A Day In the Life

Big, big, BIG news, but I’m going to make you read all the way to the end of this column to get it. Unless of course you just scroll down to the bottom. Mouse turd.

The question I’m most frequently asked about Nepal, aside from the inevitable “So if they don’t use toilet paper, how do they…y’know…?” is the vague and unanswerable “What is it like?” Anyone who has spent time in an East Asian country, or anywhere outside the continental United States for that matter, knows the true and epic impossibility of trying to answer that vague inquiry without giving an answer that is equally vague in return. The oft-used, and predictably lazy response is, “It’s good, but different,” but I have a sheer dislike of describing things as such. The word good has evolved into the preferred fallback reply when no actual thought has been applied to the question at hand. For example:

“Hey dude, how’s married life?” “Oh you know, it’s good…but it’s really different.”

“Have you Diet Caffeine-Free Cherry-Vanilla Dr. Pepper yet?” “Yup, and it’s not half-bad…just different.”

“Haven’t seen you in while Mark. How’re you feeling since the operation?”
“Oh, you know… Getting my tubes tied wasn’t the end of the world; it’s just a little different, but nothing terrible. Just a little snip here, a tuck there… Hey, how ‘bout that Super Bowl, huh? Man, that Prince is just something else!”

I hope you get my point: we, the American public are in a gradual state of dumbing ourselves down in every conceivable manner. We’ve reduced our vocabulary to one word phrases and an astonishing number of acronyms; the typical college freshman can barely speak in a complete sentence that utilizes every part of speech, much less do his laundry without mixing the colors and whites. Our movies get louder and explodier (copyright Jordan Greenwald, 2007), our magazines compensate for lack of depth with full-color photos of Lindsay Lohan in rehab or fluff pieces about rapid weight-loss pioneers who are more marketing devices than people, and it should come as no surprise that the number one song of 2004 involved Usher screaming “Yeah!” every four seconds. Somewhere, Lil’ Jon’s high school English teacher is weeping underneath her desk, clutching a copy of Ulysses. Mashed potatoes was too complicated of a dish for us to make on our own, so we created a “Just Add Water!” version, and when that proved to still be difficult, we gave up and delegated the culinary arts to the microwave. Overall, most Americans no longer bother to indulge our brains because Walmart executives and Oprah do all of our thinking for us.

Now I could tell what Nepal is really like, but that isn’t a short story, and typically people just want a solitary adjective or an uplifting sound byte, as opposed to a lengthy narrative that is as provocative as it is disturbing. Nepal is a living, breathing, struggling amalgamation of humanity. It is beautiful, it is desperate, it is joyful, and it is ever-changing. The Nepali people preserved their identity as a friendlier Shangri-La, a country comprised of mystical Hindu farmers. After opening up the borders in 1951, Nepal revealed what it really is: whatever Western tourists expect and desire it to be. Nepali people, like other East Asians, are inherently and immensely hospitable; the difference is that the Nepali have been more than willing to sacrifice their personality for the sake of modernization to suit the needs of each and every tourist that sets foot in the country.

As the West has sought out the Nepal for its escapist curiosities and mysticism, so Nepal has sought the West for its prosperity and culture. Tourists come looking for truth and missionaries come promising it, but both leave behind their impression: Nokia phones and Harry Potter, coffee shops and cable Internet, Yankee caps and Britney Spears t-shirts. As we encourage changes that will best suit our travels, we destroy the cultures and societies we are making our various pilgrimages to. The irony is that the Nepali are people have become as much of a tourist attraction as the mountains and rivers (one brochure states “Come for the adventure, stay for the mystic wisdom of the Nepali shamans!”), when all they really desire is to either become like the tourists they cater to, or escape to the United States. Today, Nepal is a shell of what it was only 20 years ago, and in another 20 years, it will be a shell of something else. The lives and the people that make up those shells are what interest me.

So I offer you this, if your eyes aren’t already tired from reading my present thoughts that are in sore need of an editor: a look inside a day in the life of Nepal. You want to know what it’s like? Very well. Be forewarned: be it humorous or be it broken, this is not a land for the calloused heart. Nepal is equal parts anecdote and leper victim. Herein lies merely my perspective, but read on if you care to take a look inside a typical Kathmandu Monday.

