Armenia Photos, Part 1

Re-Settled

5/10/14

Not that it’s saying much, but things here have improved, since the last time that I wrote.

Quite soon after those two horrible weeks, I was off to KTM to apply for my Indian visa and participate in a Rural Library Development training.  KTM is always a nice break from village life.  In fact, sometimes it feels like I’m on a completely different planet.  Of course, it’s never a trip to KTM without stress, dust, respiratory distress and spending way past my budget (what budget? HA!). 

Applying for my Indian visa was a nightmare, as I had expected.  It took a week and a half, a third of my monthly pay and four people to pull it off-Goa had better be worth it! 

The Rural Library Development training was amazing, mainly because PC Nepal staff didn’t put it on.  But seriously, these women were knowledgeable, competent, fun; engaging and great at time management-it was the best PC training I have ever had.  I’m very excited to start the hard journey to try and set up a library in my community.

Of course, the real memories made during trips to KTM occur after hours.  Here’s the rundown:

-Stoop drinking (buy cheap booze and drink it in the street, instead of paying out the butt in the bars) and dancing with the girls. 

-Discovering how to have food delivered, in KTM, and becoming incredibly lazy in our pursuit of dinner.

-Great Vietnamese dinner.

-Pizza with olives and baby corn (GOD DAMN BABY CORN!), instead of tomatoes.

- Many, many hot showers.

-Shopping for art in Thamel.

-Seeing an American movie in a crazy, nice, modern theatre-I almost forgot that I was in Nepal.

-Dessert.

-Making fun of ridiculous hippy tourists. 

-Brunch.

-Amazing live music at H20.

-Whisky sours and popcorn.

-Braving the maddening crowd at Bhatt Bhatenini (the Nepali answer to Target).

-Visiting my PST host family in Sindupalchowk.  It was great to see them, but I’m relieved that I ended up with the permanent site family that I did. 

-Hot dogs.

-Meeting two new friends on my last night in town-quite a feat for someone who doesn’t make friends easily-look at me, I’m growing! 

Of course, I had to crash back to the reality of living in Nepal on my 20-hour return trip from KTM (it’s only supposed to take 14 hours).  You wanna know the worst part?  The worst part was the two German tourists sitting in front of me-every hour or so, they would pull delicious bread, cheese and linzer cookies out of their bags and snack.  Did they bring them, from Germany, on the plane? Were they sent just to torture me with all that delicious dairy, sugar and carbs? Evil. 

As soon as I returned, the largest Nepali festival-Dashain-began.  What this basically means is that we have meat for several days (in the case of chicken-yay, in the case of goat-Ughhhh *gag*), I have to let my family dress me up like a doll, in traditional Tharu clothing and dance for hours, for the village’s enjoyment.  Dashain manages to be both boring and stressful, which I didn’t really know was possible.  Honestly, the worst part is that a lot of people come into the village, from out of town, which means many new people to stare at me.  Let me share a little anecdote about how crazy intense the starting is:

 I am standing in the road, all dressed up, waiting for the dancing to commence.  As soon as I walked out onto the road, to talk on the phone, all the local children ran out to stare at the white freak. There is a little 8-year-old girl next to me.  She finds me so fascinating, can’t take her eyes off of me, that, instead of returning to her house to use the toilet, she just pulls down her pants and, while still making intense eye contact with me, takes a shit in the road.  It happened. This is my life. 

Well, now Dashain is over.  In another week or so another holiday starts.  We should be out of the holiday season by November, when I can start getting some work done. 

At the moment, I’m just enjoying the unusual amount of power that we’re having.  Next week we’re taking a trip to the district capital to meet with an NGO about the girl’s empowerment camp that we’re planning and also, for Elizabeth and I to buy our plane tickets for Indian! Yay!  

  

A death comes to town

6/9/14

The past week has been a difficult one. 

First: the upsides:  Om, my community counterpart, and I introduced our hand-washing program to the community.  We had a meeting with many of the important people from the area to discuss why we need improved sanitation, how we will run the program, and what the benefits will be.  The meeting went very well and I’m optimistic about actually getting a project off of the ground. 

