Time, Money, Place, and Culture

Before living in Nepal, I was well aware that most cultures have a more laid-back attitude than Americans with regard to time. In many countries, meetings commonly start a few hours late. Delays are to be expected and aren’t worth getting upset over. Plans or projects often get pushed back a few days. All this, and more, is true here. Nepali time is also less linear. People might say aasti (“the day before yesterday”) when referring to any day in recent memory. Bholi-parsi, which literally means “tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,” may as well mean “some day.”

I acknowledge that I could afford to be a little more relaxed when it comes to time, but occasionally Nepalis’ extreme lack of urgency makes life difficult for me. Nepalis are almost never in a hurry—the common Nepali sayings ke garne? (“what to do?”) and jivan este chha (“life is such”) reflect their fatalistic attitude that many things (like time) are out of their hands and not worth worrying about. An example: on New Years Eve day, rather than taking the day off to meet friends in the bazaar, I went to the office in order to attend my health center’s management committee meeting. When just one person failed to show up within the fairly large timeframe considered “on time,” the meeting was cancelled. When he did arrive (a little over two hours late), the other staff sort of shrugged and said, “We’ll reschedule it bholi-parsi.” Another time, I needed to get to my district’s capital where I would be meeting my supervisor, the health officer in charge of the entire district, for the first time. I was going to take a taxi (picture fifteen people packed into a jeep with barely enough space to move your arms), but my neighbor told me the bus was coming “ahile” (literal translation: now) and I should wait. An hour and 45 minutes later, the bus finally showed up. It was only a few minutes late, arriving just slightly later than my neighbor expected. After an unhurried bus ride replete with brief stops, I arrived in the capital and booked it to the district health office, arriving half an hour late but a few minutes before the meeting actually started.

In addition to their flexibility, it sometimes seems that Nepalis’ temporal indifference results in a skewed perception of time. In other words, I often find that people have no idea how long things take. When I used ask about the length of the bus ride from my PST site to Dang, I got responses ranging from eight to twenty hours. That’s one hell of a spectrum—the reality is closer to fifteen hours. Last week, after missing the last bus from Tulsipur bazar, I decided to see how long it would take me to walk home. I’m a brisk walker, but even walking at my fastest the trip took me a solid two hours. Considering how slowly most Nepalis walk (I have to consciously slow down to match their pace), I’d guess that the journey takes three to four hours for your average Nepali. My host family’s estimate? Two hours for a woman and one hour for a young man like myself. When I got home, my next-door neighbor told me it only takes her an hour and a half. I was so tired from the trek that I almost called her a liar.

In contrast, though very generous, Nepalis have an odd obsession with money. Literally any time I spend money on anything—whether it’s a bus fare, hotel room, shirt, bag of fruit, or bar of soap—my family and friends ask me how much I paid. Whether this stems from their curiosity about an American’s consumerism or a concern that I’m getting ripped off, I’m not totally sure. Since I’ve also been repeatedly asked how much my iPhone, laptop, Kindle, headlamp, and electric toothbrush cost, and more than one person has asked how much my parents make, I tend to assume the former. If they go further and inquire about my living allowance, which I reveal is a little over US $3 a day after rent (not much even by Nepali standards), they usually drop the subject.

Myself aside, Nepalis are cash-conscious in a weird way. People haggle on virtually everything they buy, regardless of how wealthy they are or how much they expect to save. Eggs, fruits, and vegetables, which add valuable nutrition to Nepali daal bhaat, are bought sparingly because they’re seen as expensive (despite being cheaper than the cigarettes and chewing tobacco so constantly consumed here). People made a big fuss when they don’t get reimbursed for things. The Nepali government often pays people who attend trainings, a practice that has made it difficult for other Peace Corps Volunteers to recruit Nepalis who have nothing but knowledge to gain.

Given the poverty here, most Nepalis should be concerned with their finances. But for a people so fascinated with wealth and with so little of it, it’s a wonder many of them don’t work harder. I’ve found Nepalis to be pretty self-depreciative, and one of their most common comments is that their fellow countrymen are lazy. This is a half-truth that seems to reflect a hierarchical and patriarchal society where, for most, time is not money. In contrast, often the wealthiest people do the least work.

My new host family is a perfect case for examining time and money through the lens of status. We are Chetri (the second highest caste) and own a considerable amount of land. My older brother, the family’s only real breadwinner, is employed by a cable company but works only a few days a week (he is also chairman of both the boarding school and health center, although it’s not clear whether these roles demand much time). My sister and mother’s only work seem to be preparing tea and meals. Since they spend much of their time watching TV or just sitting around, we might describe them as lazy (as my friend’s host father did after visiting my house). We employ other people (mostly Tharus, an ethnic minority) to fetch water, gather wood, wash dishes, work the fields, and do much of the other work required to maintain a rural Nepali household. A young Tharu couple that has been building a new wall and buffalo pen, often works ten-hour days, while their six-year old daughter sits nearby watching their one-year old son. In exchange for their services, these laborers are paid (how much is unclear to me) and are often fed (after our family has finished eating). They also keep a portion of the crops they harvest from working our family’s land. If this sounds a bit like sharecropping, feudalism, or some other form of bonded labor, it is. Nepal is not far removed from slavery; until a few decades ago, many poor Tharus families indentured their children to Brahmin and Chetri households for life.

