Women of Nepal

Part I: Introduction

2009-03-29T14:12:00.000-07:00

My nose and forehead were cold against the window as I strained my eyes to look straight down under the wing. We were flying through glaring white Monsoon clouds that towered above us even at 37,000 feet. I wanted them to be mountains. I was looking out the window in child-like anticipation hoping a mountain would appear, just a glimpse of snow and rock that might be Dhaulgiri, Annapurna, or even Mt. Everest. Suddenly the plane nosedived and in a few minutes we were landing at Kathmandu.

I was miffed not to have a glimpse of one of the great Himalayan peaks you would see on a clear day flying in to Kathmandu airport. I wanted to see Annapurna the most because I’d dreamed about her since I was seven years old. Annapurna is the eighth highest mountain on Earth and a hundred miles west of Mt. Everest, the highest of them all. A lot of my day dreaming from age seven upwards featured Annapurna and an assortment of heroic ascents (by me). My favorite dream was repreating the heroic climb a French team made in 1950 (and the American women’s expedition in 1978) when they made the famous first ascent in which Maurice Herzog lost his toes to frostbite. The three heroes of that expedition, Louis Lachenal, Gaston Rebuffat, and the Nepali Sherpa Ang Tharkey were my childhood heroes. But I wasn’t in Nepal this time to climb. I was there to help out with a conference that would take place in Naryangharh, a small city in Chitwan Province, 100 miles southeast of Annapurna.

The crowd at the airport entryway where western passengers hesitated before venturing out into the crowds, the heat and the unknown

Sitting in the plane as it taxied towards the terminal I looked out at the rain wet asphalt glistening in the emerging sunlight. Vast puddles on the runway reflected the fleeing dark clouds of a shower that had just swept across the valley. It looked steamy outside. The other passengers began heading for the hatchway as soon as the plane stopped and eventually a long line of them threaded out from the plane towards customs. Watching them I was suddenly hit with an overwhelming homesickness more intense than I had ever experienced. I didn’t want to get off the plane. I desperately wanted the pilot and crew to run back on board, start the engines and take me right back home to my farm and children. I felt vastly empty.

I sat for a while hoping the ache would go away and then looked around the plane’s cabin and saw I was the only person left on board. I twisted out of my seat and followed where the others had gone down the stairs to the ground and across the tarmac to the terminal. I still had that bereft feeling, a loneliness, and I wasn’t exactly sure why I was there or if I wanted to be.

Between the plane and the terminal there were two lines of Nepali soldiers in bright blue uniforms standing crisply at attention facing each other so they created a corridor for the debarking passengers to walk down. The soldiers held M-16 rifles vertically in front of their torsos and looked sharply across at each other the way soldiers are trained to do. I studied their faces as I passed down the aisle between them and caught the eye of one. I smiled and he instantly melted, smiling back at me. He totally lost his composure and clumsily dropped his M-16 which fell with a clatter to the asphalt. I picked it up and handed it back to him. All the other soldiers were smiling and nodding at me. “Hhhmmm,” I thought, “this can’t be such a bad place.”

This was my first glimpse of Kathmandu the far-away city with the exotic name

Twenty minutes later, past customs with my visa in hand, I walked towards the exit. I was going into Kathmandu with a Nepali man by the name of Prakash, who flew on the same plane with me from Germany. Prakash was one of the conference organizers and we were going to meet with several other men who were taking part in the conference. At the glass doors of the terminal’s main entrance I saw my fellow passengers from the plane staring out where a huge throng of people, Asians, waited for us to venture outside. It was the “face ” of Asia, I thought, and perhaps my fellow passengers were imagining the people on the outside were there to ask us for money. I pushed on the door and heard someone shout anxiously, “Alex, are you going out there? Do you know where you’re going?” It was the American woman I sat behind on the plane who was traveling for a few weeks with her young daughter. All the westerners standing there seemed paralyzed with fear at what was on the other side of the door, of what they did not know. I felt some of the same feelings and empathized with them but waved goodbye and turned again to go out into the throngs and in that instant, like a cloud’s shadow passing swiftly across a landscape, I thought, “now I have to forget everything I have ever known, forget everything, and go out there and immerse myself completely in this experience; open myself completely.”

Hundreds of bicyclists and motorbikes filled the streets in the morning rush hour in Kathmandu

2009-03-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

The view from my hotel room window my first morning in Kathmandu included the famous Tuborg beer sign and new construction going on. The city was focusing all its energy and resources on building an infrastructure for tourism with the hope that it would become the lead 'industry' in Nepal and bring in lots of foreign capital.

I really wanted to stay in a Nepali hotel in Kathmandu so it was with some reluctance that first night that I agreed to stay with my colleagues in a western-style hotel so we could talk about the conference and make plans for the coming week. We had dinner at a new, western-style Chinese restaurant where I also felt uncomfortable. I was miffed because I wanted to begin my Nepali experience by eating Nepali food. The meal, on the other hand, was wonderful and the men around the table were personable and eager to help me acclimate to Nepal. They had all attended university in the US. The conversation was "heady", intensely intellectual, and mostly about the politics in Nepal and their perspectives on how the government should be run. I could feel the strong pull of entitlement and privilege that was groomed into these Nepali men.

Monsoon clouds like those we had flown through stack up over Kathmandu late in the day

On our way to the restaurant we passed a Nepali woman who was living on the street. I wanted to talk to her and asked one of the men to translate for me. He talked to her and repeated all my questions to her, or so I thought, and saying things back, answering me, but in a way that made no sense. My interpreter was impatient. He said I shouldn’t be talking to her in the first place and kept pulling me away. He said he wanted to catch up with the others so we left. A dozen yards along I broke away from him and went back to the woman on the street corner just as a second woman appeared that I had not seen. “That man didn't say one thing to her that you asked and he didn’t tell you one thing that she answered,” she said. “Can you meet me back here tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock,” I asked her? She said she would.

An Egg Walla out early in the morning in Kathmandu

The next morning I found a large group of women waiting for me including the woman who had stepped from the shadows the night before. She introduced herself as Renu Sharma Upreti, and said she was one of the directors of the Women’s Foundation of Nepal. She spoke English well and was compassionate in helping me understand Hindi and in particular telling me exactly what the women were saying. She translated as the women told me their stories. Almost all of them, when they were young girls, had been sold by their parents and forced to become prostitutes in India. They were thrown out of the brothels where they worked and lived when they contracted sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The Nepali government did everything it could to prevent the women from returning to Nepal but they found paths through the hills and along the rivers once used by traders and returned secretly (and at enormous risk) only to be rejected by their families. I was overwhelmed by the women’s stories and invited them to attend the conference. Their stories and stories of other women will be interwoven throughout this blog.

This photo was taken months later and includes some of the women I met that first morning in Kathmandu. The woman in the white T shirt on the left is Renu Sharma Upreti who had stepped out of the shadows the evening months before to talk to me. She is one of the founders and directors of the Women's Foundation of Nepal based in Kathmandu which does amazing work with and for Nepali women. It was an amazing coincidence that I met her in my first few hours in Kathmandu and that she was generous and gracious enough to take me under her wing. It was an enormous gift.

Urban couple commuting to work in downtown Kathmandu

Part II: Conference Planning

2009-03-29T13:38:00.000-07:00

Our group left Kathmandu that afternoon and drove south to Rampur where we temporarily moved into the lovely home owned by Prakash's parents. In the early stages of planning their was agreement the conference goal was to explore a short list of sustainble strategies for Nepal's immedate future. The context, or mission, was to give momentum to national strategy for "transitioning" Nepal towards a "sustainable" future and to define, in concrete terms, what that sustainable really meant. The larger strategy called for more local resilience and less national dependence on the growing global economy (globalization in general). From a purely academic perspective the conference was an exercise in integrating "ecological principles, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable economic development into a national political policy."

It's worth noting that we used the words "sustainable" and "sustainability" as organizing principles. We used them in phrases like "more sustainable", or "less-sustainable", and the terms and their meaning could have been replaced with "eco-friendly" or "environmentally sound" that are also loosely knit variables and not science based. For that matter they are subjective value judgments. In the planning phase of the conference we wanted to define sustainability with more accuracy and less subjectivity by way of scientifically derived data from the fields of anthropology, ecology, biology, biochemistry, geology, sociology, chemistry, and physics, that inform the growing usage of the term.

I was originally asked to help design and facilitate the conference based on skills I have in Future Search Conference management, in farming and specifically sustainable agriculture, plus a teaching background in ecology. I was excited about the conference because the country is at an important transition point in it’s development and because it is vulnerably situated between two rapidly emerging superpowers, India and China. It could easily be devoured by market forces beyond it’s control. I wanted to see if a small group of people could temper and reshape development strategies and actually integrate sustainable thinking into the national policy planning of a deeply impoverished third world country. The issue for me was whether we could get a national consensus to alter development forces, change the nominal procedures and outcomes, and find a “sustainable” solution?