Monday, 8:46 am, and I wake up to the sound of a Pekinese fighting a “Tibetan mountain dog” in the alleyway below the bedroom I’ve just regained consciousness in. The alarm clock is predictably not working, not because of shoddy workmanship, but due to the morning government-directed blackout; we’ve having two per day, for a total of six hours, for the last month due to a strain on the city grids. I rub the sleep out of my eyes with fingers too numb from the cold to feel, gradually coming to terms with the fact that I’m not in my own bed (though this room is really, really nice compared to my CWC lodgings). A perusal of the engravings in the stack of bibles on the nightstand confirm a decision that the freezing temperatures convince my brain took place in a different lifetime: Jason and I have spent the night, for a second consecutive evening, at a friend’s house in a southern Kathmandu neighborhood.

I slip my jeans and fleece back on, feet sacrificed to the cold because I’ve foolishly chosen to wear sandals on a weekend that began promisingly warm. Wandering into the den, I find Jason awake and perusing a Jonathan Edwards book, pretending to translate Olde English into Real English while he waits for the power to return so that he can Skype his sister on my laptop. We mutter the garbled greetings that have now replaced “Good morning!” after four months, and I sit down on the couch to listen to a Grove sermon on my iPod and read an old copy of Time magazine filched from our incognito host’s bedroom. Said benefactor, who will remain nameless for safety purposes, is on a month-long “debrief” (read that in missionary-speak as “vacation”) in Thailand, but his roommate, a 46-year-old Philippine missionary, is busy cooking oatmeal and ruining a familiar, but ambiguous Josh Groban song in the kitchen. Philippines are natural entertainers: they’re always entertained by themselves, even if nobody else is.

Somehow, the three of us manage to kill an hour taking turns seeing who can sing the most dramatic version of a serious song in a pathetic take on American Idol; our Philippine elder wins, in unsurprising fashion, by cooing yet another Josh Groban classic while mimicking the backseat love-making skills of Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Jason and I are nearly too shocked to notice that the electricity has been switched back on, but the 6,000 decibel warning of Instant Messenger signing itself back on brings us back to reality. While I’m washing the Philippine filth off of my face and brushing it out of my teeth, Jason delivers the bad news from the local Kantipur affiliate’s morning show: the labor union bandh, or strike, which shut down all the city buses and forced us to crash in Groban’s Nepali recording studio last night will be continuing today, and possibly tomorrow.

Bandhs, while frustrating to most visitors to Nepal, have become part of my everyday life in the last few months. Some bandhs are logical, some last for weeks, and some turn ridiculously violent without warning (please see my October post on the subject for a good personal example). This specific bandh is in response to Nepali citizens being allowed to ride on tourist buses to destinations outside the Kathmandu Valley, which is costing the crappy public buses (which constitute 95% of the country’s fleet) a lot of fares; naturally the appropriate response to lost income would then be to shut down all the country’s public transportation. All strikes are intended to send a message, and the message of this one is quite clear: “Bus drivers love burning tires.”

The situation sucks for the city in general, and I happen to be in a particular danger: my passport has been sitting in the Nepali immigration office for two weeks (government offices are open for precisely 6 hours a day, zero days a week), and there are hints from fellow American travelers that the employees usually don’t bother to hang on to such pithy items as passports for more than a couple days. I’ve made three trips to the office in the past week to retrieve my ticket back to the land of beef and Mount Rushmore, only to find that Nepal likes to inexplicably declare national holidays when the government workers don’t bother to show up for work. I nervously weigh my options while watching the tail end of the Colts-Patriots playoff game on satellite feed, Jason talking over Vern Lundquist as he at last completes that international phone call to his sister. I don’t have much of a choice; if my passport still exists, it needs to be liberated immediately, and since I don’t have any means of transportation other than my size nines, it looks like I’m going to be getting a good workout today. Please note: there is no such thing as an unexpected hike in Nepal, because if civil unrest rears its head in any form, it will spill out into the streets and screw everything up for everybody. Except on Saturdays; Saturdays are “holy” days.

