Into India

I'm in India this week for the North East Indian Linguistics Society annual conference. Having only just settled into Kathmandu life I've suddenly found myself sight-seeing in Delhi for a few days and today I'm heading to Assam where the conference is being held.

Delhi has presented no great culture shock. If anything I'm impressed that the roads are so nice, the cars so new and the weather less bitterly cold. I have found getting around rather difficult, and I keenly feel how much easier life in Nepal is because I can speak Nepali. These few days have actually been a rather pleasant reminder of just how easy I find living in Nepal compared to when I first got there. 

Stuff that (linguistic field workers) like

I've been reading 'stuff expat aid workers like' since it started up six months ago. I was put into it by a friend doing aid work in Nepal - and while I occasionally find it hard to relate there are some posts that really hit home for me. For these you could do a find-and-replace with 'expat aid worker' and 'field linguist' and it would basically be a post on this blog. For these occasional gems SEAWL is the only 'stuff X like' blog that I always read.

The most recent post about 'having a guy for that' is so on the money with how I run my life in Nepal. I have my tailor, my shoe guy, my fabric guy, my Nepali sweets guy, my jeweller, my travel agent, my bookshop guy, my paan guy and all number of other specific people for specific jobs. Like the blog above mentions, I really like introducing friends and colleagues to 'my guys' and, of course, if you're going to Nepal I'll happily put you in touch with them.

Although the SEAWL post gives the impression that this set up is to make one feel more impressive when showing off in front of fellow foreigners, there are also other more practical reasons as to how these relationships develop. It's partly out of laziness - places like Kathmandu are big and if you want something but don't know where to start looking it can be a slow slow process. Once you found someone who'll get you what you need why go back to looking? Also, being such an old-ball giant white Nepali speaker means that going back to the same people every time circumvents the 'yes I do speak you language/no I'm not rich/I don't have kids/etc.' conversation. And finally, in a place where if always takes a little while to feel like you've got social connections, it's nice to have familiar faces to say hello to on your way though somewhere.

Snail Mail

The Nepali postal system has set a new benchmark in tardiness and inefficiency. A postcard that I sent to the Handsome Penpal arrived on Friday. Which is quite impressive considering that I sent it in early October last year... good thing it didn't say anything too important!

RIP Sai Baba

Anyone who has spent time in Nepal will recognise the image of the afro'ed orange-clad Sai Baba. An Indian Hindu mystic, his picture can be found in shops, homes and micro-buses alike.



Sai Baba died last night - you can read an obituary in the Kantipur Times here, or a slightly different take over at my friend Brian's site here.

Cyber

This is a photo I took while in Nepal, of an alleyway I'd travel down every time I visited the tourist trap that is Thamel - where there's Western food, English books and faster internet to be had in abundance.

I'd never have thought to have taken a photo, but every time I walked this way with the Handsome Pen Pal he'd quietly snigger like a naughty school boy. Perhaps you've already had a snigger too.

See, what I didn't know, and what the people of Nepal clearly don't know, is that in online communities 'cyber' is short for 'cyber sex' - and so every time the HPP saw this sign and the many like it he found it to be hilarious and inappropriate.

Like Nepalis, I think it's perfectly acceptable to use 'cyber' as interchangeable 'internet' - it just goes to show that the same word doesn't always have to same meaning for everyone. After the HPP pointed it out I'd have a little snigger too, and thought I would share the joke with you to celebrate the end of the week.

Language and Literacy

Although I'm generally not one to use this blog as a vehicle for promotion this is one occasion where there's something worth sharing with you.

A lot of the work I do for my research is language documentation - I listen to the language, I work with people and I write it down and try and explain how it works. But there's a whole other branch of working with people and language and that involves teaching them to be literate in their own language.

In the Western world so many of us take our literacy for granted, but in places like Nepal education for the masses is a rather recent idea and people are taught in Nepali, which is generally their second, or even third language.

The folk at the Language Documentation Centre (LDC) in Nepal are one of the few NGOs in the country trying to help people gain literacy in their own language. This has many flow-on benefits. Learning to read and write in your own language makes those skills easier to transfer to a second language (eg Nepali), it empowers people who thought their language was of little use/interest as it wasn't written down and it allows people to do those things we take for granted, like writing an inventory of stock in your shop or write letters.

