Short Stories

Socially, professionally (if you could call what I’m doing an occupation), existentially, and otherwise, things have been good these past few months. There are still many moments that make me smile anew at the character of this country’s people. Recently, these have included spontaneously receiving a bag of mangoes from a colleague because he knows I’ve been struggling nutritionally; getting an unexpected call from a close friend who’d moved abroad for work; my host nephew impulsively cleaning my room every few days; a group of women pitching in to help each other build a new stove in each of their homes; a man proudly showing me his rooftop garden; and school children incessantly shouting “hi, Ben!” as I walk home from a long day.

Workwise, I’ve been roughly the right amount of busy. I’ve been spending two days each week at my village’s health center, delivering nutrition trainings for pregnant women and mothers of young children. By improving the community’s knowledge of the importance of proper nutrition among those most at risk, we hope to greatly reduce the level of child malnutrition. In conjunction with the trainings, we’ve been developing a nutrition center to provide information on and encourage positive changes in nutritional habits. We’re also working on improving the monitoring of child development, both at the health center and in the community.

I’ve now built ten smokeless cookstoves in my village and have been improving my skill and speed with each replication. As an increasing number of households have seen the benefits in the reduction of smoke, time, and firewood, more and more people have been soliciting me to build one. I’ve even found a few individuals who have seem seem interested in taking up cookstove construction as a part-time occupation, after the rains and duties of monsoon season pass.

 This woman is amazing. She helped me build four stoves for herself and her neighbors over the course of two days.

A few weeks ago, while building a smokeless cookstove, I was bitten by this:

That’s a baby wild boar, which some people here capture from the forest and raise to eat or sell. This little guy was bothering me while I was mixing some mud, so I nudged him aside with my foot. He squealed, charged, and sank his little teeth into my ankle. I screamed (more from surprise than pain), Nepalis laughed, and he scampered away.

While making another cookstove, I put on some music to pass the time. After a few songs, “Blurred Lines,” a racy pop song about either the unclear roles that females have to navigate or rape (depending on whom you ask), came on. I got up to change it (not that any of my Nepali companions would have understood the lyrics), but noticed that the old man, toothless who’d been sitting in the corner of the room was smiling and bopping away. Robin Thicke’s audience knows no limits.

I’ve been spreading awareness about the many amazing benefits of Moringa trees. This past week, I was supposed to hold a training to distribute saplings but, not unsurprisingly, nobody showed up. I ended up giving an informal training to the health center staff, who were very impressed by the benefits. I gave many of them saplings to plant in their own homes, and together we planted a few at the health center. After these saplings grow into mature, fruiting trees, I’m hoping there will be a big demand for Moringa trees next year.

This past month, I worked with a small farmer to build a greenhouse with a bamboo frame and plastic roof, the first in my community. This will allow him to grow vegetables in the off-season, times when prices are high and nutritional variety is otherwise low. We also installed a drip irrigation system, a small plastic tank and series of pipes with tiny holes that deliver water directly to the base of the plant. Drip irrigation conserves farmers’ time and water, ensuring that the plants receive just the right amount of water each day. Already, many other farmers have expressed interest in building their own plastic house in the coming year. These relatively simple, cheap technologies have the potential to greatly improve the production and availability of vegetables in rural communities.

I realize I haven’t mentioned my garden in awhile. A few months back, I was so fed up with animals destroying my garden that I hired two guys to construct a bamboo fence. Since then, it’s been thriving. Right now I have tomatoes, bitter gourd, snake gourd, okra, beans, and corn, as well as a small herb garden with basil and cilantro.

Before (top) and after (bottom) construction of the fence.

 

I’m also starting to do comparisons to demonstrate the efficacy of different farming practices. With my host sister-in-law, I planted one row of corn using the traditional Nepali method, and another using biointensive permagardening techniques. So far, the difference is clear.

The corn planted biointensively (the back row) is considerably taller and fuller than the corn planted with the Nepali method (in the middle, behind the tomato plants).

