Cold, hippies and an inspirational family from Norway

While we have been hearing news of sweltering temperatures and lightning ignited fires In Australia, here we are putting on shawls, scarves and slippers at night and bracing for colder nights yet. Temperatures at night can descend below zero in this season; the day time is usually cool though still warm in the sun.
Maybe the cold deters some travellers. However, Kathmandu was surprised this week to wake up and find that it is currently rated the world’s “top hippie traveller destination.” The Kathmandu Post registered a certain alarm about this, considering it a rather unsought and dubious distinction. Some travel operators even thought it might be “a deliberate attempt to defame Nepal” by adding the hippies’ “famous destination” tag. Ever since Freak Street, near Kathmandu Durbar Square, became the haunt of countless youngish and usually hashish consuming travellers from the West during the seventies, the city has found it hard to shrug off the hippie label. A Virginian based website claims that hippies continue to be allured by hashish, reported to be available in “copious amounts,” plus “the relatively negligible cost of living, and the country’s perceived exoticism.”

Another of Nepal’s papers, the weekly “Nepali Times” published an excellent article about Odd and Tullis Hoftun, who arrived in Nepal from Norway to begin service with the United Mission to Nepal five decades ago, yesterday. Here’s what the same paper had said about the contribution of Odd and Tullis to Nepal’s hydropower sector in 2004 (21 May):
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Odd Hoftun came to Nepal in 1958 at the age of 30 to help build the Tansen Hospital and later set up the Butwal Technical Institute. As a hydropower engineer, Hoftun could have had many other jobs or a lucrative career in the power industry in his native Norway. Yet he chose to travel to a little-known landlocked kingdom in the Himalaya, which at that time, had just thrown its doors open to the outside world. Why?

"I guess I was different," admits Hoftun, "it was my calling." Today, the legacy of UMN and engineers like Hoftun is a generation of Nepali engineers and technicians capable of designing and implementing hydropower projects that are appropriate for Nepali conditions.

"Our philosophy was always to start small, get trained on the job, and try bigger and bigger things," says Hoftun. And that was thinking behind the UMN-initiated Butwal Power Company and its Andhikhola and Jhimruk projects in central Nepal which have now been passed on to the private sector.
This kind of foreign aid was much more cost-effective than the bilateral projects and mammoth multilateral schemes. It built local capacity, making it less likely for Nepalis to be dependent on foreign aid for outsized projects that we could not build and maintain sustainably ourselves. "Aid had to be on a scale that could be copied and replicated locally by locals," says Hoftun.

The Hoftuns had two sons, both born in Nepal who went to local schools and spoke fluent Nepali. One of them, Martin, was working on his PhD thesis on the 1990 Peoples' Movement when he was killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu in 1992. The family was devastated, and they decided to honour their son's affection for Nepal by setting up the Martin Chautari Trust.

"The idea was to have an independent forum that could hold multi-disciplinary discussions on issues of national importance so as to strengthen the public sphere and the country's young democracy," says Odd Hoftun.

Martin Hoftun's book on the 1990 movement, Spring Awakening, has become a classic work on the pro-democracy uprising .

Foreign perceptions

Reviewing what I've written lately, it seems rather lopsided, maybe a bit inane. It doesn't reflect a side of life here that is also familiar - the underbelly of lack of opportunity in this country. I've hesitated to write about these weightier realities, and issues of confidentiality and unsought exposure quickly emerge.

However, as a "bideshi" (= foreigner) living in Nepal, I'm mostly well - buffered against the chronic insecurities and precarious existence of most Nepalis. While I've changed their names, the sketches below are about real people I know.

There's Vishnu, who walks a long distance to his office every day to save a meagre bus fare. With six people dependent upon his income, he saves as much as he can, and eats the cheapest possible lunches. He knows his job is precarious in the NGO (non government organisation) where he works, but he has few options should he lose his current job.

Phul Maya, a tiny and ancient grandmother in her seventies, has cleaned and cooked for foreigners for thirty years. Going the extra mile, these employers had long paid the school fees for her grandchildren. Now that she can no longer draw upon the gifts of foreigners, her grandson has begun abusing her. He needs some money urgently to pay for fees for career training that he is about to commence. Her son, who is considered simple, is away from home most of the time trying to earn some income outside the city. Her daughter - in - law, who earns an income sweeping the grounds of a hospital, refuses to pay anything to help her son. The two women barely speak to each other, maintaining a long standing feud. Dysfunction reigns.

Kanti, recently widowed, has recently spent the required thirteen days of mourning fasting in her white widow's attire at the sacred Pashupatinath temple. She despairs that her son, frequently drunken and out late like his father had been, will come to a bad end. Cleaning houses and washing clothes for foreign aid workers by day, she runs a small street stall selling mobile phone accessories by night. Her closest relatives, who are good to her but live at a distance on the fringe of the city, want her to take a room nearer to them, but she insists that her two young daughters need to be able to stay at their current school. There's been too much change for them already, she reasons. Since their father's death, the daughters have had to stay with relatives while their mother fulfilled all the requirements of Hindu mourning and shift rooms from where their father died. They are understandably quiet and withdrawn.

Lal Kumari, thin as a stick, pokes her dishevelled grey head around glass shop doors along the road to Jawalakhel, extracting gleaming one and two rupee coins (about 3 cents) from staff who pay her to move on.

Such glimpses of people's situations emerge easily enough. Some days things are "tic byo" (ok again) and other days it's "costo neramro cho!" (how bad is that!).

I read in  Samrat Upadhyay's "Arresting god in Kathmandu" the other day, about "Nepal -crazy foreigners...people who lived in the country in a romantic haze, love-struck by the mountain beauty and the simple charms of the people, but grossly naive about their suffering." I'm more aware than that of people's real lives, but there remain no easy answers about how to respond.

[Samrat Upadhyay is a Nepali author based in the USA. This volume of his short stories was published by Rupa on the Indian subcontinent in 2001; this reference appears on p.45.]