The planning sessions went on well out of the fiercely hot sun in this shaded arbor for a few hours each morning and again in the cooler periods of late afternoon.

As the planning progressed a centralizing theme emerged which was nothing like what we had discussed earlier and it represented my worst fears. The more politically ambitious men wanted a terse philosophical argument pitting the "evils" of “Globalization”, meaning the expanding global economy, against the multi-faceted concept of “Sustainability”. These men wanted the conference to be a political statement. They wanted to use the term "Sustainability" as a hammer to bludgeon the nominal economic development strategies of their political opponents. In their zeal to polarize the two concepts they created a false dichotomy in which they portrayed globalization as “the belly of the beast”, as one of them put it, as all ”bad”, and portray sustainability as it's polar opposite as all “good”. There was inaccuarcy and confusion within these definitions. For example, at one point they were saying “organic” was synonymous with “sustainable”.

When I agreed to come to Nepal and work on the conference I didn't know that members of the organizing committee had political ambitions and that the conference would be used as a political platform to promote secular political interests. In other words they were using the conference to build credibility that, in turn, would give their ideas legitimacy. In that context the centralizing idea and attendant themes of the conference were compromised by the expediency of those ambitions. It became apparent these men had a proclivity to polarize "hot" issues to give them a dramatic flair. The conference was no longer an exploration of the complex issues and variables atttendant to both globalization and sustainability and had become an overly simplfied argument striving to make the issues black and white. It seemed risky to me to go in this direction. I preferred the original idea of looking for a shared vision of a transition process for Nepal, that was in itself sustainable, and that would be supported by the government.

To be fair to the conference planners, the politically ambitious included, they could only see Nepal as a small, landlocked, vulnerable country sandwiched between India and China and they were feeling how vulnerable Nepal was to exploitation by these political entities as well as the expanding global economy which they saw, realistically, as a house of cards. It was a delicate position to be in.

The social structure of Nepali society is complex. There is a complicated caste system that involves social and professional groupings of people, men and women. It doubles as a class system. Women have almost no status and own next to nothing. In the caste system Brahmins are at the top of the social order. The ‘untouchables” are at the bottom. In between there is a warrior caste and a merchant caste. Brahmins are not necessarily the wealthiest group. Brahmins are often the poorest people in the room. However, they’re the intellectuals, scholars, teachers, and politicians. Nepali men, most of their lives, live quite apart from women. They interact with women very little as they grow up and the two genders are very separate. For the first two decades of their lives, until they are married, the men hang out with men. Women hang out with women and do most of the manual work.

In addition, the level of poverty in Nepal is staggering. It has a profound impact on the country. Women and men, particularly in rural areas, have extremely difficult lives. Living is strenuous for both genders, but the burden falls on the women. They've only had a voice in the government since the 1990 constitutional reform. Nepal’s is a patriarchal culture practicing patrilineage in which kinship and property is passed down by the father; on the male side of the family, to the son. There’s also a dowry system. When a woman marries she (her parents) must pay her husband’s family for taking her in and she also lives with the husband’s family and helps them. Her parents have had to pay for her to leave and are left without the extra helper. For those living in dire poverty this is an enormous burden. On top of that Nepal has a history of polygamy so that a woman may have to compete with a second or third wife for position and rank.

In the planning stage it became more and more obvious that these issues would not be discussed. They would be implicit and yet it is impossible to talk about the sustainability of any system or any form of government in which all people are not essentially equal and where the health and well being of women and children (and men) are not the highest priority. Sustainability can’t be achieved where there are deep schisms in the perceptions of justice and where basic human needs are not met.

In the last days before the conference was to begin we had agreed on various governing principals for the conference. This included the modes of facilitation and discussion, the hands-on exercises, a work shop and several field trips that would be congruent with the themes of the conference. A community development organization (CDO) in Naryanghar, a small city in south central Nepal on the Naryani River, was going to host the conference. This all sounded good but as the planning wrapped up and we got on the road to Naryanghar I was nervous about how loose everything felt. So much time had been spent on the political themes the agenda and time line were still vague. We were going to "wing" it. I decided to step back and trust my experience of conferences and the "group process" in general. I have seen lots of magical things happen with groups and it fortuitously was the case in Naryanghar.

2009-03-29T13:33:00.000-07:00

The Berlin conference was held at a 500 year old castle and attended by European academics writers, ecologist, and environmentalist who were wrestling with a working definition of "sustainability" and trying to understand the full impacts of the most pressing environmental issues. In this picture we were sitting at a huge table in the castle garden at 10 pm. The sun was still up because we were so far north.

On my way to Nepal I stopped in Berlin, Germany to attend a conference there that focused on Globalization and its impact on Europe and other areas of the world. My purpose was primarily to meet two British environmentalist, Nick Hilyard and Helena Norberge-Hodge who were presenting at the conference. Helena, in the early 1990s, published a book she and her husband wrote titled, "Ancient Futures" about their experiences living in Ladakh over a 16 year period. They also produced a video titled, "The Future of Progress" that explored mid to late 20th century economic development on the culture of a small non-industrialized country like Ladhak. Teddy Goldsmith, Nick, Martin Khor, and Helena are interviewed in the tape and create a grim picture regarding the future of non-industrialized countries like Nepal.

Nick was the assistant editor of the British scientific journal "The Ecologist" working with the magazine's editor, Teddy Goldsmith, who was legend in the environmental movement in Britain and Europe. In my eyes Nick and Helena are highly respected, educated, articulate, and down to earth practitioners who are far more grounded in reality than a lot of the purely academics folks are. I also wanted to participate in the Berlin conference to better understand the tensions that exist between academics who want to define concepts and practioners who want to achieve a proficient practice "on the ground." The tension was there at the Berlin conference. In one instance the director of the conference, a well known academic, told Helena to "shut up" because she disagreed with him. There may have been gender issues involved in this tiff, but it was clearly a tension of fit between abstract and the "real" .

Nick Hilyard (looking at the camera) is an environmentalist and writer and an editor at " The Ecologist" under senior Editor Teddy Goldsmith. They devoted the entire January 1972 issue of The Ecologist (Volume 2, No. 1) to their now famous "A Blueprint for Survival"; a powerful scientific-environmental statement that laid out all the major issues threatening our planet and defined "sustainability" in ways that put it into a usable context. It really shook the world. It was more overt and comprehensive then anything written prior to its publication and probably since. It's hard to believe that it was written 40 years ago because it's a brilliant effort to alert the world and the world's leaders to the need for deep changes in the infrastructures of industrialization and, particularly, the use of carbon fuels. I'll always admire Teddy and Nick and the staff of The Ecologist for their courageous efforts to create a strident voice for change in the tradition of Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Olaus and Mardy Murie, and a long list of other naturalists and ecologists.

Helena Norberge-Hodge, with her husband John Page, had lived in Ladakh (Little Tibet) for six months a year for 16 years, or 8 years total, and in the early 1990s pubished a book with a video about their experiences. In her writing and video material she has shared an insightful social ecology within the global discussion about the questions our survival. Helena's insights of how the rampant economic development impacts undeveloped countries that can not adapt quickly enough to protect themselves from the industrialization process making them vulnerable to a literal "killing off" of local, indigenous knowledge, wisdom and integrity. Her video was one of the first visual documents to show what's been happening in the "Third World". Her book and video tape are still available (try Amazon.com. Once again her book is titled "Ancient Futures" and the video is titled, "The Future of Progress"). "The Ecologist, Vol. 2, No. 1" is available on the web.

A view of the castle across the moat

The Berlin conference helped prepare me for the Nepal conference. The subject matter was similar and the academic thrust, the intense need to politicize the issues, as I've already described, was also similar. Seeing it in Berlin first and then in Nepal confirmed for me that it wasn't a phenomenon of a "cosmopolitan elite". The Berlin conference helped me to be patient with that academic perspective and to learn how to gently push for a science-based perspective which mean avoiding the tendency to paint everything black or white. This blog will explore these ideas through the roles of individuals, particularly women in impoverished countries, as they grapple with limited resources to really understand the quality of life issues and the real "practice" of sustainability. The critical question on the table (that we're all are sitting at) is: can humanity survive another 200 years, or even another 100 years, or another 50 years on this planet? And if so, how? I don't think any one really honestly knows the anwer.