Further caste inequity can be seen in my office. In Nepal, office jobs are so highly sought after because they offer a comfortable salary and free time (some men, such as my brother from my first host family, even grow out a pinky nail as a sign of status connoting that they do no work with their hands). For these same reasons, working in the health center is a prized job. The staff of my primary health center is of mixed caste, but all four nurses, five health workers, and the lab technician are Brahmin or Chetri, whereas the assistants, peons, and sweepers are mostly Tharu and Dalit. Everyone gets along well and works a similar amount (which, many days, is very little), but the Brahmins and Chetri staff visibly hold higher rank and income than the Tharu and Dalits. Of course, their qualifications and duties are vastly different—the health workers and nurses have the difficult tasks of diagnosing and proscribing because they’re more knowledgeable about health. But does the upper staffs’ higher education stem from a biological or behavioral superiority, or a more structural inequity that perpetuates greater status and salary for those of higher caste?

Now reread the above section, and every time you see the word “caste” replace it with “socioeconomic status,” “Chetri” and “Brahmin” with “white,” “Dalit” with “black,” and “Tharu” with “Latino.” We don’t have castes in the U.S., but it’s well known that Latinos and African Americans are disadvantaged in many respects. When we discuss the caste system, Nepalis often ask me if blacks are the lowest caste in America. I usually just respond that America doesn’t have a caste system, but the real answer isn’t so simple. By no means does the rigidity and severity of American inequality compare to that of Nepal. Still, it’s important to remember that even in the land of opportunity, the way is easier for some.

As is true of many developing countries, the other issue holding Nepal back is the gender gap. To better understand community dynamics, volunteers are encouraged to record a typical daily schedule with different groups of people (i.e. men and women). The results are what you might expect, if not more extreme. Nepali women’s responsibilities include feeding animals, lighting fires, making tea, cooking, feeding their families, doing dishes, preparing their kids for school, doing laundry, sweeping, gathering wood, cutting grass, fetching water, tending the fields, and more; they have virtually no free time. In contrast, it is not uncommon for Nepal men to perform no chores whatsoever. After their morning meal, many go to the bazar to wander around, drink tea, play cards, and chat. Some men drink alcohol to excess, even midweek and midday, which significantly contributes to poverty and domestic abuse.

Though they run their households, Nepali women usually have little influence in financial or family matters. One of the men in my PST community bet a considerable sum of his wife’s own money that his candidate would win the election. He did win (which I suppose is lucky, but also reinforces his behavior), but if he had lost she would have been powerless to get the money back. There are exceptions, of course—men who play an active role in their families and limit their fraternizing when there’s work to be done—but the typical husband-wife dynamic is far from equitable.

Many Nepalis are aware of the caste and gender gaps. At a women’s group meeting, a Chetri woman proposed that the board ought to have a Dalit representative, which many women agreed with (unfortunately, no Dalit women were present at the meeting, so the point was moot). Men readily acknowledge how hard their mothers, sisters, and wives work, sometimes with a subtle smile that might suggest admiration, guilt, or conceit—it’s hard to say. And groups are working to bridge the gap. Government programs delivered through local women’s groups are encouraging women to stand up to their husbands for their basic financial and human rights. Victims of domestic violence have access to counseling services (at my health center, for instance). One of the NGOs in my community is dedicated to providing educational and career opportunities to disadvantaged groups, especially Tharus. Some things are changing for the better.

What’s lacking is a widespread awareness of the developmental constraints that gender and caste inequality have placed on the whole of Nepali society, especially in rural areas. There are a variety of reasons why this country remains so poor, but it seems to me that a considerable barrier is the ke garne-jivan este cha attitude. If all facets of life are simply accepted “as such,” there is little impetus for improvement. It’s not a coincidence that, at our counterpart conference, our government counterparts (whose jobs entail improving the state of agriculture and/or health in rural Nepal) deemed themselves way more activist than the rural Nepalis they serve. Like most Americans, they believe that problems are something that can be fixed. This is not the predominant, reflexive attitude of most Nepalis.

This leads to an important question for my work: is cultural change justified for the sake of development? That seems like a sticky question, to which our knee-jerk response is a resounding no! What is culture, though, but an aggregate of a community’s beliefs and behaviors? My work here, whether it’s diversifying vegetable production, building improved cookstoves, or giving nutrition training, requires that people change their behavior based on a belief that a new practice is better. Am I altering the culture by changing what people grow, how they cook, and what they eat? Completely. Like in so many cultures, food is an integral part of Nepali life: except for certain religious occasions, most rural Nepalis are unwilling to eat anything other than daal bhaat (or sometimes daal roti) morning and night. Nutritional change is so difficult because it is cultural. Even things like open defecation, the practice of relieving your bowels in broad daylight, have a cultural component: some Nepali women are reluctant to use latrines because they prefer going into the fields in small groups and defecating together. Latrines are clearly a more sanitary and aesthetic alternative, but given their busy schedules, Nepali women only have so much “free time” to socialize. Outlawing open defecation, as the government has rightly done, has eliminated something cultural.

The above may be a bit tangential, but my point is that often even the simplest forms of development require cultural change—this is why globalization is such a loaded term. If we think we can a country can absorb all the benefits of development while preserving its culture completely, we’re kidding ourselves. What we can do is be culturally sensitive by trying to limit our cultural impact whenever possible. Encouraging Nepalis to work across castes, supporting women’s empowerment—these are some obvious examples of cultural shifts necessary for desirable development.

In any case, this is what I think about in the hours I spend waiting for things: in the Nepali time equals money equation, place in society is a major confounding factor, and culture lies beneath it all. Until Nepal begins to connect, both in concept and in practice, hard work with economic advancement, it will continue to lag behind.