The first horror: But first, some background: In Nepal, particularly in this area, wealthy landowners, generally of the Chhetri or Brahmin castes, own most of the land.  These landowners then have poorer people, typically ethnic minorities, like Tharu, work them.  These workers get 50% of the products from the land.  It is an antiquated, unfair system that only works to reinforce economic and caste subjugation. 

Last week, I went to visit a friend at his site.  His family are wealthy landowners who have Tharu peope working their land and doing work around the house.  My friend has become close to a Tharu woman that does work around his house.  The evening of the visit, after dinner, I was watching the fireflies nest in a nearby tree when I overheard my friend asking this woman about kamalari.  Kamalari, as I think I’ve mentioned before, are slaves, in Nepal.  Poor families would send their young children (typically girls, of course), to another family to be an unpaid worker, for a period of years.  These girls generally do not go to school and are not treated well.  They do backbreaking work cooking, cleaning, and looking after children.  My host grandmother was a kamalari from the age of 8-11 before she got married, at the age of 13.  Several minutes later I return to sit down next to my friend and found him very, very upset.  Apparently, this woman had just told him that she doesn’t get a salary, as she’d previously told him, but has been a kamalari for his family for 8 years.  He was devastated, as was I. 

We spent many hours discussing the situation and decided that some investigating was in order but that, regardless, this was a hideous situation.  The following day, he talked to his family, who claimed that they did pay her and, in addition, very generously (sarcasm), gave her one new outfit and a pair of shoes/per year.  In reflection, this woman had asked my friend for money, in the past, so there was a possibility that she had been lying about a complete lack of salary.  There is no question, however, that she and her family are very poor.  We were not sure whom to believe, so, at this point, we are going to find out the legal amount that his family has to pay her and make sure that is being done.  After her contract is up, we will put her into contact with many of the organization in the area that can help kamalari.  I have no doubt that his family used to have real, completely unpaid, kamalari. I think that his family is paying her, now, only because the police have begun cracking down on the practice of kamalari in the past two or three years. 

In discussions with my family, I also found out that there is a history of my family being kamalari for his family, which adds an interesting dynamic to my relationship with him and his family.  The whole situation is horrible and something that I never even considered that I would experience in my life-being witness to a person who may or may not be a slave.  Heart breaking.  My only consolation is that, as a very wise woman told me, we now are in a position to help this woman, that we can be a blessing to her. 

The second horror:  On Wednesday, the day of my meeting with community leaders about my hand washing training, I arrived at the health post at 1:00.  Om was, of course, an hour late.  As I sat there with the other health post staff, we heard a commotion out on the porch.  I went to look and saw, lying on the cement, an old, thin man in only a dirty pair of underwear.  He was having spasms and foaming at the mouth.  I horrified, asked what had happened.  One of the doctors said that he had taken poison to commit suicide.  The people that had found him had been trying to call the ambulance for hours, but couldn’t reach anyone.  (An aside: one of my projects is getting an ambulance for my health post, and for Western Dang, as our nearest one is in a neighboring VDC (county) and is often unreachable, as was the case on this day).  I asked the doctors what they were going to do and they said “nothing.”  I asked if they could give him something to make him throw up and they said, “we don’t have anything.” A headmaster of a school, there for the meeting, suggested soap and water.  The doctors said, “We can’t do anything.”  I felt the panic and shock rising up in me; I had to get out of there.  The only way out of the health post was walking right by the old man.  At the exact moment that I walked past him and, not being able to help myself, looked down into his face, he died.  I will never forget his face: head thrown back, mouth open, as if to scream, eyes wide.  After I had passed him, I looked back and saw one of the doctors shaking his body, violently, trying to see if he was still alive.  After I had collected myself, I returned to the health post to have my meeting.  Not a single person was upset.  An hour later, the police came to pick up the body and take it into town for an autopsy.  I wondered why, if the police were able to transport a dead body into town, they weren’t able, an hour before, to transport a dying one.

