Waiting out the Rain, Hanuman Dhoka Palace, Kathmandu

We had just a massive rainstorm Wednesday, but short, dropping something like 2 centimeters of rain in 25 minutes in the heart of the old center city. It was more like watching a waterfall than a rainstorm--and there was, as you might expect, a lot of watching and not a lot of walking or driving.

Celebrating the Dalai Lama's Birthday, Boudha

Around the Stupa on the Dalai Lama's 73rd Birthday, Boudha

Celebrating the 5th of July

Across the street from the former Royal Palace, gated and fenced and patrolled; behind tall pink walls and furnished with an embassy's security protocol of metal detectors and blast-proof doors, of armed guards in fatigues from the Nepali army and inset signs forbidding photos, lies Phora Durbar, the American club in Kathmandu and site of the city's 4^th of July party. The 4^th of July party which, this year, happens to be on the 5^th of July.

After passing through security—a metal detector, an x-ray machine, the removal of coins and keys and phones and cameras, the aforementioned door, opened remotely—you enter Phora Durbar to see two things: in the foreground a parking lot, paved with dark, smooth asphalt, large enough that it contains a separate section signed “Parking for VIPs” of 8 or 10 spaces; and behind it a combination baseball and soccer field of groomed bluegrass, the infield dirt a rich red-brown and sprinkled here and there with sprouting crabgrass, advertising signs for Mike's Breakfast and the Rum-Doodle and others in sharp blue and crisp white along a low fence behind the third-base line, in all the perfect recreation of normalcy, of genericness, of any combination baseball-soccer field anywhere in the suburban US.

You can't walk straight across the parking lot to the field, though, not without hopping a four-foot fence, and the paths direct you to the right, winding past the Commissary and Administrative Building to a nicely shaded divergence. Here, hard right to the basketball courts, with a lone teenager dribbling a ball slowly; soft right to the pool, teeming with kids and parents, skins showing rosy undertones; straight ahead to the Phora Durbar wireless cafe, empty and perhaps closed, but dark and uninviting in any case; left to the green field, busy. The field, this July 5^th, has two big tents set up in an L, and—not really visible from either one—a small stage at one end with a microphone stand and a plastic container of jelly beans. Past the other end of the L lies the Kidzone: what appears to be a bouncy castle, most notably. And then, around the infield, elephant rides in a lazy diamond, elephant and mahout dressed in celebratory regalia, crimson and gold.

The 5^th of July party is free, but the Kidzone costs 200 rupees, the bottles of Corona and Amstel Gold 120, the Heath Bars 60. The burgers alone are 200 rupees, but the vegetable fajitas—filled with such an unappetizing mash that my friend Elizabeth takes two bites and then eats only the tortilla, leaving the entirety of the filling—cost only 70.

It's overcast today, the cloud cover a domed tortoise shell of near-black broken only by joints of glowing, luminescent gray. If you are as shallow as I am, the first thing you might notice is that Phora Durbar is filled with ugly Americans: not bossy and loud Americans, but instead self-important men with crossed arms, with guts tucked into golf shirts, golf shirts tucked into khaki cargo shorts; blond women with vulture postures in formless t-shirts and acid-washed jeans; in the crowd around the watermelon-eating contest, you hear an unintelligible clucking and see a chicken-bob of heads with baseball caps that advertise New York, St. Louis, Milwaukee, caps that advertise hometowns.

Later, when I am discussing the attributes of the population that day with my friend Jeremy, he concurs. There certainly weren't a lot of attractive people there, he says, and I was looking.

But the scene is filled with Nepalis as well, and the odd European able to wrangle guest privileges for the day. And judging by name the raffle winners—of a blender, of a mountain flight, of a pair of nights at a hotel in Pokhara—seem to be all Nepali. But the American emcee filled the banter with the detrital references of American pop culture: Raj Kumar, come on down, you've won dinner for two at the Rum-Doodle! Sushma Lama, you may already be a winner!

The atmosphere is entirely odd.

The hats, near as I can tell, are one of the only ways that the party encourages mingling: You're from Detroit? I'm from the U.P.! For the most part everyone stands around talking to people they already know: a group of study-abroad students sits together on the grass, a trio of Lincoln school teachers near the food, me and my friends slowing drinking beer and looking out over the sports field as the mahout takes the elephant home around 3 pm.

