

We’ve also had cool lecturers, including one who is currently involved in writing the new Nepali constitution. This guy is a former education minister and top development planner, and he’s been speaking at our program for thirty years….

Still not really sure what I want to do for my project, but I have a month or two to find out.

Family stays next week, and then in March, we go to Chitwan National Park, where we will ride elephants.