The plastic
greenhouse I built with a farmer, with some pretty healthy tomato plants.
Whereas many of the tomato plants outside the house died from disease during
the monsoon season, not a single plant inside did (although the yield was a
little lower than I’d hoped because farmer was too busy with other work to
properly tie many of the plants to the stakes). He wants to build another house
next year in an area with better airflow, and one of his friends stated he
wants to build ten of them (I’ll believe it when I see it).
My garden’s doing pretty
well these days. Right now I’ve got cilantro, basil, dill, fenugreek, spinach,
mustard, lettuce, watercress, onions, garlic, radishes, carrots, tomatoes,
cauliflower, broccoli, kidney beans, snap peas, and cassava. The bugs and
chickens are still a big nuisance, though.
Another volunteer
and I returned to the heavenly hills of Sindupalchok to celebrate the Tihar
festival with our former host family.
My aunt’s cow ambivalently
receives tika during Tihar.
We were put to work
the day after we arrived. Here I’m bundling up the rice and then threshing it
to separate the grains from the chaff. We concluded our day by each carrying a
sack of about a hundred pounds of rice up the steep, slippery path to our
house. The Nepalis took it in stride—we were exhausted.
Banji likes to dance.
Tika during bhai tika of
Tihar.
Firecrackers.
A quail that was
caught in one of our rice patties. We later ate it for dinner. In the words of
my host sister, “Not much meat, but it makes a nice curry.”
My spoiled nephew
has an extravagant, westernized birthday party.
A spontaneous
afternoon “dry picnic”, which is ironically named because “dry picnics”
necessarily include alcohol) with some guys from my village.
The only turkeys we’ve
ever seen in Nepal. And just in time for Thanksgiving.
A bullet embedded
in the wall of a friend’s house, left intact from a decade ago when shooting
broke out in the streets of my nearby bazaar during the Maoist insurgency.
D is for Dang. And occasionally debauchery.
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