Despite early challenges, gardening is proving to be a fruitful hobby—both from the satisfaction I get from growing something from seed to food, and the conversation it generates among villagers. Presently, there is a complete lack of vegetables available in my village, so the harvest from the garden is also keeping my family well nourished.

It’s also fruit season in Dang. The other day we covered all of our pomegranates in plastic bags to protect them from pests. I spent several hours one afternoon with my host sister trying to knock down mangos by throwing sticks and stones at them. The Asian pear tree in our backyard is laden with fruit, which make for a nice snack when I’m feeling underfed. Since coming to Nepal, I’ve tried a bunch of new fruits, including rose pear, jackfruit, pomelo, litchi, mulberry, gooseberry, and several others whose names I don’t know in English.

The other day I was cooking some American-style pasta when my family urgently called me outside (tangentially, my family is always surprised when I eat anything for dinner other than rice. It’s, like, not kosher). Just above the kitchen doorway, coiled on the bamboo rafters, sat a six-foot long snake. Eventually it slithered off the far end of the roof and into the garden below. Thankfully, my family tells me he’s a “friendly snake” who will protect us by eating baby cobras. I’ll feel much safer once the monsoon season is over.

Speaking of monsoon, apparently a lot of the people in my village get drunk before they head into the fields to plant rice, which, in my opinion, makes the deftness of their work even more impressive.

For the past few months, my computer’s been doing this weird thing where if I touch it while it’s charging, it mildly electrocutes me. Interestingly, this doesn’t happen if my feet aren’t touching the floor or walls, which leads me to believe that the electricity must not be grounded. So I have to be careful.

Whether from my chronic illness or steady diet of daal bhaat, I’m pretty certain that my sweat has changed odors in the past few months. I didn’t use to think I smelled bad, but now when I perspire I reek something strange with a subtle hint of curry.

Yes, the constant sickness, rain, and isolation bring me down sometimes, but many things are going right. Okay, maybe not always “right” per se, but at least life is interesting.

Storm Clouds and Silver Linings

Monsoon season has come to Dang, the parching heat of the few months prior supplanted by persistent mugginess and daily rainstorms which, I’m told, will last for the next two months or so.

These past few weeks, most of my village has been busy plowing, planting, and transplanting rice, which many Nepalis consider their most important crop. Planting rice is unlike any other kind of agriculture. First, villagers wait until their paddies get nice and soggy from the rain. One paddy is designated as a nursery for the seeds to develop into seedlings; the others paddies are prepared for transplanting with a pair of oxen pulling a wooden or iron plow. Plowing is conducted in a seemingly random pattern, loosening the soil to allow better water absorption and root penetration rather than forming the neat furrows typical for other crops. Once the paddy fills with a few inches of water, it’s ready for transplanting. Armed with small bundles of rice seedlings, farmers moving swiftly from row to row placing the plants in the mud. After trying it yourself, you come to appreciate their speed and precision.

Rice is such a staple in Nepal that it takes some farmers weeks to plant. The harvest must suffice to feed a family for two meals a day for an entire year, until the next rice harvest.

These full days of back-bending labor mean that many Nepalis don’t have the time or energy for much else. We Peace Corps Nepal volunteers regard monsoon season as test of our endurance. On top of villagers’ busyness, which renders community involvement in projects difficult, the constant rain and mud make walking or working outside an unpleasant experience. As I learned this past week, the monsoon season can also encumber excursions away from the village.

To celebrate the Fourth of July and my birthday, I traveled with some friends to Pokhara, a tourist city in the center of Nepal. The fifteen hours it took to get there was well worth it. In Pokhara, I was able to treat myself to a massage, a nice beer, and a guitar (which I’m hoping will make for an excellent monsoon season pastime, if it doesn’t mold first). I got to watch the some world cup matches, play a game of pool, and have a little fun.

For all my complaints about Nepali transportation, my experiences have comparatively pleasant compared to those of some fellow volunteers. My friends have been spat on, peed on, pooped on, and vomited on while riding on buses in Nepal. On the way home, however, my relatively good fortune ran out.