Strapping my sandals on and stepping out the front door with Brian Hirschy’s hideous army green backpack in tow, I am assailed by two things: a Pomeranian that believes itself to be a Doberman, and a 30 degree increase in temperature. I am sweating in my jacket already, but I still can’t feel my toes. Locking the gate behind me, patting my pocket to make certain I have the receipt for my visa with me, finding my “new” iPod serving as a paperweight next to it; I pop in my headphones and turn on a John Piper sermon on Romans, partially to facilitate spiritual growth over the course of the next hour, and partially to insulate myself against what I’m about to hike through. Here’s my journey.

Leaving the neighborhood of Nakkhu, instantly forced to wade through two separate wedding processions that are winding their way through the narrow muddy streets. Each party is trailing a full Nepali brass band playing a form of folk music I last heard in the Borat movie (honestly), and with the two bands wearing identical red uniforms, I puzzle over whether or not one will end up at its final destination with two extra French horn players in tow. Nakkhu is one of the first areas of Kathmandu to be infiltrated by house churches, and since it is no longer illegal to be a Christian in Nepal, there is a large, outwardly expressive community of believers in the surrounding areas. Four churches, different denominations but decidedly charismatic, crowd the street corner. In a sense, its as if I never left Arkansas.

Six boys playing cricket in the street wave enthusiastically and shout “Hello!” at the overdressed videshi (foreigner) shuffling toward them. I smile and say hello back, enthusiastic not because the boys are so friendly, but because my feet have finally decided to accepting blood from their respective capillaries, and ask how the boys are doing this fine morning; they do not respond, not having yet learned a proper response in their English classes. I’m bid farewell with more cries of “Hello!”

I cross a bride spanning the river that marks the lower border of the city of Patan and hold my nose. The city of Kathmandu has been voted by an international environmental group as the #2 most polluted city in the world in the last week (#1 is Dehli, India, for those of you who are interested), and the river below is a perfect example of why. The banks of the river at the bridge are nearly 20 feet tall, the grass matted with settled dust as truck drivers have taken to dumping their loads into the river rather than waste petrol by driving to the designated dumping zone outside of the city. The water itself is infinitely black, sludge-like, with the smell of urine and toxic waste wafting from its banks; I count amongst the swirling rubble three diapers, a pair of bicycle tires, four living ducks and one dead one, condom wrappers, snack noodle wrappers, an Anaheim Mighty Ducks t-shirt, and two women washing their hair. The urge to vomit is stifled, eyes remaining close until I am safely a block away.

The street winds through several blocks of identical houses and identical shops. Three little girls play hacky-sack with a handful of interwoven rubber bands. Because of the bandh, there is no school today – teachers cannot reach their respective classrooms, and children’s buses are denied use of the roads. Sure enough, as I reach the intersection of Ring Road, the main street that tightly borders the whole of Kathmandu, an endless stretch of empty school buses extends beyond my sight lines. It serves as a chilling reminder of the last bandh I happened to get caught in, which left hundreds of children stranded on buses on this same road overnight, many of them below the age of seven. The number of children that go missing each year in this country thus becomes yet another Nepali conundrum, both utterly believable and utterly unimaginable; a recent newspaper bulletin established that in the month of January, 350 children disappeared in the Kathmandu Valley. These are the disappearances that were reported.

Trudging through the Tibetan community just south of Jawalkhel now, pausing to watch a group of street dogs viciously attack a puppy. A pile of refuse at least a foot tall has collected outside the gates of the Tibetan Labor Workers Union complex, left uncollected possibly as a slur by the Newari government against the not-so-welcome immigrants. A young boy, ankle-deep in the trash, is sifting anxiously through fruit rinds and rubble before, face beaming, pulling out a broken purple sandal and slipping it onto one of his now noticeably bare feet. I assume his shoes have dislodged themselves at the bottom of the trash heap, then recoil in horror when he pulls a out yellow sandal of a completely different style and slips it onto the other foot; the child, homeless, has just lucked into a “new” pair of shoes.