A friend suggests, obliquely, that this entire stage—in fact, this entire scene—is the recreation of both the most boring parts of the 4^th of July and of the Ugly American, in its original, novelistic sense, in which the most famous description, by a fictional Burmese novelist, is this:

A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They're loud and ostentatious.

There can be no doubt that Phora Durbar is both pretentious and ostentatious. Think of the symbolism of having the American club—a club!—right next to the palace, Jeremy says. And all the resources used to keep the baseball field green during the drought season: fall, winter, and spring. Or the parking lot: I cannot think of another place that has one like this, orderly and clean and thoroughly Angeleno, in the entirety of the city. Not a place that would let me in, even for just a few hours, anyway.

I say a few hours because the festivities end at 4, and normal Americans like me are not allowed to become members of Phora Durbar: it is for permanent residents of Nepal only, and they check your visa status before allowing you to join. But since the visa situation in Nepal is an utter disaster—as I've written before, everyone I know has visa issues—this means that Phora Durbar is limited to a certain type, or to certain types: Embassy types, employees of the enormous international NGOs, anyone whose employer can afford the expense of bribes and time that it takes to negotiate a proper residency visa. It feels something like a country club, adapted for its milieu, and the 5^th of July an awkward wedding.

I'm not sure it's wrong, though, for Americans abroad to remake a little corner of whatever place into something comfortable and familiar. I certainly need relief from the cracking, in-your-ear honks of traffic as I bike or walk on just about any road; and from the small, ever-present worries about cyclospora among the bits of shredded cabbage that garnish you plate of momos or of getting water from the tap in your mouth when flossing, worries that flag and flare like the itch of a mosquito bite; and from the constant negotiation of taxi fares, of haggling over bananas and tomatoes and green beans and saag, of whether the lanky man who runs the cafe where I watch Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Charlie Wilson's War can convince Nepal Telecom the internet really isn't working and the problem is with them.

But if it's acceptable both to want ease and to have it, is it also acceptable to want it in privacy or, less generously, in exclusivity? For Phora Durbar is absolutely exclusive; indeed, the US Embassy in Kathmandu refers to it, in a security email sent May 27^th, as a “compound.” Which it of course is. Paternalistic too, in its “No Photos” signs, for it's not an artful compound, and even if I had remembered my camera today I would have found little to photograph. The signs, in context, seem little more than don't-want-what-you-can't-have statement—and who says you can't have? Why, we do, of course.

The cliché about the boy and his country—or whatever variant you might prefer—is very much a cliché because of some relevant truth: I can leave California, can leave San Francisco, but can't stop the neural connections that notice how Nepal would be a little more friendly if it were a little more like home. This is not wrong, but normal. Instead, what I find disturbing is a mind that would share these thoughts only with people who share them already; a mind that would close the American club to most everyone (however American this instinct often is) and so further entrench the very separations and divisions that most all of them work, in their everyday lives, to eliminate. To work in Development is to try to lessen or reduce the barriers that prevent the gritty whirlwind of poverty from dissipating, the barriers to food and sanitation and a global body of knowledge that the walls of Phora Durbar are a tangible metaphor for.

It is not so wrong, I think, to build a baseball field in Nepal and take a few hours at dusk to watch your young sons hit dusty groundball singles up the middle, but there is something demeaning and demanding and above all disappointing about forbidding normal Nepalis to see it, to see how life might otherwise be. The opening of an actual possibility, an actual job, for a Nepali takes much, but the opening of an imagination takes little, and is often almost as good.

At 4 on the dot, a man with a bullhorn gets up and says that Phora Durbar is now closed, which is not exactly true. In point of fact, it is closed for non-members, people like me and my friends. We continue sitting and drinking our beers, talking quietly, wondering whether the early closure—and lack of protest –is quintessentially American or quintessentially Nepali, or both. At 4:15 we are all herded away, past the tents gently wafting in the breeze.

On the way out, driven by Phora's security each step, as if they are shepherds and we goats, my friends and I smudge the glass doors of the Commissary with our fingertips and noses: on blue wire shelves Kikkoman soy sauce and the red cardboard boxes of Cream of Wheat, Coca-Cola and Sprite 12-packs in colorful paperboard, restaurant-size cans of Rosarita refried beans, and, off to the side, a plastic toy section. Things we don't want or need, we say; what we want sometimes is easiness, is calm and efficiency among the blinding and chaotic gusts of Nepal, and nearly all these things we can get at the Bhat Bhateni supermarket anyway.

Changu Narayan Temple, Nepal

Gold Triptych, Changu Narayan, Nepal

A multiple essay/attempt week!