A few days after leaving Berlin I was in this paradise far from Eurocentric perspectives. I was far, far away in a place where everything was very new (to me) and exciting and delicious and beautiful. At this well (in the photo above) behind the house in Rampur we washed our dishes, our clothes, and ourselves under that hand pump. It was elegantly simple. We walked to the well along that path in the photo below. It was a lovely haven of exotic flowers, ginger plants and mango and lemon trees and a profound silence that was at first shocking and which then became astonishingly essential to me, like a cup of cool, spring water. How often do we get to experience real silence, that essential stillness and peace?

This is the back of the house and shows only a small piece of the larger, productive garden the couple kept. All their organic waste from the toilet and kitchen went into a composter which had to be churned once a day to produce bio-gas which they used for lighting and cooking. They grew 95 percent of their own food including dairy products and vegetables. They ate meat occasionally and sparingly. It's the healthiest diet I've ever lived on. This picture of the family and the way they live is a snapshot of a potentially sustainable life style, but not entirely. It's deceptive and I've discovered that I have to be careful in how I label what is sustainable and what is not. It can be complicated. In this case the house and garden share the same infrastructures and resources that we all do and that we use daily without being acutely aware of the impacts.

This looks a bit like Eden. The area in the back of the gardem with the lighter, horizontal greens is the large pumpkin patch where we harvested greens every day for our main meal.

2009-03-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

The task of stripping the thick outer skin from the stems of the pumpkin leaves and runners was time consuming and an excuse to sit and gossip. I used the hours of food preparation to learn Hindi and more about Nepal and the immediate neighborhood. Those hours are some of my most cherished memories of Nepal.

When I wasn't helping with food things or working on conference stuff I roamed the lanes of Rampur with my cameras and journal writing down the descriptions and names of plants, asking my litany of a thousand questions to anyone who would listen. I enjoyed the interactions with the neighbors and they did as well. The quiet setting and the relaxed pace of the communication were valuable in helping me learn the language and helped the neighbors get to know me. I was curious how my presence as a white male from half way around the globe was felt by the people I met. My whiteness was a continual point of connection because some of them had never seen a white person before. They loved looking at me in detail, wanted to touch my skin, the hair on my arms, and some kids even wondered what I might taste like if they were to lick my forearm.

I'll discuss this concept of gender, color, education, and class a litte further down in the blog, For the moment I will only say that upon my arrival in Nepal I felt a sense of "freedom" because I was outside the "system" and it gave me a kind of license but I also felt enormous responsibility to be overt, honest, make myself available and be transparent to everyone I met. By available I mean that I let people "make use of me" as I do in my social work: to be open and let them ask personal questions, rant about things, share their personal narratives and express their feelings honestly without judging them.

Nepal life is so much slower than anywhere in the West. It is pedestrian by contrast to the culture I live in and a pleasant change from a large cosmopolitan city like Berlin or even my own city in Western Massachusetts in the US.

Part III: A Short Detour to Look at Corn Production In Nepal and Get A Glimpse of Some Sustainable Agricultural Concepts

2009-03-29T13:26:00.000-07:00

It was typical to see small groups of women and girls, or pairs like this one, carrying these baskets of freshly picked ears of corn from the fields back to their houses where they would shuck the corn and remove the kernels and dry them. This traffic went on from very early morning until late afternoon. I arrived in Nepal during the corn harvest and close to the beginning of rice planting. The two crops overlap in their growing cycles. Rice and corn represent about 90 percent of Nepal's agricultural harvest and the two grains are equal in importance as well as in the size, or amount, of the harvest. They are the country's "staple" crops and the basis of the country's food system and diet. Other items in the diet include barley, wheat (in western Nepal), and some green vegetables. The diet in the areas where I visited in Nepal included a limited amount of meat, usually goat or buffalo. The corn harvest goes on at about the same two or three week period when the rice has to be planted and is dependent on the arrival of the Monsoon, so, as in other agricultural areas around the world, it is a busy, labor-intensive time.

Watching this procession each day and meeting some of the women as they walked back to the corn fields gave me my first impression of the role of women in Nepal and how hard they work, and how little they receive from their hard work. They put in long days and everything they do involves large expenditures of energy possibly at about the same rate as running a long race, or climbing a difficult mountain. This form of agriculture, the intensive manual labor by women, and the growing of only two crops with the resulting lack of diversity and the huge impacts on the soils, brings up some interesting points. Is this a sustainable form of agriculture? What are the variables that make it more sustainable than other ways agriculture might be practiced in Nepal now and in the future, and how do some variables make it less sustainable?

A woman on the way to the fields in Rampur to harvest corn. She's holding a "corn knife" which most women carry tucked into the back of their saris.

The absence of a mechanized, petroleum-fueled agriculture, one that is more subsistence-based for home consumption, very dependent on manual labor with additional power supplied by oxen, makes Nepali agriculture appear sustainable and relatively stable over long periods of time. It utilizes local, seasonal supplies of surface water that requires little additional energy (mainly gravity) to move to the crops in the field. About 50 percent of the yearly supplemental nutrient applied to crops is from locally produced organic fertilizer derived from composted animal manure. These features represent facets of a sustainable agriculture seen in the context of a small country with a small population to feed, but I want to explore whether that is a valid assessment of Nepali agriculture in general.

The concept of sustainability, as I have been using it, represents a continuum of perspectives and practices. It consists of many, many variables. It's usually boiled down to a few axioms that are useful but not accurate. It has also become a "buzz word" which further blurs its meaning. What's sustainable in Nepal might not be any where else. Or what is sustainable for one individual may not be seen as sustainable by another individual. As a continuum, sustainability is a measuring tool that gives us a way to compare practices, impacts, rates of adaption and eventually allows us to make decisions that promote the health of the soil, the water, the plants, the Planet, and each of its inhabitants. Sustainability equals reduced stress in living systems which, on the flip side, translates to greater, or optimal health of living systems. As I mentioned before it is really a broad organizing concept that helps pull information into a central heading for closer (better?) evaluation and decision making.

In the early 1960s with the advent of the IBM Fortran 1640 computers the field of Ecology, as a substantial field of science, became modernized in a brief period of time. The word "ecology" was suddenly on everyone's lips, used in advertisements for myriad consumer items. The term "sustainability", congers up some of the same ideas Ecology does about the interrelationships between the environment and the seeminly infinite numbers of living things inhabiting those environemnts. One really sound measure, today, of whether what we humans are doing is sustainable or not, is the fate of the biodiversity within those environments as it is represented by the fauna and flora on our planet. All of us are probably aware that the biodiveristy index is shrinking astonishingly quickly (tragically) almost on a daily basis.

Those early IBM computers made it possible to collect and store enormous amounts of precise data and organize the data into a more comprehensible picture of the Earth's ecological systems then what had existed before. By the way, those computers were as slow as molasses, as big as automobiles, and made really strange, scary noises late at night in the college laboratories they inhabited.

Ecology suddenly became a very important science for helping us understand the complex interrelationshhips of all things, everything that makes up the natural world here on Earth, and the human impacts on those systems.

In addition, computers changed the way we use language to define things. Computers created a language of their own that change the way we perceived the Earth and the living systmes and one spectacularly related phenomenon, the Apollo Space Program, which was computer "driven" created a revolution in how we perceive the Earth. That was when in 1969 American astronauts made the first moon landing and immediately began sending back photographic images of the Earth. In an instant most people on Earth near a television suddenly saw their home as a gorgeous, brilliant blue, white, brown, green marble hanging precariously in the blackness of space. Those images revolutionized the way we thought and talked about the Earth.

This woman is selling "Moki" by the side of the road. It is roasted corn and what we ate for breakfast and snacks most of the time I was in Nepal. You sip your chia while you wait for the roasted corn cob to cool off. Then you pick off kernels of corn individual and chew on them. It's yummy and a great breakfast with that provides a lot of energy that lasts for hours. Nutrition-wise it's the same idea and probably a little healthier than corn flakes.

We've latched on to the word "sustainability" as an expression of hope and commitment. We, started fairly recently to critically measure all impacts humans have on the planet particularly those which pose a serious threat to the "sustainability" of the Earth where sustainability means survival. Right now, as I write this in April 2009, sustainability is most often used in conjunction with the terms "biodiversity" and "global warming", the two popular measuring tools of sustainability. Within those terms sustainability poses the critical question: "will the Earth continue to sustain life indefinitely? Will we be able to sustain our existence here indefinitely? These are post-modern questions and the first real indicators that something is terribly wrong. The first cues about the accumulated damage we've been doing to our planet initially emerged from books like Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" in which she reported the enormous damage done by the DDT and other pesticides. It was widely read and instantly a comprehensive, unified response by the US government which was to ban the use of DDT in the United States. That was an example of "sustainability" in action and one of the first of numerous warnings that reached a broad cross section of the population and created a consensus along with a "mindfullness" that we needed to be much more aware of what we are doing to the environment. Carson's book coalasced a broad response from conservation, preservation, and environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, The Audubon Society, and the Wilderness Society.