Returning to site from Pokhara, the bus was making good time. We reached a bazaar three hours from my village by 10:30am, giving me an ETA of around 1:30. After the many hours spent on buses in the past week, I was keen on the prospect of an early arrival.

About an hour later, we reached the first river. I held my breath as we forded the murky water on an imperceptible road, and took this video.

A few minutes later, we approached another river and proceeded across in similar fashion.

And then the bus stopped. The other passengers glanced at each other with looks of mild concern. Then we started moving backwards. And then we stopped abruptly. As a foot and a half of water rushed up against the left side of the bus, mild panic set in. Passengers started talking, arguing, and even shouting. Nepalis began to gather on the riverside to survey the situation. People began climbing out of the windows and onto the roof, passing their babies and other belongings up to the waiting hands above. It’s very confusing to experience a crisis situation in a foreign country, culture, and language—I had no idea whether this was a common occurrence, how severe the situation was, or how to respond. I began asking Nepalis what had happened and what I should do, and in typical nothing-is-wrong, don’t-upset-the-foreigner fashion, they told me to “basnus” (sit and/or wait).

Unfortunately, my phone died in the middle of the incident, so I wasn’t able to take more pictures. Even more regrettably, it died because I’d drained the battery watching Marie Antoinette during the bus ride.

Eventually I was the only remaining passenger in the bus, at which point a young guy offered to help me evacuate. We hoisted my backpack and cardboard box containing my guitar (and some dirty clothes, which hadn’t fit in my bag) to some people on the roof. I climbed up, cautiously traversed the rooftop, descended the ladder at the back, and waded through the fast-moving water to the bank from which we’d come, guitar and flip-flops in hand.

By now, a crowd of two hundred or so had assembled along the river’s banks. Among them, I spotted a familiar face—an NGO worker who had visited my village a month earlier. With her was a young white woman, who I deduced was the NGO worker’s friend she’d mentioned on her visit. Originally from South Salem (which neighbors my hometown!), she had previously spent ten months in Nepal on a Fulbright and had returned to gather research for her thesis. The serendipity of meeting another American on the side of river in a remote part of Nepal almost blew my mind.

Finally, after an hour and a half, a truck arrived to pull the bus out. It seemed that some of the bus’s machinery had gotten wet, which prevented it from starting. As vehicles resumed their traversal of the still-rushing river, a police officer directed me to climb into a truck to take me across. The truck’s cabin was already occupied with four police officers and a man in handcuffs, who all smiled at me as I took my seat with my bulging backpack and guitar case.

The truck dropped me off a few miles from Tulsipur, the closest bazaar to my village. I hopped another bus, which, stopping every thirty seconds to let passengers on or off, finally reached the Tulsipur bus park around 3:30, with time to spare to catch the 4 o’clock bus to my village.

Except that the bus park, which is usually bustling with buses and jeeps, was practically empty. I asked around about the buses and learned that none of the westbound buses were running that day—in fact, the heavy rain from the past few days had flooded the road, which had prevented any buses from even leaving from the villages that morning. So I headed over to the jeeps, which would be a bit more cramped but would get me home. The drivers there told me the same story—there were no jeeps going even remotely near my village that afternoon. I wasn’t alone, however—a group of Nepalis was also searching for rides home. They began lobbying the drivers for someone to take them westward, offering to pay extra. After a few minutes, a jeep arrived with a driver who consented to the deal. I hastened to the car, but arrived too late. The jeep, my only ride home, had already filled up.

By now it was after four, and if I’d have to walk the two and a half hours to get home, I’d need to leave immediately to reach home before nightfall. Seizing my bag, guitar box, and the two kilos of bananas I had stupidly bought, I set out. On the road, I ran into one of my hospital coworkers at his medical shop, who informed me that the flooding in the road was so great that I might need assistance in getting across.

Thankfully, after twenty minutes of walking, a bus approached and offered me a ride (where it came from, with the bus park deserted, I’ll never know). But I’ve never been so happy to squeeze into the last vacant space on a Nepali bus.