This week's features, since people tend to like bullet points and lists:

• Pictures of Changu Narayan, prettiest temple in the Kathmandu Valley that I'm actually allowed to, you know, look at without Shiva burning my eyes out or something.
• An essay about Changu Narayan, Western eyes and Nepali art
• and Celebrating the 5th of July in Kathmandu!

Posts may not arrive in this order, and depending on the internet situation on any particular day may not arrive at all. Also, Sunday was the Dalai Lama's 73rd birthday, so despite not feeling in tip-top shape I went to Boudha--the center of Kathmandu's Tibetan community--and took a few pictures. If any of them came out, they'll find a way to sneak on here, I promise.

Kids, Changu Narayan, Nepal

Vajrayogini Temple, near Sakhu, Nepal

The path to Vajrayogini Temple, near Sakhu, Nepal

Bandh!

The first thing to note, I think, is the word, which in Nepali is banda, no aspiration, a word that comes from Hindi, from India, with all the attendant difficulties of Indian politics. In Nepal we—if I can say we—write bandh and say banda, just as we expats jokingly might say phrend for friend or Where are you phrum? for Where are you from?

Bandhs are so much a part of Nepali life that the Lincoln School—the American international school, the most prestigious and expensive in the Kathmandu Valley—actually incorporates bandh days into each year's academic calendar, just as a school in Minnesota or Maine might plan for snow days. This year, in fact, contained an excess of bandh days (in relation to days of bandh), so that the end of the year was a hodgepodge of 3- and 4-day weeks. The students, of course, don't mind: unexpected days off are always a celebration.

There's no other way to do it, though. Bandhs gather like storm clouds, like the anvils of thunderclouds, sometimes far on the horizon with plenty of warning but more often charging the air while you are preoccupied with the mundane repetition of phone calls that do not go through or unscheduled electricity outages, soaking you as you walk in the gloaming along the cratered asphalt roads. You expect them, but never quite expect them in the moment they occur. And while there is even a website dedicated to bandhs—nepalbandh.com—it, like the Weather Service, can only be said to be accurate in retrospect.

Last week's bandh—a transport bandh on Wednesday and Friday, with many buses absent since the prior Saturday, and a full bandh on Thursday with enforced shop closures—was the confluence of calls for bandhs by 3 groups: petrol distributors (service stations and their wholesalers), who are unhappy about the continued shortages and the recent price hike; the transport unions, which are not organized labor but the owners of local and long-distance bus companies and local taxis, unhappy that the government restricted their announced fare increases from about 40% to 25%; and the Nepal Student Union, unhappy that the government-mandated student discount on transit was 43% instead of 50%. My pictures of brick throwing in Chabahil were student clashes ostensibly based on the Student Union's demands; they strike me as utterly unplanned and ill-considered however, more an excuse by kids to effect chaos than policy change.

I might also point out that in Nepal, the police throw the bricks back.

Even in Chabahil, however, the students' targets were localized; that is, they weren't vandalizing shops or torching cars; indeed, the street, littered with bricks half-broken and with red brick dust, semed incidental to everything, unlike Western protests that target an institution, a culture symbol, a corporate outlet, or all three. Outside of the government-called bandh for the Constituent Assembly elections in April, which were marked by a charge of apprehension and uncertainty in the streets near empty of everyone and everything save a police pickup truck bouncing through at speed, the three bandhs I've been through the center of have all seemed to carry an air of good humor and pleasantness, as if the burning tires in the road or ropes across the bridges were normal. Indeed, I've found myself more than once the object of a joke: “Closed!” someone will say sternly, and wait for me to look disconcerted. Then: “No, no, come, is ok,” and the crowd makes a small space, or a rope is lifted, or, once, a small child comes to take my hand. The pervasive cultural assumption seems to be of the best intentions of foreigners; even when we break the rules during a full bandh and hire a taxi, the car is stopped and we have to get out and walk.

There is something similar in spirit, I think, to the way that Nepalis, and the more permanent members of the expatriate community, tolerate bandhs they are not involved in, which is to say with cheeriness and equanimity. “In Nepal time is not money,” say my friend Olivier, a former translator for the Red Cross and drummer in the band Rai ko Ris, and though I find myself frustrated by the loss of a day's work, this is not so much a concern of the permanent residents. They have made their peace with bandhs in a way I have yet to. “Well,” Olivier smiles, “time is not yet money.”