Back to corn: the history of corn in Nepal is fascinating. Corn originated in the New World emerging out of what's now Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. It grew there as a wild plant. Over, perhaps, a thousand years it was slowly bred out by people in that region and it gradually evolved into a food crop that farmers had control over. They could plant seeds in clearings they made by burning the forest and they would not fairly accurately when the corn would be mature. Calenders were created to determine what was the best time to plant the corn and how to predict the harvest in advance. Corn became an important food crop helping to sustain the ancient cultures of the Maya, Ayacomo, and other first people.

Beginning before the Christian era (2000 BP) corn began to "migrate" to the far corners of North and South America. A long list of Native bands from present day Canada and the United States, from ocean to ocean, have had corn in their diets for more than a 1000 years if not longer. It is now grown on every continent including Asia and Africa where it's a very important food source. It was introduced into Nepal in the mid-1800s and has, since then, offered a secure staple crop that would not fail if the rice crop failed. I am going to guess that corn was introduced to offer some insurance against famine. Corn, at the time it was introduced, had no known pests in Nepal and it grows well in the climate and soils of Nepal, and uses the same tools and labor force that rice does for planting, cultivating and harvesting.

There is a section in the blog below on rice cultivation but to compare corn and rice historically is interesting. The latest theories regarding the development of rice as a cultivated food say that it was first domesticated along the Yalu River in China beginning 7000-6000 years ago and that it took almost 2000 years to develop reliable domestic varieties. It began with wild varieties and over a painstaking period and process rice eventually emerged as a dependable food crop. This history parallels the development of other grains like buckwheat and wheat further east during the same period in human history.

Corn is not the most sustainable crop to grow. It's an anuual and like rice, is a "heavy feeder" meaning it removes a lot of nutrient from the soil particularly nitrogen but including other essential soil ingredients like sulphur, phosphorus, and potassium. (The three macro nutrients in the soil are expressed as NPK: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium. There is a long list of essential micro-nutrients like iron, sulphur, manganese, magnesium, zinc, copper, etc). Corn produces a lot of biomass including the corn plus the corn plant. Nepali farmers utilize the entire plant first as human food and then fodder for the livestock. Only a small portion of the corn plant isn't used and what isn't used is plowed back into the soil at the end of the harvest where it adds organic matter and nutrients (small amounts) back into the soil.

I grow corn in my home state in the US which I sell in local markets. I made a point of talking to the Nepali farmers about their corn "practices" particularly how they compensate for the heavy loss of soil nitrogen by the yearly corn crop. The farmer in this photo told me that because of the large number of farm animals (water buffalo primarily) that are still used for field work there's a good annual supply of animal manures (farm yard manures=FYM) which are reapplied to the fields in a composted form. Corn loves manure and cows (buffalo, too) love corn! The variety of corn he's holding is what I saw most of the time in Nepal. It is most likely a variety called Rampur Composite which is a yellow, semi-flint, open pollinated variety (OPV) and it's close in color, size, number of rows, and taste to a variety that was popular in the US in the 1960s-1970s called "Golden Bantam". It's called a "good keeper" because it holds it's sugar content longer than some of the new "super sweet" hyrbrids like "Butter and Sugar" (popular in the US) which only keep their taste for a few hours after they're picked before the sugar turns to starch and the corn becomes less tasteful. Semi-flint refers to the hardness of the outer shell, or casing, of the kernels. There are several types of corn: Dent, Flint and pop corn, for instance. Dent has a softer shell and that means the starch is configured differently then Flint corn which as a super hard corn has more starch. One last note: Nepali's get most of their carbohydrates from corn. Most of the corn grown in Nepal is consumed at home, or in the village where it is grown.

Agriculture is labor intensive in Nepal and that's underscored by this picture where a family is busily husking a small mountain of corn. I saw this repeated everywhere as in the photos below and largely it was women who were doing the work.

Another family and another mountain of corn. The corn seen here is for home consumption. After the kernels are removed from the cobs they're dried on tarps when the sun is shining and then it is ground into a product like corn meal or hominy and stored for use by the family. During the harvest season everyone enjoys the corn roasted on open flames when it is referred to as "Moki" (moke-eye).

The labor issues around corn in Nepal are more complicated than the nutrient needs of the plants. Nepal is currently risking everything to become a world tourist country. It has sixteen, or so, national parks with different themes. Many of them are conservation areas around the high peaks of the Himalaya like Everest (Sagamartha), Annapurna, Mansalu, Kanchanjunga and Mansalu that create a governance for environmental protection and the ability to manage the amount of traffic. The others are primary tourist attractions as well as plant and animal sanctuaries particularly for endangered Asian species like the Bengal tiger and the Asian elephant. Because most of the infrastructure for this industry is located in cities like Kathmandu and Pokhara they tend to draw men off the farms with the hope for better pay and more money. It's that old story. So the population left in the rural areas to tend to the planting and harvesting of crops is largely in the women's and children's hands (and backs, etc.) Is that sustainable? The response has been to create an infrastructure to mechanize agriculture as much as possible. That means tractors, bank loans, tractor dealerships, tractor repair people, gas stations, tire stores, etc. It means jobs but it also means more capitalization by the farmer.

In 1919, in the US, 90 percent of the male work force was involved in some area of agriculture whether it was on the farm or working at a factory that made tractors and plows, or other implements, or fertilizer and pesticides (although there were few chemical pesticides in use at that time). In 2009 less than 10 percent of the entire US work force is involved in agriculture and most of that is within the golf industry. Golf Courses in the US now account for millions of acres (approximately 3,000,000 acres in 2009) of grass that needs watering, fertilizers, insecticides, specialized lawn mowers, etc. It is the largest sector of agriculture in the US at the present time .

First the corn is husked.
Then the kernels are removed from the cobs by hand and it is a tedious, time consuming job
.
Until the basked it filled. I tried to find out how many ears of corn would fill a basket but the sizes of the baskets varied so much that it was useless. This woman and I tried to keep count of the number of ears it took to fill this basket. Suffice it to say it was a lot of ears.

The baskets are emptied on cloth or plastic tarps. The corn is then spread out to dry in the sun.

The sun is sometimes unreliable, or rather, because of the Monsoon season arriving there is a chance of showers at any moment so someone stays close to the corn and makes sure it doesn't get rained on.

This photo incudes the unhusked corn on the left, husked corn cobs on the right and a some of the kernels in the wooden "boat" in the center.

This is a close up of the corn kernels. These will be ground into a coarse meal.

In the foot hills and mountains where the rivers run particularly fast it is economical to build a small grist mill like this utilizing a water wheel and the fast moving water to grind the corn mechanically.

Without a water powered grist mill the corn is taken to a centralized business, a miller, that grinds corn.

Here it's weighed to determine the price paid to the farmer. As I already pointed out almost all the corn harvested in Nepal is consumed in the same place it was grown, by the farmers and their families, or within the village. In other words, very little of it gets shipped to other areas in Nepal, or out of the country.

In the foot hills near Annapurna I watched this young woman quickly use the discared corn husks to make these mats which are used in the homes. She used her feet as much as she used her hands. When I tried to do this I failed miserably and became the laughing stock of the entire village. They probably still laugh uproariously when someone imitates me trying to learn to braid the corn husks.

It was really neat to watch her do this because of the way she used both hands and her feet and she did it astonishingly fast. She made it look easy. It reminded me of the Kumal who made their own fish nets which requires tying complicated knots over and over again but they could do it with blinding speed. I have watched Navahoe and Oglalla people make bows and arrows and arrow heads from scratch in this same way, with skill and confidence and incredible speed. These are lost arts, that indigenous knowledge that gets separated and disappears before anyone know what happened to it.

The very end of the corn harvest entails chopping down the corn stalks and transporting them to where the buffalo are fed.

Here again it is the women and children who are doing most of the field work. This woman and I had a contest to see who could pick up the most corn stalks in a single load and I said I was pretty sure it was a tie which amused her no end.

For the moment that is the end of the corn story but it gets repeated in myriad forms in Nepal in terms of the sustainability of agriculture and development of food systems. Within the conference setting which we will return to, there was fear that by adopting one path to economic development that Nepal would be forced by the World Bank and other lending agencies to change its food system and adopt that of the industrialized countries and, particularly, adopt a mechanization of food production. This had both positive and negative connotations for the farmers at the conference.

Part IV: The Nepal Conference Begins

2009-03-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

The road west from Kathmandu to Mugli and Pokhara threads along the left hand (south) wall of the Trishuli River gorge. It is a magnetic, majestic and enticing place that exudes a powerful wildness and beauty. It's not unrealistic to fear that someday there will be a large hydroelectric scheme constructed here to power neon signs at hotels in various parts of Nepal.