This month, the LDC are trying to raise money to help female literacy in Nepal. Four thousand US dollars is enough money to help almost 500 women gain literacy. You can read more about their project and donate here. These guys are a really small NGO - they have about 3 full time staff and I can promise that none of the money you donate gets skimmed off to pay for glossy advertising or luxury cars.

Having seen firsthand the reality of life as an uneducated woman in Nepal I could give you endless reasons to give money. I know I sound like a cheesy celebrity ambassador but this is one way you can make a real difference.

Goodbye KTM... for now...

It's always easy at the end of a long trip like this to tell yourself that five months wasn't that long after all, and everything worked out pretty darn well. It has been a good trip in many ways; I've made lots of new friends - both foreigners and fellow visitors, I've improved my Nepali to the point where getting by every day isn't exhausting, and I'm coming home with much more thought out and better organised data.

So the trip has been good in many ways, and here at Lozguistics I like to keep things on the more lighthearted end of my time here, but there have been less-than-fun times as well. I've gained an impressive amount of weight thanks to a lack of running and an excess of rice and sugar tea, I'm pretty sure the aforementioned tea has left me with at least a couple of dental cavities, I spent at least 2 months with lice and at times I felt more homesick than I even have before.

But you take the bad with the good and there's been enough good to balance things. And it's definitely time to go home, digest my data, return to normal eating habits and be able to drink tap water. It's much easier to say goodbye to a place when you know you're coming back. My only regret from the last 5 months is that I didn't go see Bryan Adams play the first rock gig by a foreigner in Nepal last night.

Countdown

As the countdown units for tomorrow's departure move from days to hours, Nepal also has a countdown under way; as of today it's 99 days until the deadline for a new constitution.

I don't want to go too much into the political situation here. This is, after all, supposedly a blog about Linguistics in Nepal, not Politics. I don't really follow politics here all that closely - it's hard to while cut off in the village and also it tends to rarely have any news worth celebration. Also, I like this blog to remain not so cynical and it's hard to do that when talking about the political situation here, where basically the only stable feature is the complete instability.

So it's no surprise that all major players in the constitution writing process are saying the deadline will not be met.

I've decided it's now a race between the Nepali constitution and my PhD thesis. I have between 12-18 months of funding left and a personal desire to wrap most things up by September 2012 (I feel like one day I'll regret committing this statement to a public forum). I'm willing to take bets, I think it's going to be close.

Rain

Today and yesterday has been gray skies and constant rain - it all feels much more like a winter at home than the KTM dry season. It's all very confusing, and makes navigating the streets even more difficult. It also makes doing work more difficult, with the constant rain it makes doing audio transcriptions quite difficult!

There's also been some very impressive thunder and lightening. One of the small towers at Swayambhunath got struck by lightening Monday night - you can check out the damage here.

Funerals

I've finally got around to adding a couple of photos to the post I wrote about the village funeral I went to a few weeks ago. I was reminded because yesterday I went to not one, but two Buddhist funerals.

These were slightly different to the last one, as both of them were cremations. The previous ceremony I attended was about helping the spirit move on to the next phase of its existence, while both of these were about fare welling the more physical elements. In the more northern parts of Nepal and in Tibet sky burial is a common way to return the body to the world - leaving the body exposed to birds of prey and other animals. However it's not so practical in Kathmandu or the hills where I work and cremation is preferred.

Like the village funeral both of these events involved a lot of butter candles, a lot of feeding people and whole lot of incense. What was interesting at both of these events is that there seemed to be a lot more gender segregation - with women doing the majority of the cooking, praying and crying.

It is perhaps something of a shame that I didn't get to stay to see either cremation take place - but after visiting Pashupatinath I think I've inhaled enough ashes of dead people for one trip to Nepal.

Another wedding

During my last stay in the country I got to attend another wedding. This one was smaller than the last, and because I kind of had a hang of the format and basic Tam conversation I found it all a lot easier than the last one.

This wedding was interesting because the couple already had a 2 year old daughter. While having children before marriage is becoming increasingly more common back home it's not something I've come across here a lot. Or at all. Courtship is usually a bit of a whirlwind here (or taken care of by one's parents) so there usually isn't time for a pre-wedding bub.

People I talked to in the village said this kind of arrangement is becoming more common, and there certainly seemed less scandal about it than I would expect in Kathmandu.