Part of this, I think, has to do with the flexibility of time in the everyday life of Kathmandu. Though this particular concept seems to be slowly passing, everyone still speaks of “Nepali time,” meaning that if you are scheduled to meet at 7:30 you will actually meet around 8. But this, I think, does not get at the heart of the ease with which time is treated here—an ease that makes bandhs all the more tolerable.

On the eve of the Euro 2008 quarterfinal between Italy and Spain, I was invited to watch the game with an Italian jeweler named Alberto Luzzi and his Nepali assistants, a pair of Nepalis who speak Italian and wear designer sunglasses at night and at any time dress shirts unbuttoned in an open V down the chest, at Alberto's house in Patan. The game started at 12:30 am here, meaning that it would conclude about 2:30 if there was a winner in normal time, which there was not. We called the night, jovially, “banda sleepover,” since the transport unions had called for a bandh the next day, though no one knew what its extent would be—in other words, whether the day would see crowds closing streets and forcing cars off the road.

Just after 1 am, a little more than 30 minutes into the scoreless game watched through a gauzy fuzz of static on ESPN, the power went out. As befit Italian-speakers, a Greek chorus of grumbled Che cazzo!s immediately followed, with a few Italian-language rants on the perfection of a power outage during a soccer match. Then came Nepali: ke garne, people said, what can you do, lighting candles and staying near the television, in case the game game back on. Alberto texted friends in Italy, who promised to update us, in the candlelight, if anyone scored.

By halftime we speculated about the outage: the whole city was out, and from Alberto's terrace you could see only lights in Buddhanilkantha on the Valley's north rim and past Bhaktapur to the east. A million other people were left in darkness, but to be fair, the vast majority had been in darkness—sleeping—when the power failed. “Must be the students,” one of Alberto's assistants said, and this became our theory for the night. When the power company said it didn't know why the power was out, and that the system looked on the computer to be working normally, the theory gained strength.

Throughout the game—throughout our banda sleepover—we sat in the dark waiting for the beeping of Alberto's phone. “Spain has hit the wood,” Alberto said, after a tense moment of wait for the rest of the room; and a sigh, and then: “Italy shot cleared off the line.” No one, oddly, left. We had the hope, I suppose, or the faith, that we would see the game again. “Zero a zero, finisce il secondo tempo,” Alberto said.

Three minutes into extra time, the power returned, to a great cheer. We watched intently as the teams played a sloppy, fatigued, open game. What I remember most is Roberto Donadoni's substitution of Alessandro Del Piero, who led the Italian Serie A in goals with his club Juventus—and who, fresh among two teams that had played a game and a half, we saw walk around the pitch when not on the ball.

At 23 minutes into extra time the power went off again, and we waited once more for updates from Alberto's friends in Italy. We got the message that the game had gone to penalties; and when the phone next chirped, to list the Italian misses and announce Spain's victory, the atmosphere was oddly fatalistic, the tension diffused. Ke garne.

“Italy did not deserve it,” Alberto said, “and I say so as a big, big fan. From the way they played...”

“Ke garne,” someone interrupted—and someone else followed with “Hasnu parchha,” which means: you can only smile.

About the bandhs, ke garne? You can only have a banda sleepover and try to watch a soccer game; for if you don't make it to work in the morning during a bandh, everyone understands.

A thoroughly Nepal Day

I am having, as one may guess from the title, a thoroughly Nepal day: The internet's been off, then the power (unscheduled) for much of northeast Kathmandu, where I live; my appointment today was canceled because the man I was meeting with has been in the hospital for the past 3 or 4 days, according to the woman with the shop next door; I've either got busy signals or no-answers for the phone calls I've been trying to make. Eh, it's all okay, but it means no real update to the blog (I'm at an internet cafe instead of posting from my computer). On the other hand, it hasn't rained for more than 20 or 25 minutes, so that's a plus.

Wrench Nepal has a blog again, and I am also it

For any of you wanting to follow my unprofessional life, I've finally got the keys to the Wrench Nepal blog, and I'll be posting updates there about the program and how it's going, and hopes for the program's future and such.

Swimming with the PA Boys, Lapsephedi, Nepal

Prisoners Assistance Nepal Housewarming, Sakhu

The PA Nepal house and school in Sakhu were officially opened last Friday, though I've been teaching up there for 3 weeks and the majority of PA's wards have been living there longer.