This is the road to Naryanghar. The Trishuli starts high in the Himalya close to the border with Tibet and at a point a few miles downstream from where this picture was taken it joins and becomes the Naryani River that flows on to the Ganges and the Bay of Bengal. The Trishuli is a gorgeous river that's already known world-wide as a formidable "rafting" and kayaking river and seems to fit into the present scheme of maximally developing tourism in Nepal.

We held the conference at the CDO, or Community Development Organization, in Naryanghar. The box-shaped yellow building houses the main office, a small class room, and some sleeping quarters. The wide cement sill at the bottom of the wall was a favorite place for people to sit and hang out during the conference. It provided an important "get-away" where a lot of the work of the conference was done by people talking informally and spontaneously.

This is the large building, the "long house", that housed the women's dormitory, the large conference hall, dining room, and kitchen. It was all very compact and efficient. The CDO was remarkably self-contained and self-sufficient including the food we ate which was grown on site.

On the opening day of the conference we were all subdued, anxious, and rigid, or maybe shy is a better description. The "academics" had no trouble talking and felt very comfortable holding the floor and were obviously good at it. It was predictable, too, that the conference would begin on a heavy intellectual note which was intimidating to members who were largely uneducated.

Those who felt uncomfortable talking, like Suvenda, tried to be serious by listening intently and taking notes. At the end of the first day everyone had begun to warm up and a camaraderie was beginning to form. The second day I was amazed how easily everyone slipped into the heady talk about globalization and sustainability as if the conversations had been going on for years. I saw how useful the conference was for creating a long absent forum in Nepal for people to talk about what they were experiencing in their communities, even those members from the most remote villages, and how alarmed they were at what was happening in Nepal.

Conferences have many uses in addition to the dissemination of information and ideas. The buzz words these days used by grant writers who are looking for money to put on conferences commonly state how their conference will "build capacity" and "develop leadership". At well-run conferences that's true.

A key purpose of any conference is to "enrich knowledge" which can be seen as part of building capacity and developing leadership, but it is even more intrinsic then that, more subtle, in that much of what happens at conferences is unspoken, it's absorbed almost through the skin. When we are in groups of people who are energetically focusing on a grouped set of issues our brains go off in myriad directions, synapse after synapse, little firings of intellectual and sensory exchanges in which we process what we know, rebuild it, strengthen it, test it, reprocess it, and then put it up for awhile and revisit it at another day. You can call it creativity at work, insight development, or learning. It's powerful, though.

Some other things conferences are good for: incubators for new ideas, resolving conflicts, building coalitions, learning more about the "who, where, how" of central issues, provide connections between people, and provide a place to practice expressing our ideas and then getting the all-important feedback from other members. Finally, what members take from a conference is a growing sense of his or her "authority" which I'll describe as the "permission to do work". This doesn't mean there's a diploma or certificate, but through connections, the practice and sharpening of ideas there is a sense of "joining around a task" within the conference community. This "joining" process brings with it responsibility, credibility and a plan of action, a task, and it is within that joining that authority is given and taken.

Surya (in the photo above he has his hand up) who came to the conference almost by accident was a good example of the leadership development piece. He's a member of the Brahmin caste and he is also what I call a practitioner. That's my word for someone, not necessarily outside of academic circles, but one who has extensive hands-on experience and understands the practical aspects of the work, or in this case, Surya has a working knowledge of how to implement sustainable ideas and sustainable design and is familiar with the complexities involved. In his case he is a farmer interested in creating a "permaculture" and other sustainable forms of agriculture and sustainable ways of living. Surya is remarkable man, a remarkable human being. He's knowledgable and helpful and has a great sense of humor which he always uses to get his points across. He was an outspoken member of the conference because of his knowlege and because he's a Brahmin (I have added a whole section on Surya below).

The women at the conference were mostly silent the first day, or so. It was evident that Nepali men and women do not interact very much. It was not really shyness, but the few women who there were reticent in the face of the terse academic polemics. They did not seem to have the same volition the men did to condemn globalization per se. They were clear what they saw as the negative impacts that concern them the most as Nepali women, but they were articulate in saying they saw specific benefits for Nepali women in the thrust towards modernity as Nepal was being pushed towards the 21st century. Two of their stated concerns were: 1.) the continuing sale of young Nepali women by their parents to contractors that then sold them in India to brothels where they were forced into prostitution. They saw this as a global issue because they pointed out that it takes place around the globe. (There is a section below that goes into this practice in Nepal in more depth.) and 2.) The growing presence of pornography (films, videos, magazines, etc.) that's imported into Nepal from around the globe. The women are concerned because of the implications for Nepali women and all women living in impoverished countries because women are drawn in to participate in the production of pornography to make money to survive.

Part V: WATCH, a Kathmandu-based non-profit agency that's stopping the sale and transport of Nepali girls to brothels in India

2009-03-29T13:18:00.000-07:00

This woman was the director of WATCH, a non-profit agency, that works throughout Nepal as well as with governments of other countries to stop the selling of young Nepali women by their parents. Poverty and the caste system and other features of the social structure of Nepal puts a low value on women so that impoverished parents of daughters are often driven (enticed?) to sell them. Most of these girls, if not all, are sold to "contractors" who transport them to India where they are sold to brothels in places like Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta and other large cities and forced into prostitution. Girl infancide is still practiced in the more remote areas of Nepal but is rapidly declining.

Statistically, between 5,000 and 7,000 Nepali girls like those in these photos are sold every year and shipped off to brothels in Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta. More than 20,000 Nepali women are at risk of being sold.

The strategy of WATCH and other organizations focusing on women's rights and health is to make people aware of the complex social and economic issues that make the sale of these young women part of Nepali culture. WATCH has been successful at getting police to help in some of the cases and also to find witnesses that will testify against the perpetrators, but the main thrust of their work is to educated teachers and others who come in contact with young women. In the past few years the number of young women sold has been cut dramatically and other countries are offering some assistance.

I had a briliant co-workers at one time and we were working on a project to help farmers in the United States transition to more sustainable agricultural practices and production techniques in grain, vegetable, meat and dairy. Late one evening she called me on the telephone to say goodbye. She was leaving. She told me the World Health Organization (WHO) had offered her a job she didn't feel like she could refuse. It was to go to Macedonia and war torn Croatia and work with mothers in those countries to help them educate their daughters. When her work was completed in those areas she was to continue and go from country to country. I was sad she was leaving but I was envious, too. I wanted to go and I keep thinking how important her job is and how difficult a task it must be in some ways, the different possibilities involved in the different different cultures. I was envious about what she would learn. I felt what she was doing was the most important thing one could imagine. And I think often about why we don't have a program to teach men how to raise their sons (and daughters), to teach men to care.

In contrast here is this photo of pornography being sold on the streets of Kathmandu that the women at the conference had grave concerns about. Pornography grows exponentially eveery year. It's the global market pushing relentlessly. It's also about men. Pornography is a market entity driven by men. It is the further exploitation of women by men. It's growing into a multi-billion dollar industry in the West. It seems to be part of who we are, like the market place itself, as it has been around for thousands of years. I now see efforts to condone it because there is no way to stop it. In the popular media it is joked about and accepted as an everyday thing, but it is driven by men and exploits women on a number of different levels. It portrays women as one dimensional and needing to satisfy men in particular ways in order to be accepted. Most pornography creates the illusion that sex is not so much about relationship and more about having fun, being cool, like smoking.

Part VI: Back to the Conference

2009-03-29T13:13:00.000-07:00

Attendance at the conference pulsed as people came and went. Some people could only stay for a day or two. This caused confusion and occasionally we were crowded in like sardines which was not a bad thing. The flux brought in new perspectives and ideas, new personalities and levels of experiences, and motivated us to think more about how well the conference served the needs of the community.

I wrote in my journal that the flux in attendance was reinforcing my earlier feelings that we were disorganized and "winging it." I felt that we needed an agenda and we needed to stick to it or else each person who entered in the middle of the conference side tracked us and took some of the momentum out of the discussion, or they clouded the discussion with their input. I felt that way because of my own need for control, more control over the process in general, because I was impatient with the way the intellectual process was focusing on globalization and sustainability.

We spent alot of time criticizing other people, cultures, countries, like the US, and not focusing on ourselves. The intellectuals' thrust to encapsulate the concept of globalization as if they're somehow divorced from, external and separate from it, created, for me, a strong sense that we were all in a state of denial.

The days went by slowly and the sun traveled around the room slowly before hunkering down in the corner reminding us that it was late.