 Besides the obvious trauma of seeing someone die such a painful death, I am still very shaken by two things: One, the fact that the doctors failed to do anything to help the old man.  Granted, I’m not a doctor, so maybe they could see that he was beyond help, but they didn’t even do anything to comfort him, didn’t even go near enough to examine him.  I told one of my friends about this and she, in turn, talked to her host father about it.  He runs a health post and claimed that there was, definitely, something the doctors could have done, or at least tried, as I suspected.  Two, the lack of any reaction on the part of the witnesses and of the community was shocking to me.  In general, Nepalis are not an emotional people.  I think I’ve seen one adult Nepali cry, in all of my time here.  After something like that, all I wanted was recognition that something sad had happened and a hug (way too much to expect!), instead, I got no reaction past disbelief at how upset I was.  I spent many hours that afternoon and evening, crying alone, in my room.  A few days have past and the trauma isn’t so fresh.  I can close my eyes without seeing his face, but I know that my life will never be the same and, honestly, the little faith I had in the rural health services that I work with, in Nepal, is gone. 

Sex, Lies and Daal Bhaat

25/8/14

I have returned from my sojourn to KTM.  In fact, there is a possibility that I will be going back, in a month, for training about how to establish a library, at site-here’s hoping!

The KTM trip was complicated, from the start.  As some of you may have seen on the news, there have been massive floods and landslides in Northern India and Southern Nepal, over the last couple of weeks.  The day before I was to leave for KTM, this weather hit us.  There was torrential rain for 36 hours, the rivers swelling and the roads turning to mush.  I got up on Friday morning anticipating leaving on the regular 9:30 bus.  My family kept telling me that I shouldn’t go, but I though that they were just exaggerating.  Around 7am, despite the ridiculously bad cell reception, I managed to talk to my nearest neighbor, Ben.  In his village, part of the bridge had washed away and he’d be unable to leave his site.  That settled things, we were stuck.  It was a very bad day.  It was sad to see the three houses that had been washed away in the river, watching the dejected faces of the families thinking, I’m sure “what do we do, now?”  Knowing that there was no help from the Government coming, that the only help their equally hard-up neighbors could offer was help with the physical rebuild made me thankful for the (flawed) social safety net we have in America.  On a more selfish note, I wanted to leave, wanted to join my friends in KTM, wanted to run my first GAD meeting, the one that I’d been planning for months. 

Much to our relief, the rains stopped for just long enough for the water levels to lower to make travel possible.  7 am Saturday  morning, my Buba and I left our house for the 3-hour walk into Tulsipur.  We met Ben at the intersection, after an hour, and proceeded to trudge into town.  It wasn’t so bad, really just a strange adventure, although there was a rather deep, fast moving river that we had to cross (thank goodness for growing up in MT and being used to that!) We talked about how bizarre it was that a three-hour walk was no longer a big deal.  When, in the states, would you be all right with walking three hours to get somewhere?  If that were the case, I’d just pass on whatever activity required the three-hour walk!  While our arrival in town was a relief, we weren’t out of the woods until our 7-hour bus ride to Butwal was over.  We boarded the bus with some anxiety.  About an hour and a half outside of Tulsipur we had successfully crossed all the rivers that could have hampered our journey.  The rest of the road was fine, although we passed nearly 30 small and medium sized landslides that had blocked the road the day before and had only recently been cleared.  By 5:00 we arrived in Butwal-dirty, sunburned, exhausted, but relieved.  A delicious “American” dinner and good night’s sleep left us refreshed and ready for the final leg of our journey.  The Butwal to KTM leg of the journey was easy.  We splurged and spent an extra 20 rupees on a deluxe bus!  This meant free water, comfortable seats and Nepali and Indian music videos that we got to make fun of-what a treat!