Three elderly women and an ancient man stumble, zombie-like in a circle around a Buddhist stupa, lifelessly and desperately whispering unanswered requests to the prayer wheels they obediently spin each morning and evening. Two girls laugh hysterically across the street, urging a puppy to leap back and forth across their jump rope. A shopkeeper stands outside his Ghurka knife emporium, smiling through his plaid scarf as he sips his morning cup of tea. A man parks a motorcycle on the curb in front of his shop, and the two embrace, sharing in the morning’s pleasantries; as I pass by, the motorcycle driver helps the shopkeeper light a stick of amber-scented incense, waving it prophetically over the knives that will likely go unsold this afternoon.

An open-air market awaits me just south of the traffic chokepoint in Jawalkhel, locals selling grapes, potatoes, and radishes that have brought in from the countryside, as well as stomach-ache remedies and condoms. An old woman throws a spoiled orange at a street urchin who has just failed at pinching some of her goods, missing his head with a pitch that would have been well out of the strike zone. Schoolboys whose parents sent them out the door despite news of the strike on the morning news have scaled the fences of the private soccer field on my left and are debating on the legitimacy of a goal. An ambivalent police officer, dressed in military blues, finds that his cries of disapproval have gone unnoticed by the infidel Ronaldos, and rather than climb the fence to scold them in person, he practices twirling his bamboo cane. The locals appear unimpressed, and hungry.

Traffic picks up here on the main streets of Patan, arteries coursing into the heart of Kathmandu. I follow the flow of traffic, opting not to walk on the non-existent sidewalk, feeling the phantom pangs of sensitivity in a right elbow that has been tagged by a half-dozen motorcycles or rearview mirrors, as each vehicle passes me by. This is out of character for me, as I often walk head-on into the surge of Suzukis and Kias: I like to be able to see the face of each person who comes within centimeters of potentially plastering me. The chances of surviving a pedestrian collision are not good. Nepali traffic laws dictate that, because there is no such thing as vehicle insurance in the country, if a pedestrian is injured in a vehicular accident, the driver at fault must pay for the injured party’s medical treatment in full; if the pedestrian is killed, the driver pays $1000 to the grieving family, and the matter is considered settled. Therefore, pre-meditated murder comes off necessarily cheap, and Westerners who stray too far into traffic are considered fatalities who “just didn’t understand our laws.” I hug the curb; I’m worth more than $1000.

Passing up Saleways, the Nepali version of WalMart, where Jason and I buy all of our Nutella and spaghetti. There is a Sega Genesis, circa 1990, on sale in the electronics department for $200. Time magazine is $3; Maxim is $13. Maxim is sold out routinely.

Sights of Patan’s shopping district: Nepal’s only Hallmark store. Maoist teenagers handing out pamphlets to motorists and asking for “donations,” despite the fact that Maoist leaders have promised an end to such practices months ago. A pair of police officers standing outside a German bakery munching on donuts, making the stereotype a seemingly international truth. Two competing hospitals strategically placed across the street from one another. A dozen Internet cafes, each promising “High-speed Axcess”; neither of the two that I glance inside on this afternoon have a single working computer. An Italian restaurant. Three pizza places. A Thai restaurant. Several Tibetan restaurants. A Mongolian restaurant. Not a single genuine Nepali eatery in sight – the owners are desperate to please Western visitors, and Nepali food is reportedly “too hard to make.”

A shop advertised as an “Optometrist/Dentist” that actually sells office chairs and bootleg DVDs. A three-story restaurant that offers “Free mixed drinks and kid’s meals during happy hour!” A clump of homeless adolescents and one child of six or seven huddled together in front of a bank, huffing aerosol fumes out of plastic bags; one boy appears to be breathing in spray paint fumes, as is evidenced by a swirling cloud of purple inside the transparent plastic bag he cradles to his face. Buddhist temples. Hindu altars. A cow grazing on a raised grassy knoll at the edge of a major intersection (Nepali traffic law #729: “A motorist who strikes and kills a cow must serve 19 years imprisonment”); the billboards above it shill Oranjeboom and Johnnie Walker Red.