For awhile it seemed that we were not really going to talk about sustainability in a practical way, that we would waste our time on definitions and name calling. I wanted desperately for people "to get it"; to find sustainability in themselves, to look at the way we all contribute to these seemingly opposing forces of destruction and conserving. I spoke passionately about being open to seeing things differently, to welcome new perspective on our own lives and responsibilities, to be courageous in attempting to change how we think and live.

The intellectual debate went on for some time, a kind of splitting of hairs, a competition almost, of who could come up with the best definition. Time was lost, the non-intellectual majority, the people who had come to get practical information about changing Nepals nominal course of economic development, of understanding what was the most productive way of changing the current situation, had to sit and wait while the others talked.

One of the women, Laljahiri Majhi, who I give a section of her own in this blog, when I first met her said, "I don't know much", but later contradicted by observing that "the men only talk. That's all they ever do is talk. They never really do anything." She was right but her experience didn't just come from the conference, it came from her life-long experience. I found myself agreeing with her. It applied to me as well, I mean as a man. When she told me that I quickly looked at myself and asked myself, "is that true about me?"

What is the truth behind all of this? What is that we were really looking for at the conference. It seemed to get lost, somehow, but that is also a stage in the group process, the getting lost and then finding oneself again. I think the truth is that something is wrong on our planet. We are heading towards a cliff, or something that has the potential to destroy us if we're not careful. There is an enormous amount of energy expended on trying to define how close we are to the edge and what's the velocity we are traveling towards it, rather than stopping and thinking about a new route. It's often said in the US that men won't stop and ask for directions when they know they're lost. I know that's true because I have done that, I mean I have refused to stop and ask for directions.

Splitting hairs about the form of government that needs to be created is a waste of intelligence. It's gone on long enough. There are people who are ultimately suited for that kind of visionary work but in reality it isn't the type of government that changes anything, it's the people and their level of education, motivation and commitment to change. Then there's the economic system. Much time was lost at the conference splitting hairs about which system is best. The intellectual men at the conference got lost precisely at this intersection in the road and they were focusing a lot of the discussion on the destructive power inherent in capitalism.

The discussion was often heated about how destructive economic development under capitalist regimes is in the global sense; how it fosters enormous waste, out-of-control-consumerism, frenetic impulsivity (the "I want, I want" mentality), and the lack of quality in products that, inevitably, are designed to fall apart quickly, etc. It is profitable for a few and costly for the majority. It destroys the environment. There was a long discussion about natural resources, wood, that is removed from places like Malyasia illegally putting billions of illegal dollars into the hands of a few rogue businessmen. There is in capitalism, it was said over and over at the conference, too high a level of aggression that often spills over into environmental violence. Some decried capitalism's successful destruction of "The Commons" in it's campaign to divorce and separate people from the environment.

The conference was never intended to be a long discussion about economic systems or politics. It's safe to say that, at least in the US, we're pretty much stuck with capitalism so if you're going to change the world the change has to occur by understanding and utilizing the strengths of capitalism as well as making capitalism more sustainable in the use and reuse of natural resources, making products of a significantly higher quality and with much higher efficiency resource-wise and with zero combustion of carbon based fuels and carbon based end products. Just as important, too, within capitalism, is the need for a significantly greater effort, a huge effort, to minimize poverty everywhere. Unfortunately capitalism needs poverty as much as it needs inexpensive oil. Capitalism relies on cheap labor and cheap resources no matter how environmentally destructive the reliance becomes.

Some members of the conference pointed out that capitalism has to be reshaped with a newer vision of peoples' needs and goals. Most importantly there has to be a rapid shift to new infrastructures in every area of energy use and production. We need to stop making everything out of plastic. We need to stop depending on plastic as it accounts for so much of the petroleum use. We need to localize food systems and stop, for instance, shipping specialty food items 12,000 miles by air from third world countries to the lucrative markets in the developed countries. The World Bank, it was said dozens of time, needs to stop forcing countries to change their agricultural systems to incorporate the exporting of food to the rich nations. There was cohesion among almost all of the conference members around the enormous urgency felt to make a radical shift to creation of sustainable infrastructures for economic development.

The message from the conference up to this point is old and mundane and it's simply this: something is terribly, terribly wrong. As resilient as the Earth is, as clever as we think we are, as intelligent and technologically advanced as we think we are, the damage we are doing to the planet's ecosystems is really, really close to being irreversible and we are not doing enough to stop it. No one wants to look foolish enough, like Chicken Little, to say the planet's doomed. No one wants to risk saying it's "out of control", but either one of those statements might be true. It may not be doomed but it is certainly out of control. And, if we were truly enlightened, if we are paying attention, we would immediately stop burning carbon fuels today. We'd ban manufacture of any new automobiles first thing tomorrow morning and, in the afternoon, we would all start planting millions and millions of deciduous trees. But of course nothing like that will happen. Democracy's role (and I 'm not objecting) will be to do "step-downs"; legislation, laws, limits, more efficiency, but that will take time and that part is about the money; not rocking the boat. Money is still everything. Money is power. And there is also the issue of militarism and who is going to let their defenses down first.

We confuse money with wealth but the Earth is our only real wealth: soil, sun, water, plants, biodiversity. We lie to ourselves, unable to admit how insane it is to keep burning billions of barrels of oil as if it is going to last forever. Are we anticipating a miracle? In the year 2008 in the US gasoline prices topped $4.00 a gallon and the country got a scary lesson in how dependent we are on oil for everything. On the other hand, do we believe that wind energy and photovoltaics will replace the oil and heat homes, schools, factories, hospitals, and power bigger and bigger tractor trailer trucks made from oil, that pull thousands of tons of merchandise made from oil, thousands of miles every day along millions of miles of highways made from oil, on tires made from oil? Will we end up killing each other over the last few barrels of oil?

2009-03-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

This man was a Chepang and lives in a remote village in west central Nepal. To get to his village requires a long bus ride from Naryanghar and then a climb up through the mountains that took almost a day and was very steep. He described one section where the path went along a narrow ledge across a steep face and was very dangerous. He said that despite its remoteness his village has been approached by a group of Germans wanting to 'donate' plastic utensils including dish washing pans, wash tubs, plates, cups, spoons, knives and forks his people do not customarily use. The villager discussed the situation deciding the Germans were trying to get them dependent on the plastic and probably had done the same thing at other villages to create markets. They refused the offer (with the exception of one light blue tub one villager admantly held on to as she liked washing her dishes and clothes in it.) A year later they found out the plastic was manufactured in a way that made it very expensive to recycle and the manufacturer was trying to save money by dumping vst amounts of the plastic on the "third world".

The third world has often been used as a place to dispose of the industrial world's mistakes like the pesticide DDT, spent medicines, technologies, and all kinds of other goods that are too non-perishable.

Suvenda was also from a region west of Naryanghar. He laughed with me about his looks and said he thought he might be a descendant of African Americans living in the US. He joked with me about taking him back with me because he was sure he had relatives living in New York City.

Ram Chandra is also from a remote village (are you thinking that everyone in Nepal come from a remote village?). He's like a 'county agent', a teacher, and works with farmers in his district helping them with problems and concerns. He contributed a lot of useful information to the conference particularly in the conversations about Integrated Pest Managment and by sharing a vast knowledge of Nepali agriculture that he has acquired. Like many of the other participants he has a wonderful sense of humor.

I can't remember this young man's name but remember that he was very shy at first claiming not to know much but that by the end of the conference he "emerged" as creative and insightful and contributed a great deal to the discussions. My point in introducing the men in these photos is twofold. The first point is to say that, whatever else I have said about the Nepali men or about intellectual, academic types, they are hardly mean, ignorant people. They are bright, work hard and are personable. Like most people in the world they mean well. They aspire to the same universal values of kindness and honesty that we all do. My second point is that the conference, with everyone's input, was the kind of place where even the most shy person from the most remote place on Earth could emerge, feel safe and thrive.

Part VII: A Distraction of Rice

2009-03-29T09:31:00.000-07:00

One morning we all ventured out to a village several miles away. We were to have a meeting there with the village leaders and the meeting had been set up by the academics. It was politically motivated for the most part. We had to leave the Land Rovers and walk the last mile to the village because the path was so rough. Suddenly we came around a bend and the path came out on to a vast open plain, miles long and miles across and stretching to the foothills of the Himalaya. It was stunningly beautiful.

To our right I could see a few women bending low from the hips and planting rice in a rice paddy filled with water that was one of thousands of paddies extending as far as the eye could see. I walked over where the women were planting. They began to laugh when they saw me kick off my sandals, put my Nikons down on top of a low dike and wade into the paddy. I asked the woman closest to show me how to plant the rice seedlings.