Because the main road was flooded, we would have to take a considerable detour along roads not designed for buses. Several times, we encountered another vehicle coming towards us and were forced to back up to a point wide enough where it could pass. The ride was extremely uncomfortable. Standing in a semi-crouched position (I’m too tall to stand up on the buses here) with hefty load on my back (no room to put it on the ground), I was sweating buckets with the heat and humidity in the packed bus. Every few minutes, a bag of my bananas would fall from the overhead compartment and hitting a man in the head. A Nepali woman kept scolding me for bringing my bulky bag aboard, but I feared what would happen if I put it on the roof. At one point, the bus suddenly swayed perilously while crossing a small stream, causing some of the items on the roof to fall off. I really hoped that my guitar, which was up there, wasn’t among them.

We had almost made it to the main road when a tractor approached from the opposite direction. We moved aside to let it pass, but when the driver put the bus back into gear, the wheels spun. We were stuck in the mud. Everyone exited the bus to assess the situation. The male passengers pushed the bus, dug out the wheels with shovels, and tried everything to get the bus going, but they only succeeded in getting it more stuck. I rounded the side of the bus and was alarmed to find a pair of my shorts dangling from the metal bar on the window. The cardboard box with my guitar and dirty clothes had been torn to pieces—but somehow, aside from the hanging shorts, everything had remained inside.

Forty minutes later, a passing tractor driver agreed to pull us out, and we were off again. The rest of the ride was mercifully uneventful. I strolled into my house just after 6:30, way later than I had anticipated. All told, the trip was full of unexpected challenges, but I also caught a bunch of breaks along the way.

As the storm clouds set in for the next few months, I hope for the ability to see the light that lingers at their edges, because there is a lot to be glad about. Rereading my past few reports, I realize that my tone has been a bit negative lately. The truth is, despite the many downs, I’m actually quite happy here. I’ll aim to make my next post(s) more upbeat to reflect it.

If You Could Eat Only One Food…

…for the next two years, what would it be?

Chances are you’ve never considered whether that hypothetical question could become a potential reality. And if you had, I highly doubt you’d have chosen daal bhaat. For travelers, sampling Nepal’s traditional rice and lentil dish is a novel experience. But after eating it twice a day for the past ten months, it’s become the bane of my existence.

Health-wise, the last few weeks have been a real struggle. In my four years at college, I was sick for a total of a week and a half; in the just past 7 months, I’ve been sick for over 30 days. And not with your run-of-the-mill coughs and colds. Most recently the culprit was giardia, a protozoan that causes loss of appetite, frothy diarrhea, sulfurous belching, and extreme flatulence. Let me just say, getting giardia in Nepal is a quick and sure way to get that beach body you’ve always wanted. You lose a bunch of weight all while getting a great glute workout from all the squatting over the latrine. My host mother was just diagnosed with typhoid for the third time in six months, so I really shouldn’t complain. And fortunately, I’m vaccinated against that one, although my 78-page Peace Corps-issued Health Handbook warns that “this vaccine is less effective than most of the other vaccines.” Here’s to you, dumb luck!

In the past month and a half, I’ve taken medicine for giardia, amoebas, and other intestinal parasites. Typically someone opposed to self-medicating for minor medical issues, I’ve popped about a hundred Pepto Bismols and antacids. I’ve gone entire days without an appetite for anything, which, for those unaware of my eating habits, is analogous to Nicolas Cage refusing any movie role put in front of him. I’ve now lost 20 pounds since arriving in Nepal, through a combination of gut-wrenching disease, hard work (by which I mean doing anything in this heat), and poor nutrition.