My hip is aching as I reach the bridge into Kathmandu, following the flow of people past the entrance to the king’s palace and United Nations headquarters. A man with no shirt on smokes a cigarette on the roof of the Nepal Ministry of Agriculture building, glaring at the peons below him. Street vendors sell biscuits, cigarettes, chocolates, and more condoms. A man in a well-pressed three-piece suit hops out of an expensive SUV on one side of the street, then runs to the other side of the street and hops onto a waiting bicycle, pedaling like mad back in the direction he just came from.

Billboards proffer such products as Opti-bake Microwaves (“Yumm-teen possibilities!” shouts a girl in a chef’s hat), Choco-Fun candy bars (“Giggle! Giggle! Pinch! Pinch!”) and 2PM Noodles, whose television commercials have made claims that feeding your children said noodles will enable them to fly and withstand bullets. Two familiar faces grace the majority of the posters that graffiti and adorn the walls of local businesses and homes: Prachandra, national hero/villain and concealed leader of the Maoist movie, and the ambiguous construction worker whose face adorns the advertisements for Sukhar Cigarettes, the unofficially government-endorsed brand of choice. The construction worker is hard at work repairing a telephone cable that appears to be strung across the peak of Mount Everest, yet he wears no jacket. I am not the first Westerner to read Into Thin Air and be puzzled by such a depiction.

I pass Ratna Park, the open-air government celebration facility, pausing to watch adult men fly kites and children read newspapers, before hanging the turn that leads me into the immigration office. I am in luck – not only does the official in the visa office recognize me (he greets me with grin and, “Mr. Greenwald! We thought the rebels may have gotten you! Ha Haahhhhh!”), but he does not request a bribe in return for my passport. He hands it over without any fuss, reminding me that he’ll see me again in three weeks when my visa expires again. I am too ecstatic over this proof of my existence having not been thrown in the furnace to respond sarcastically, for once.

I stop over in the Kathmandu Mall, which is advertised as “Nepal’s Only Indoor Shopping Mall” despite the fact that three other malls now exist, wading through four identical floors of American brand clothing being sold as Nepali brand clothing (red and brown Yankee cap anyone?) before reaching the international food court on the roof. My interaction with the waiter follows as such:

“Can I have the Thai Barbecue Chicken with Bamboo?” “No Thai food today, sorry sir.”

“Can I have the Pork Egg Roll and Fried Rice?” “No Chinese food today, sorry sir.”

“Dhal Bhat Takhari?” “No Nepali food.”

“Pizza?” “Oven is broken sir. You like chicken burger? We make with fries…”

After lunch, I head next door to the main branch of the Kathmandu parcel service to pick a birthday package sent by Jason’s little sister, Krystal. If you want to understand the intricate workings of a foreign post office, a highly suggest renting the movie Labyrinth; the building is an ever-shifting maze of walls and piss-poor lighting, staffed by disgruntled desk clerks and an army of warehouse gnomes who are on indefinite break. I’ve been coached on the process of retrieving my box by Jason, who has become a parcel office regular, but it’s still confusing: wander into one dimly lit room, hand over a photo-copy of an ID (two photo-copies if you’re that confused), fill out one form, head into another dimly lit room and pay money for another form, fill in two blanks, return to the first room, wit for your box to be rescued from the warehouse and sifted through for bombs and beef, go back to the other room, fill out the rest of the second form, pay money to one customs official, pay money to another, return to the original dimly lit room which has now grown smaller and dimmer, finish filling out the original form, pay more money, and run shrieking for the light. Have a nosebleed yet? Fear not, that’s the easy version of picking up a package; it gets more difficult if the office manager calls for a pause in activity for the employees to snack on yellow sponge cake and tea, government-provided of course. It is no coincidence that the only fat people I have seen in Nepal work in the post office.