Photo shows the dikes that have to be repaired every season. Water flows by gravity into the paddies from an irrigation ditch. The buffalo pull a "smoothing board" which is just a long
plank pulled horizontally to the hitch. The teamster stands on it to add weight and smooths out the contour on the bottom of the paddy as the water enters and fills the paddy. Then it is ready for planting the rice seedlings.

This is a photo taken in another location that shows a farmer preparing a field for the rice rotation. Old rice plants have been cut down and stacked at the bottom of the photo and the farmer is plowing the soil, turning it over, and turning under the organic material, the plants on the surface. After it's turned it's "lumpy" and will only be ready for planting the rice after it's wet and been smoothed down.

2009-03-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

The women are walking towards the rice seedling "nursery", the light green patch near the center of the photo. In the photo below they will all sit down and begin stripping the tender, bright green rice seedlings from the water softened soil and tying them in bundles to be taken to the women planting the rice in the paddies that have been smoothed and filled with water.

The hills in the distance are towards the north and are the lowest foothills of the Himalayas
Rice seedling nurseries seen through the trees at the top of the field.
The rice seedlings are grabbed by hand in bunches and tugged gently out of the ground. Then one of the seedlings is wrapped around the bundle and tied so the bundle stays together until it reaches the women in the paddies.

2009-03-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

One of the women whose task it is to prepare and transport the rice seedlings to the planters.

A mosaic of paddies with the colors indicating where the rice has been planted and where it is in the process of being planted. You can see the small bundles of rice seedlings floating on top of the water in the paddies to the left.

In large operations the men usually take charge of water distribution. They use tools shaped like mattocks and shovels to open the dikes to let the water flow downhill into the paddies.

As the paddies fill the teamsters smooth out the clods of soil and then the women being planting.

2009-03-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

The men are also the only ones who can drive the buffalo teams in the paddies. Women are not allowed to touch the animals. In some planting operations I saw as many as five or six teams of oxen (another name for the water buffalos) working the same large paddy.

This is the technique for smoothing the paddy. The teamster stands on the smoothing board and leans back slightly to push the board down into the soil and mud. This treatment makes the bottom of the paddy even so the rice seedlings will all be planted at the same height relative to the surface of the water.

This was the line of women planters that I first saw when we entered the broad field from the road with it's lovely views to the north.

I took off my sandals and put down my Nikons and looked for a place to join one of the smaller teams where I wouldn't be in the way quite as much. I wasn't sure if they would even let me plant but it was almost too muchfor me to resist trying as it looked physically demanding and difficult and I wanted to know what it felt like to do it for hours as the women do season after season.

2009-03-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

I walked over where these women were planting. They began to laugh when they saw me kick off my sandals, put my Nikons down on top of a low dike, and wade into the paddy. I asked the woman closest to show me how to plant the rice seedlings. They were all hysterical; laughing, yelling back and forth to other groups of women planting across the wide expanse saying things like “Hey, we have a white ox”. I smiled but didn’t laugh and tried to be the very best student I could.

In a few minutes I kind of had it down and was handed my own clump of tender young rice plants and began reaching down into the warm, muddy water that was about 8 inches deep and gently push the roots of the rice seedling into the mud.

There were a few men around, the bosses, and the buffalo drivers, and they watched me for a minute or two, shrugged their shoulders, and went on with what they were doing.

I tried planting as fast as the women and failed miserably. I was getting sunburned and they rubbed mud on my shoulders and arms. I worked feverishly in the heat for a few hours and then I heard the shout “Kana” (food: lunch) echo across the field and I followed the women to a little hummock above the paddies where a huge Asoro tree stood shading the dry earth.

One group of women and men eat lunch out in the open near the paddy.

2009-03-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

A group of us including the teamster, a young boy, crowded onto this hummock under the asoro tree to eat lunch. I hadn't brought anything to eat and planned to go without but that was out of the question.

One of the women opened a basket and handed out pieces of round bread, like a tortilla or Nan. On top of this they shoveled a pile of sautéed vegetables, left overs pumpkin greens, and then lots of rice and we wrapped the bread like a taco and ate them off stainless steel plates. I kept demurring saying I wasn’t hungry, trying to be polite, but they ganged up on me and forced me to eat (I’m joking). It was delicious. It tasted so good!

We drank cool spring water from a bucket that was passed around and we sat and looked across at the mountains. I asked my litany of a thousand questions and they sat patiently and answered them all. Then they asked their litany of a thousand questions. One of the women told me her “story”, her life’s narrative, of trying to change the status quo, trying to save the forests from being sold and destroyed, of children dying, of hating her husband, of feeling stuck, and of desperately wanting an education.

This was the young teamster who ate lunch with us. When lunch was over and we went back to work I stopped to take a few pictures and then I asked the boy if I could take his buffalo team for “a spin” and try my hand at smoothing out a paddy. Now the women’s laughter resounded louder than ever across the plains but I deftly jumped on the smoothing board, took the whip and the reins and in a few minutes was doing a credible job. The boy wanted to know why I could do that so well and I explained that, among other things, I was a farmer back in the US and with that I solidified my acceptance.

I planted rice in the women’s line for the rest of the day. When it was quitting time the whole crew, men included, walked to the village and took turns washing off under the water pump at the well.

2009-03-29T07:56:00.000-07:00

This is how it's done. You have to stoop low from the hips and puts your weight into your thighs it becomes a fairly comfortable stance but after awhile, a few hours, you don't know if you'll be able to stand up straight again.

Of all my experiences in Nepal one of the most delightful memories I have, and it is still palpable (as if it was only yesterday), is standing in the amber light of late afternoon on the concrete slab by the well head as I vigorously pumped the well handle and these women and men took turns ducking under the heavy flow of water to wash off the mud.

They laughed like school children. I took a turn and sat under the strong stream of water while others pumped the pump and I scrubbed the mud from my legs and arms and both the women and men flocked around me attending to me, helping me.

When my colleagues from the conference came up from their meeting in the village, Renu, Tara and Laljahri ran to the well and joined the women and I, laughing and splashing water. Renu explained to the village women in Hindi who I was and why I was there and laughed with the women as they described my clumsiness planting rice, described all the mistakes I made, how slow I was, and how my poor white skin was too tender for Nepal. It was dreamy. The conference men, with the exception of Anil, stood at a distance watching. They were smiling but looked disconnected and out of place.

2009-03-29T06:31:00.000-07:00

When the rice is planted these next photos show what it looks like. The shades of the color green in Nepal are astonishing as I keep saying. The rice and corn are different shades of green and when they are planted close together they form a patchwork.

The rice paddies, too, with the water filled high to the top of the dikes, reflect the colors and the clouds and in the last photo, the sunset.

Part VIII: Back to the Conference

2009-03-29T06:29:00.000-07:00

I love this picture. Everyone in Nepal wears these "flip flops". It was easy to tell when the conference was in session because the doorway to the conference room was jambed with them where they had been kicked off the feet of the participants in this haphazard manner. It meant everyone was inside and hard a work.

In my presentations to the conference I usually shared real stories that illustrated what the sustainability movement in the US looked like and what directions it was taking as a way of dramatizing the ground that had been covered. I explained about transitioning and how sustainability was a unifying principal and how some people thought of it like a virtue, something that could only exist as an action, like kindness or honesty.

One story I shared at the Nepal conference was one I had also told at the G-9 Global Conference in Denver, Colorado when President Clinton was in office. It's a lovely story about sustainable agriculture in action particularly the complex issues involved in changing the status quo. I played no part in the story. I'm just passing it on but the story belongs to a friend, a dairy farmer in Indiana in the Midwestern US, who I'll call Dan.

Dan had a large dairy farm with lots of land, lots of barns and other buildings, lots of expensive equipment, lots of expensive top-of-the-line dairy cows and a huge amount of debt. The two seemed to go hand in hand. He watched for two or three years recently while his profitability plummeted. He saw his "Profit Per Cow "margin get sliced in half in a year. Even though he was fully mechanized he needed to hire someone to help with the daily operation. For a while his son and daughter-in-law lived on the farm and worked with him. But as money dried up they got jobs in town to help pay the bills on the farm. The bank was beginning to hint that he was falling behind and that they were worried about him.

Just before Thanksgiving in 1996 Dan was just at the point of calling it quits. He had booked the auctioner and set a date to sell off all the equipment and cows and find a real estate agent to help sell the farm. Dan and his wife had made the decision together. They were devastated by the idea but the stress had become overwhelming. Then Dan read an add (Surya's story a little further down in the blog will remind you of Dan's story.) in a diary magazine about a Grass Growers' Conference in Wisconsin that was a week away. He had no idea what it was about but he decided to go to the conference on a whim. He threw a sleeping bag and air mattress into his pickup, got his son to milk the cows for a few days while he took the time off, said goodbye to his wife, and made the long drive to upstate Wisconsin.