The top picture is of Indira Rana Magar, PA Nepal's director, and her daughter; the bottom picture of one of PA's in-prison teachers (and a former prisoner himself) and, I believe, his daughter.

On the Mend

I spent all of yesterday massively sick—one of those illnesses so intense that in your moment-to-moment subsistence you are convinced that it has a not-insignificant chance of killing you, and alone in your apartment you consider texting a friend to have her check in the next morning, just to be sure you've not died of dehydration in the night, though in retrospect this shames you a little, as melodramatic—and while I am on the mend enough today to eat and leave the house, my plans for writing about the bandh probably won't materialize today.

That said, one of the interesting disparities between Western life in the non-West and Western life in the West is that here the exact terms of illness are not things to be kept hidden, are not improper. Within two weeks of my arrival here (which seems forever ago but in fact was only ten weeks ago) I was having drinks with friends at a bikas bar called Buzz, in Patan, when Isabelle, who works for Icimod, asked if I had gotten sick yet. I demurred, in the onomatopoetic sense of the word, saying only that I had been sick a little since I had arrived, nothing serious. When pressed, I said a little bit of gastrointestinal trouble, nothing more.

“It's okay,” my friend Gemma said, “we all talk about it here.” And so we talked that evening about taking your own stool samples, about the joys of solid stool, and about the fatigue of giardiasis, which, as I recall, Isa has had three times.

Of the (by my count) four essential functions of continuing existence—eating and drinking; breathing; sleeping; and shitting—shitting is the only on we consider, in the West, improper to discuss (save for with our doctor, where we are legally entitled to privacy). To air the particular peculiarities of a bowel movement is, at the least, uncouth, often the foundation for frat-boy humor; of a lack of bowel movement is a septuagenarian or geriatric cliché, the complaint of a would-be George Burns. Indeed, in English we lack a socially appropriate everyday word: shitting is obscene; pooping is juvenile; stool is medical jargon, a word I didn't learn as a synonym until I was 12 or 13 years old and a veterinarian asked about my cat; feces is technical and more appropriate to non-human animals. It's not that we lack the vocabulary to speak about shitting, but that we lack the lack of taboo.

It's interesting, I think, that this particular social construction is so easily discarded. Gastrointestinal problems are rife among expats here—everyone has a store of the anti-diarrheal Ciprofloxacin, and it's offered as you would offer naproxin or ibuprofen to someone with cramps or a headache. Doing so, of course, normalizes gastroenteritis, makes it not something to be suffered in silence. The temporary, or location-specific, relaxation of taboo has a social function too, one of bringing expats together in stories of our mutual biological distress. We are here adapting our culture, or cultures, however you define the term, not to the social milieu we live in so much as the geographical and environmental space.

I have of course spared you the details of my own situation; but because this is yet another place where, as a expat, I exist in the space between cultures, between cultural norms.

Throwing Bricks, Siphal

Sunset at Dacchi, Nepal

The end of the Hindu Kingdom

Nepal's official--that is, nationalistic--identity has for decades been that of "the world's only Hindu kingdom." This has created a number of odd side effects: the deliberate undercount of Buddhists and animists in the national census, for instance, because to see them as part of Nepal would undercut the narrative, and would undercut the king's power.

Indeed, the idea of Nepal itself is a creation of this sort of nationalistic idea: Nepal is the historical name for the Kathmandu Valley, not for the reach of the Himalaya nor the rough area that now comprises the nation of Nepal. The songs about Nepal's beauty and glory that litter the radio and the music tv channels were likewise mostly created and promoted to unify Nepal culturally, from around the 1950s, though many Nepalis, especially from rural areas far from the Kathmandu Valley, will tell you that the songs are "very, very old." And the beneficiary of that sort of nationalism was the focus of it: the King, the incarnation of Visnu, for the idea was that people would give up their tribal allegiances for an allegiance to the king.

So the end of the monarchy here problematic for Hindu nationalists in India who have seen the end of one of their beacons of hope, the end of the only official Hindu state. Here I farm out that analysis to CounterCurrents, as Subhash Gatade can explain the geopolitical implications far better than I can:

Any close watcher of the Nepal situation would tell you that Jaswant Singh is not alone in having and expressing a negative opinion about the developments in the newest republic which has seen the end of 250 year old monarchy and the end of the 'model Hindu Rashtra' much espoused by the Sangh Parivar organisations. In one of his recent outbursts, Mr Ashok Singhal, the International President of Vishwa Hindu Parishad is reported to have compared Jihadists and Maoists who would together bring further calamity to the tiny country.... Perhaps one needs to ask oneself why does Mr Singh feels pertrubed over the end of a regime which concentrated all power in the hands of a small caucus centred around the King which denied basic human rights to a vast majority of Hindus and which condemned the followers of the other religions to a secondary status. Whether it has to do with emergence of NCP (Maoists) as the single largest party in the new republic which has humbled all the other parties or it has to do with the emergence of the most diverse and representative parliament in the world today. Independent observers have noted that the newly elected Nepalese parliament has more than one third of women and other one third representation is from the different ethnicities and oppressed castes.