My box contains mini-bottles of cranberry juice, birthday streamers, activity books for children, and some candy. Naturally, as I examine everything in the daylight in front of the building, I attract a crowd of a dozen nosy Nepalis, all eager to see what the videshi has had shipped in from a mysterious foreign country. There is a young boy, a leper, with stumps for both legs and both arms drawing pictures for willing pedestrians by holding a colored pencil in his teeth, and he plaintively asks me for money by repeating the chant of “Paisa, paisa, paisa...” I offer him a cranberry juice and he frowns. Realizing my insensitivity (“The kid has no freaking hands, how the eff is he supposed to drink it? Nice one Jordan…”), I unscrew the lid and hand the bottle to his mother, who is sitting next to him; the boy takes a sip and grimaces again, beginning to repeat “Paisa, paisa…” I walk away, bewildered, humiliated, and deflated. My box weighs 5,000 lbs.

I make it a solid kilometer before the weight of the box begins to strain my back to the extent that it is no longer comfortable to pretend that I am comfortable. Frantic searching for a taxi produces nothing – the solitary cab that I see is forced over to the side of the road by (you guessed it) brick-wielding strikers, who drag the driver out of the vehicle and beat him on the side of the street. No crowd gathers, as a sweaty American carrying a cardboard box is obviously more fascinating than a street fight.

I give up and haggle with a rickshaw driver, convincing him to cart me two miles for 200 rupees. When the driver has to hop off of his bicycle and push the contraption uphill for ten minutes, it weighs on my conscience. I offer to help him, but he snaps at me and slaps at my thigh; I don’t argue with him. Two boys on a bicycle ride along next to us, shouting “Hello!” at me over and over again, and when I finally respond, they call me mula sakh, a popular Nepali insult that roughly translated means “radish neck,” and ride away laughing. I find comfort in the story of Elijah and the bear that ate all those kids. When the rickshaw finally drops me off at the choke, I cave in and give the driver an extra hundred rupees and a cranberry juice; I am a horrible bargainer.

The walk back through Jawalkhel is too tiring to be comprehended or paid attention to. I play games in my head, trying to make up sudoku puzzles with no solution or remember the lyrics to Whiskeytown songs. The same old women and ancient man are repeating the same prayers as they aimlessly follow the cycle of spinning prayer wheels around the stupa in the Tibetan neighborhood. The little girls with the jump rope have disappeared, replaced by a massacred dog missing an ear and bleeding from open wounds in its cheek and side. Impromptu games of cricket and soccer rule the streets, cars seemingly having been permanently exiled from the city. Adult men holding hands dance to a Hindi dance version of that Celine Dion song from Titanic song in front of a butcher shop. The sun is setting, the games continue.

I pass Jason on the road home just before the bridge over that godforsaken water, and spend the rest of my journey home trying to figure out if he told me he was heading to a store to buy spaghetti or a spaghetti strap top. A crowd of children follows me all the way through Nakkhu, singing and kicking a soccerball, asking me if I know Avril Lavigne. Two boys sit in the dirt in front of the gate to my home away from home away from home, strumming a guitar and singing “How Great Is Our God” in Nepali. They smile and take my box from me, carrying it up the stairs to our apartment and giving me an awkward hug before running back down the stairwell, laughing all the way.

My Phillipine friend greets me with the admission that he thought I was dead, and I’m unsure whether he’s telling a joke or making heartfelt expression of joy upon this, my triumphal return. I doze in the den for a half hour before Jason arrives back with spaghetti (I knew he said spaghetti!), and we pop in a bootleg DVD of Stand By Me before, surprise! The power goes out! Bed time once again comes early in Shangri La, and I dream of a warm shower and driving a garbage truck for a living in a foreign country.

Still awake?

Okay, so I did promise big news, and since I try to stay true to my word, here you are:

Rina is a mommy!!!! It’s a boy!!!! Rina’s been pregnant since Jason and I arrived in Nepal, and she nonchalantly announced Tuesday morning that her water had broken and she was going to go to the hospital to “maybe” have her son. Santosh, her husband, called later on that night to announce that she gave birth to her son, who has the tentative name of Cillian (tentative until Rina comes to her senses and names the kiddo Jordan), just after 7:00. You would’ve thought that every child in the orphanage had given birth by the celebration – girls jumping up and down and hugging one another, boys pumping their fists and singing Nepali folk songs. Just goes to show you: Nepal is equal parts destitution and hope. Christ is alive here, and the pain is a credit to his glory. So take joy, the kids are alright.

Bear out.