Tan

Having spent the last 5 months in Nepal pretending to be married I now have such an impressive wedding ring tan that when I return to Australia and stop wearing the ring it's going to be tough to convince people I'm not pretending not to be married.

Losar

I was really excited that this year my trip coincided with Losar - the Tibetan New Year. I arranged everything so that I'd be in the village for the festivities and was looking forward to sharing lots of anecdotes and photos with you.

However, Losar turned out to be a bit of a fizzer. The uncles who usually organise the party were working overseas this year, and no one stood up to fill their place. Most of the people who wanted to dance and party went to a village a few hours away and so the rest of us had a very quiet night of it.

Although Losar may have been a fizzer I learned one important lesson - it doesn't matter what type of New Years you celebrate, if you just rock up on the night and hope for an entertaining evening it's usually a flop.

Load Shedding

"Load Shedding" is something I've alluded to a few times in posts here, but I've never explained what it is properly.

Basically, there's more demand for power in Kathmandu than there is power. This is partly because most Nepali electricity is generated by hydro-power, and now that it's dry season there isn't so much water around. According to most Nepalis it's also because Nepal sells its electricity to India so it can make money instead of delivering it here.

To deal with this shortfall, whatever may be causing it, the city is divided into seven blocks and they alternate who has access to power. throughout parts of the year you may find yourself without power for a a couple of hours a day - never more than about 8 hours through out the week. At the moment, however, in the very depths of the dry season we are without electricity for approximately 14 hours a day. You can check out this week's schedule here, if you're curious I live in group 6.

Given that I do a large amount of work on computers, this is obviously an inconvenience for me, but it constantly amazes me that the city continues to function as it does at all. On most nights one can hear the steady hum of generators (a must of any size business that wants to survive here), and meals by candle light aren't romantic, just pragmatic.

It's things like constantly streaming electricity that I take for granted at home, but when you're without it for more than half of every day it suddenly becomes rather a luxury!

A dozen days

I'm back in Kathmandu, quantifiably older (no longer in my early 20s!) for the final dozen days of my field trip. These I plan to spend tidying up data, sleeping in read beds, catching up with people, eating salads and having a few final frantic data sessions.

The final jungle adventure continued to be a shambles. My main consultant didn't surface until my final few days, there was a week without power that made working hard, and there was a wedding and Losar in there too - not to mention that I had a supernasty bout of gastro that put me out of action for a few days. With all that ot's impressive I got any work done at all.

I'll be sharing some of those adventures over the next few days, for now I need some more salad and an early night.

Happy New Year!

After a lovely few weeks holiday I've sent my own personal Porter back home - with a chuck of my ever-growing book collection. Having time off over the Christmas and New Year period was lovely, and certainly a different experience to this time of year back home. I'll share a few of our adventures over the next week or so before I head back to the village and leave email behind me for a few weeks.

One of the social highlights of the holiday was New Years Eve, when we met up with some friends, and a few of their drunk friends and ended up at a jazz bar drinking cocktails until the small hours. Of course, the Western New Year isn't that exciting in Nepal - it's one of at least a dozen that crops up.

There's the Nepali New Year which is in mid-April - it's based on the Bikram Sambat calendar also used in India. We're currently in the year 2067, which actually makes 2011 seem a little behind the times.

Then there's the Newari New Year - Newars being indigenous to the Kathmandu Valley, and their calendar is the Nepal Sambat. For them, New Year falls in around Tihar, so some time in November and we're only in the year 1332 right now. There's a push among certain groups to get this recognised as the official calendar of Nepal.

Next is Tibetan New Year, known as Losar, and celebrated by various ethnic groups in Nepal that are Buddhists of the Tibetan schools. But, to make things complicated, there are no fewer than three different dates for Losar. The first is Sonam Losar, which follows the lunar new year. The thing I like most about Losar is that it is celebrated for two weeks - which sounds like a proper party to me! This is the Losar date that Tam speakers celebrate - and for 2011 the first day conveniently falls on my birthday. The second Losar, Gyalpo Losar, is celebrated on the 5th of March in 2011. It's celebrated by Buddhists from Tibet and several Buddhist ethnic groups in Nepal. Finally, the Gurung ethnic group celebrate Tamu Losar as a fixed date every year, as opposed to basing it on the lunar calendar. These guys actually kicked of the Losar season, with Tamu Losar falling on the 15th of Poush, on the Nepali Calendar - which this year was the 30the of December - meaning they were recovering from their hangovers just when Westerners were embarking on theirs.