We arrived in KTM on Sunday afternoon and I immediately ran to a nearby hotel pool to swim with my friend, who was celebrating his 21^st birthday.  While it wasn’t exactly ideal pool weather, just being in a bathing suit, floating in a pool, surrounded by manicured gardens transported me back home for a short hour.  Sunday was about my friend’s birthday.  After getting dressed up and going out to dinner, we all consolidated in our largest hotel room for the commencement of the festivities.  Debauchery was had.  I don’t think anyone can understand how wild we get, and why, unless they’ve experienced the isolation of living in a rural village for weeks and months on end.  We are desperate to talk, to laugh wildly, to dance (often raunchily), to eat, to drink, to touch, we are desperate to do all those things that we can’t do at site.  So, whenever anybody chides us for being loud and wild, I just think “you have no right, because you have never been where we have been, you have never done what we have done.  And if you have, you have forgotten what it was like.”  After cake, a twerking contest and lots of silly picture taking, we managed to herd the group out to one of the only “clubs” in town.  The joy in that room, as everybody danced and laughed and let loose, was palpable.  Of course, the next morning saw hangovers to match the revelry of the night before. 

By Monday is was back to work. Those volunteers who were Resource Volunteers had sessions all day.  Us losers had to occupy our time in different ways.  I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 12-4 at the PC office-meeting with staff, trying to fix problems that are un-fixable at site, advocating for GAD.  Monday evening saw GAD’s first in-person meeting.  It went wonderfully.  Our new CD and his wife attended, the only staff members who thought it worth their time, and were very interested and attentive.  We had so much work to do that our meeting turned into a two-part-er, but I am very excited about what our position in PC will be, in the coming year, as well as our upcoming and ongoing projects-I’ll keep you updated! 

Most evenings were spent watching movies (“The Fault in Our Stars”-what a hilarious stinker!), getting yummy dinners and drinks and going dancing.  For the most part, the time PCVs spend together is joyful, fun and full of love. However, there is a dark side to PC relationships (both platonic and sexual) that I never anticipated. 

When I joined PC, I honestly thought that peace-loving, semi-crunchy granola types would surround me. I actually thought that I would be one of the more abrasive, non-hippy types in the group-boy was I wrong! I have spoken about the drama in PC before, but right now, it seems out of control.  I guess when you put 24 people together who, with the exception of two volunteers, are between the ages of 21 and 31, things will happen. PC Nepal is like “The Real World”(the only exceptions being a lack of physical fights and camera confessionals).  We have: cliques, intrigue, rumors, gossip, breakups, cheating, fights, tantrums, crying, lying, bullying. 

Another thing that I had heard about PC was that 75% of people return to the states either married, engaged or in a serious relationship.  Now, Nepal may just be different from other PC countries, but, at this point, I don’t see how it’s possible for that number to even be 25%!  To start or sustain a romantic relationship amidst all this…well, I don’t know how it’s possible.  Platonic friendships are easier, as they don’t have sex mucking things up, but even our PC platonic relationships have to contend with rumors, mistrust and lies.  The friendships that can stay afloat amidst this will be very strong, to be sure.  I count myself very lucky to have several of these friendships to provide me emotional support during the struggles of PC.  I do not think that the situation we are dealing with is because we just happen to have dramatic, bad people as volunteers.  I think that we see the worst (and also the best, at times) in each other, brought out by the massive stresses that we contend with.  This, in combination with youth and general horniness creates the cesspool of drama in which we find ourselves.  To stay sane, I just try to stay out of it and to help my friends navigate the turbulent waters, when they fall in, to give them lots of love and to be an advocate for them.  The fact that I (and my friends) haven’t  freaked out, hit anyone or quit, seems to speak to the fact that I’m doing a fairly good job. 

I have no solution for our situation.  I can only hope that people start being more self-reflective about their actions, to see how much more pleasant life would be without cliques and bullying and rumor mongering(lord knows, I like gossiping as much as the next person, but the difference between gossiping and rumor mongering lies in the truth of the information being passed about).  Life here is hard enough without feeling that your every thought and action could be fodder for criticism and/or malicious embellishment. 

Travel back to site was also difficult.  I stayed in KTM two days longer than I had planned, due to concerns about roads and thus the necessity of Dang-ers traveling together.  Once I got to our district capital, I was further stalled by a Bandh (these are called by political parties and basically say that for a certain amount of time, no vehicles are allowed on roads). I don’t see the point of them, except as a show of political strength.  I stayed over night in the capital and then finally finished the long trek back to site-laden down with two packages from home and dog food for Danny.

 While site is very boring, I am relieved to be home-to the peace and quite, at least for a little while.