The BJP is the right-wing Indian political party, and Jaswant Singh is the former prime minister of India. The rest of the article is here.

Lazimpat, Kathmandu

Everyone loves the awesome-lope, Sakhu

Before I left a friend was teasing me about the Trek you see here, which is an old, low-end model called the Antelope. It's a bike I put together out of spare parts from the Bike Kitchen in SF, intending to leave here; and as I told everyone before I left, it was going to be a sweet bike for Nepal.

Which it is, so much so that whenever it's sitting around all sorts of Nepalis want to give it a ride down the alley or around a building. Age seems not to matter--there's been a 48-year-old man missing one front tooth on the bike, and very young kids, as you see here--though gender does, as only one girl (from the PA house) has gone for a spin. I've got numerous comments on how light the bike is, which is surprising since it weighs in excess of 30 lbs, though perhaps shouldn't be in the context of Nepal cycling, where--and only a few people will understand the gravity of this--the wheels on Indian bikes are missing lock nuts.

As I told my friend, it's not a Trek Antelope--it's an Awesome-lope, because it's awesome for where it's going, i.e. where it is now. The Trek brand carries a lot of prestige here, as do all the big American cycle brands, which makes sense when you're here. It's not that the same bike with decals that say "Ranger" or "Hercules MTB" would be esteemed less; it's that you could never find the same bike made by Ranger or Hercules.

Not one of these kids is in my class.

And just for reference...

The PA Nepal House, Sakhu, Nepal

I am horrible with Nepali names.

Normally I am pretty good, and when I am teaching I am usually very good--it's just that you learn tricks for names, give each connection of name to face a mnemonic based on leters or spelling or odd connections of your memory: Lucia wrote about Albany, California; Greg has a chinstrap beard; Philip's favorite bus line is the 22, but he's only been on it once. But Nepali names are unfamiliar, and while I find the simple names after Hindu gods easy--Parbati, Ram, Gautam (named after the Gautama Buddha, who Hindus have adopted as an incarnation of Vishnu) and the like--but any name less familiar in my consciousness fails to stick, or tends to. In the repair class I'm teaching at the Prisoners Assistance house up in Sakhu, forever, I can remember only the name of Jogath, who is amazingly mechanically-minded, the star pupil.

This is only to say that the name of the girl who hijacked my camera on Saturday--first as the subject matter, then in fact the camera itself, asking if she could take a picture and then putting to film everyone in the house--has a name that escapes me. She's above, on the right. Not her history, though: she's just come back to the home about a week ago, a returnee. She had been "adopted"--that is, PA took her on as a ward--when she was only a few years old and her mother was in jail. Some years later--two or three or four years ago--her father took her back, but pulled her from school and had her cleaning house, doing laundry, and working in the fields all day. He also cut off all her hair, hence the head scarf--she's embarrassed, shamed, by her hair. It was only when she began to be beaten that PA could take her back, however--Nepal doesn't guarantee schooling for anyone, and girls are still seen as having a lot less worth than boys, especially in the rural parts of the country. Even as many caste hierarchies have been overturned in the past couple of decades, and though, somehow, the current constituent assembly has a mandate for female (and third-gender) members, in many if not most families a woman only gains status when she gives birth to a son.

While she certainly charmed me--I was happy to encourage her to take pictures, as long as she treated the camera respectfully, which she did--I later found out (from Indira, who the kids call Amma, the director extraordinaire of PA Nepal) that she's had a hard transition back. Those scratches on her face are from a fight with another girl, and she's been disruptive in school. All unsurprising, of course; but also a much more complex story than I knew or understood when I let her take the camera. A good reminder, perhaps, that in the environment at the PA home there's always a back story.

Some of her pictures:

Added June 22, 2008: Her name, it turns out, is Sushma.

Working the Fields, Sahku, Nepal

Near Thali, on the Road to Sakhu, Nepal