My counterpart at the health center loves to joke that if I’m going to continue counseling people on good nutritional practices, I need to start looking healthier. I don’t actually look underfed (Nepalis’ ideal body image is a bit meatier than that of Americans’), but he’s right about needing to improve my diet. For the past month, my eating schedule with my host family has been:

6:30am: milk tea

10am: steamed rice, thin lentil curry, and vegetables

4pm: toasted corn

8pm: steamed rice, thin lentil curry, and vegetables

Most American college students eat a more well-rounded diet than rural Nepalis (and, consequently, than Peace Corps Volunteers living with those rural Nepalis). Aside from fresh eggs, milk, meat, grains, legumes, and seasonal fruits and vegetables (about five at any given time), the only food items available in my village are crackers, chips, chow mien, donuts, soda, juice, and, of course, tea. Lately, the lack of ingredients and imagination in Nepali cuisine has really begun taking its toll. Eating has become a chore, an unpleasant but necessary task of everyday life. Faced with the monotony of an unfamiliar dish, we volunteers find ourselves craving all sorts of food—even things we never really liked in the states (for me, that thing is chocolate). My knees begin to weaken when I imagine that trepidatious moment when I’ll once again walk onto the linoleum floors and enter the endless maze of eatables that is the standard American supermarket. Nepalis often ask me just what American food is like, a conversation which, like most others here, varies little with each recurrence. In this case, they’re shocked to learn that Americans don’t eat rice every day, and I’m unable to convey the sheer variety of things that Americans put in their mouths.

These twice-a-day daal bhaat binges, aside from constituting an unhealthy dietary schedule, often fail to provide the protein, vitamins, and minerals I need to be healthy. I supplement some with fruit, peanuts, and other snacks whenever possible, but the distance to the nearest store (forty-five minutes by cramped taxi) and my budgetary restraints (thank you for giving almost all of our living allowance’ food allocation to our host families, Peace Corps Nepal) makes it impossible for me to balance my diet.

Why is eating healthy so difficult here? Well, as a food security volunteer, it’s pretty much my job to figure that out and work towards improving it. A big part of it is a production/supply problem—most local farmers are producing only a few crops at any given time using primitive agricultural methods, and foods imported from elsewhere are too expensive for most families. But equally important is rural Nepalis’ ignorance about nutrition and its importance in overall health.

I’ve given nearly 30 nutrition trainings in the past six months, each of which has involved a game in which I ask participants to match food items with their nutritive role: energy, growth, or protection from disease. Typically, groups correctly place fewer than half of the commonplace food items (things like meat, rice, tomatoes) with their appropriate group, and sometimes as few as a third. In other words, people have very little idea of what they need to eat to get the nutrients they need.

Misconceptions about nutrition are rampant in my community. The pervasive belief that foods are either “hot” or “cold” means that many villagers go half the year without eating certain nutritious foods—eating a mango or papaya in the cold season, for instance, might cause you to catch a cold. As another example, sons are traditionally are fed nothing but breast milk for their first six months (as is recommended), but daughters are only exclusively breastfed for five. One day, I tried to get a pandit (Hindu priest) and his wife (a female community health volunteer) to debate this discrepancy, but they settled on “that’s the way it is.”

Perhaps my most upsetting encounter with a nutritional fallacy occurred this past week, when a mother came into the health center complaining of weakness and fatigue. Her sixteen-day-old daughter had jaundice, a troubling but not uncommon phenomenon among newborns in my community. Because of her baby’s jaundice, the woman’s husband and his family had been forcing her to live on strict diet of only salt water. It should go without saying, but that’s extremely dangerous for the health of a lactating mother and her child. I sat down with the husband to explain the gravity of his actions and to set him straight. When I later recounted the story to the health center doctor, his draw dropped in horror.

Because of erroneous beliefs like those above, a lot of rural Nepalis have poor nutritional status and habits. Without marginalizing the severity of their situation, my sincere fear is that the longer I live here, the more my nutrition will suffer too.

You can make a huge impact on the food security of this volunteer by sending a box of goodies to:

Ben Wagner

Shreegaun Primary Health Center

Shreegaun 2, Bagar, Dang

Nepal

These days I’m craving protein bars and powder, dried seaweed/spirulina, and, naturally, peanut butter. Plus, tomorrow’s my birthday!