The Tharu ethnic group in the Terai - the flat lands in the south of Nepal that are heavily farmed - also celebrate New Years on a different date, although I should find out more about them. And there is a small but not insignificant Muslim population in Nepal which means that they recently celebrated the Islamic New Year on the 26th of November.

Iron stomach

On this field trip I am cursed with the twin good fortunes of being well-fed by the friends I live with when I'm in the village, and also having a very robust digestive system.

Last trip I was also relatively well fed - but spent more time living alone in KTM where I had more autonomy as to what I would eat, and how much. Also, for most of last trip, I was - to a greater or lesser extent depending on the week - quite sick. It's not something I really mentioned on the blog partly to prevent unnecessary worry and partly because it was so persistent it wasn't worth mentioning. So even with an unhealthy diet and a lack of exercise routine last year I still managed to come home not looking too different to when I departed (I did lose a heap of weight in the middle and ate a lot of cake to make up for that).

My iron digestive track has lead to the development of a stomach a little less solid and a little softer.

I have never eaten so much in my life as I do in the village here - and growing up with a Polish grandmother I can tell you that is not a flippant statement. How they eat so much rice is beyond me. The strangest thing is that after a week we had to sit down and have a serious conversation because my friend has been concerned that I'm not eating much. I pointed out that Nepalis eat a lot more rice than Australians - I didn't point out that since they won't let me do any work I'm not as hungry as she is after 8 hours in the fields.

Of course, having a more robust digestive system has made me much more cavalier about where I eat and what I eat. I still don't ever think I'll be able to eat the fresh coconut sold on the streets of Kathmandu, no matter how much my mouth waters every time I walk past - but I have eaten all manner of questionable things on this trip and remained unscathed.

I'll just have to hit the salads and bike riding when I get home.

A white christmas... in the distance

This year marks the second time in my life I'll celebrate Christmas in the Northern Hemisphere - and once again I'm not doing a very good job of a traditional Christmas.

Last time was in 1998 when my family celebrated with some friends in California. That involved poolside margaritas in the sun (well, margaritas weren't for me, given that I was about 13 at the time) making it much more like your average Australian Yuletide celebration.

This time Kathmandu is sunny, if a little chilly in the mornings. The good thing is that as long as it's a clear day (smog permitting) and we go somewhere with a good view we should be able to see snow covered mountains in the distance.

This year is the first time I'm spending Christmas anywhere other than a Christian-heavy Western country. To date, the festivities consist of one scraggy Christmas tree in the trekker's supermarket, and Sufjan Steven's Christmas EPs on repeat. This doesn't upset me too greatly - I find Christmas in Australia faintly nauseating, possibly a hangover of too many years working in retail. Also, this year I'm more excited about the countdown to the arrival of the Handsome Pen pal rather than Santa Claus. Still, I love spending time with my family at Christmas, I think in the next week or so it'll dawn on me that I'm missing that, and my grandmother's Christmas pudding.

Farewell sleepy little town

Tomorrow I'm heading back to Kathmandu to count down the days until Christmas, and eagerly await the arrival of the Handsome Pen pal/faux-Husband.

Living in a small town has been a very different experience from big-city KTM and also very different from living in a small village. One thing you notice very quickly is it's small enough for everyone to recognise you, but unlike a small village they won't come and talk to you, only look at you.

I've made myself some friends here - the cook place where I go for lunch most days, a woman from a beauty shop who I purchased some shampoo from the first day has become someone I chat with every day.

Also, having nothing to do here besides leave the house for lunch and a walk around town (which takes approximately 25-30 minutes to do a lap) it's also proven to be a rather productive place to work. Still, I'm very eager to be getting back to KTM. High on the list of things to do are eat salad, have a shower with warm water and get a massage. I'm not sure what order to do those things, but probably not at the same time.

Two weeks, 75 emails...

Not to mention the 352 unread items in my RSS reader, and the fact that the internet in the town I'm in is like something from the mid-ninties...

I'm currently in a larg-ish town near the villagee for a couple of weeks to work with some other speakers, and enjoy things like plumbing, personal space and food that isn't daal and rice.

Although I've just settled in here, I'm back to the villages in a couple of days for a wedding. It's a tough life, but someone's got to enjoy all that singing, eating and dancing.