He wandered around the midway at the conference looking at what all the vendors were hawking in the form of new farming methods, new breeds, new versions of old ideas, and then he ran into Charlie Opitz, a dairy farmer from Wisconsin. They began a conversation about something or other but it showed that the two men were a lot alike and thought alike. Dan and Charlie went for a coffee and started to really talk. They talked for hours. Dan told Charlie every detail of his dairy operation and Charlie listened carefully. Then Charlie told him every detail about his operation. Dan listened. They talked most of that first night. Dan attended the presentation part of the conference the next day and heard Charlie and other members of the Grass Growers Association talk about how they were changing the way they farmed and were putting the emphasis on the grass and the soil. Dan was fascinated. Still, he had made a decision to sell his operation. The conference ended and Charlie and Dan said goodbye. Charlie gave Dan his business card and told him if he changed his mind to call him. He said it didn't matter what time of the day or night it was, just call him and then Dan drove home.

He pulled up in his yard in the middle of the night and was still wide awake from all the coffee he drank during the long drive. He made one more cup while he sat at the kitchen table listening to the wind and the clock tick. He took out Charlie's card and called him. He began to say, "I don't know....." and Charlie interrupted him. "Don't say another word. Me and some of the other boys are coming down to see you. We'll leave in an hour or so and be there tonight. In the meantime don't spend a cent. Don't by any Christmas presents, don't make any long distance calls, turn the lights off that you're not using. Try not to spend any money you don't need to" and he hung up. Dan went to bed. In the morning he told his wife he was having second thoughts about selling the farm.

Charlie and his entourage of Wisconsin Grass Growers took a walk with Dan around his farm the first morning they were there. They looked at everything. They looked at the tractors, the fencing, each cow, the milking parlor, the machines in there, and they looked at the house and everything in it. Then they bought some food, cooked a huge dinner and got Dan and his whole family seated in the dinning room and began a discussion that went on into the early morning.

They helped Dan see the box he was in. He owed the bank a lot of money that he could only pay back with his milk receipts. His milk receipts were falling in value quickly. He was behind. He owed the veterinarian thousands of dollars because he had super breed, high production Holsteins that were sensitive to the cold, had all kinds of udder problems, and produced a designer milk low in butter fat. He owed the nutrionist a lot of money for all the fancy soy and corn supplements he fed his cows, the local Extension Service out of the state university was also charging him money for consulting fees, and lastly, he couldn't afford any help, not even his own son, and he was stressed to the max.

What Charlie told him to do was keep the date of the auction and get rid of all his high priced tractors and hay bailers, plows, seeders, manure spreaders, all the gas guzzlers. Then he told Dan to sell all his cows. Then he told Dan to take the money from those sales and pay off the bank everything he owed and with the money left over buy two ATV (All Terrain Vehicles) machines that are sort of like motorcycles except they have four wheels and more power. He told Dad to start buying a replacment herd only this time buy sturdier cows, older breeds, that gave less milk per milking but were rugged enough to gaze outside in Indiana all winter so they could be kept on grass. Grass was the key to all of this if you haven't figured that out yet.

Dan did everything that Charlie recommended and two years later at Christmas, after Dan came back from telling his story at the Wisconsin Grass Grower's Conference to a standing ovation his old banker showed up at the farm with a big basket of fruits and cheeses and told Dan, "We really miss you down at the bank." Dan was now making enough profit per cow per year to pay his bill and to pay his son and daughter-in-law enough money so they could be back on the farm. In fact the farm was making enough money now that they were planning to take it over when Dan retired or died. We're talking about profit, I reminded the people at the conference, and it underlines the fact that if it isn't profitable it isn't sustainable. If it isn't profitable in some way for some one no one will want to do it.

Dan and Charlie's measuring tool for success is the grass they grow. If they are farming sustainably they're making money but their soil and grass are optimally healthy. One way Charlie had of measuring soil health was the number of earth worms in a given measure of soil. He had so many that they often migrated across his farm to less populated pastures.

Dan was selling his milk locally to a strong market. He sold "value added"milk products: butter, yoghurt, ice cream, cream and sold fresh eggs because he was running chickens through the cow pasture to help keep the grass healthy and free of parasites. He grazes his cows in a line across the pasture with their heads just a little back of a two strand electric fence that he stretchs across the pasture and moves a few yards up the pasture everyday. The cows eat and then drop their manure across the field close to the fence as they graze. Dan can manage the fertility of his pastures by moving the electric fence faster or slower up the field and back down again in a rotation. This is good for the grass and soil. He feeds the cows hay in the winter laid out in a "ribbon" in front of the same, solar-powered electric fence. He supplements the hay with protein in the form of thumb-sized nuggets of his own corn that he spreads out of a bucket on top of the hay. He still has one tractor with a cutter for hay. He lays up the hay in round bales that he can easily put on the back of one of the small ATVs and pull it out, like cotton candy, in a wide ribbon across the pasture. Dan has been able to climb out of the box he was in pretty quickly with Charlie's help. He helped start an Indiana Grass Growers Association and he usually comes to the annual Vermont Grass Growers Association each winter so I'm able to stay in touch with him.

2009-03-28T16:27:00.000-07:00

Tikka is holding his symbol of local resilience, locally bottled Chiuri juice. Chiuri is a local, Nepali tree crop, a fruit with a wonderful tangy, citrus flavor. The men at the conference touted the bottle of juice as their answer to Coca Cola. This bottle represented the beginning of a real business venture and a real product now in production in Nepal. It has become a rallying point around the country in support of the "buy local" movement.

There was a definite ease among the men at the conference who would sit around and talk for hours by themselves. I'm not sure what they talked about but their body language said they were relaxed and enjoying themselves. In most cultures it is in small groups like these that men make important decisions.

The men in this group work for the government of Nepal in some capacity and all of them are intimately involved in the national political "scene" so it is not surprising that they have a lot in common and probably have a lot to talk about. In the photo above Laljahri is sitting near Prakash listening intently to every word. She later commented that they were talking politics and not about conference related things

One can sense in the men, immediately upon meeting them, an entitlement and a fraternal kind of connection between them that is disrupted when the women are close by. This entitlement is unique, I think, to Indian and Nepali men but I'm not sure and maybe stereotyping them which I want to avoid.

2009-03-28T16:21:00.000-07:00

White men in America also act entitled and fraternal. It isn't unique to one place or one culture. I have my own entitlement issues, to be honest, as well as tendencies to be defensive and overly sensitive in some group situations. The point is that I feel men have to change, myself included, if we are going to do this well in terms of achieving a greater degree of sustainability. The Nepali men are charming and personable but that is not the point. We also have to be more inclusive and more accessible and less guarded, less paranoid that some one will see who we really are under our defenses. Why is this important?

Warren Facey, a farmer in Massachusetts that I have worked with in groups, once suggested that after an important meeting that a student intern be provided for each participant in the meeting and immediately after the meeting each participant would be sequestered in a seperate room with intern who would write verbatim how the participant described everything that was said and what was decided at the meeting. Then, all the interns would return to the meeting room and, one by one, read the descriptions of what was said with the participants listening but not allowed to comment or correct anything. Warren's hypothesis is that the descriptions would be incredibly different and the results would show that communication, generally, at meetings is often terrible.

It's important that there is consensus, that we all try to communicate with each other well, making sure we are understood and that we understand the members. It may sound tedious, but the idea or practice of entitlement, any derivation of entitlement, is that one group has more power than any other by color, gender, race, education, class, money, job titles, color of the hair, beauty, body shape and size, in other words for myriad reasons. In the United States we have this Platonic idea that one man can have all the answers, the president, the coach, the professor. We have the hardest time saying we don't know something so entitlements are often our defenses to hide a sense of inadequacy and to create a sense of authority. As a social worker I am in schools often to deal with aggressive students. Most of the aggression I see in the classrooms, perpetrated by young men particularly, is really a defense against their sense of inadequacy at not being able to read. They're ashamed so they act tough.

The men at the Nepal conference enjoyed a sense of power and mastery based, for example, their vast knowledge of the political situation in Nepal. They referred endlessly to what was going on in the parliament and about strategies for gaining power, strategies for weakening the power of their opposition opposing political parties. They were an "in-group" and they used their level of knowledge to keep their group exclusive. They were collaborative with the other conference members to a degree, but found it difficult to collaborate with the membership as a whole. They saw them selves as "apart from" based on their social class and education. This is what's called covert uses of power. It goes on in every conference and every meeting. It goes on everywhere. I am not in any way condemning these men. I'm just observing that if we are truly going to try sustainability as a course of action then we have to be inclusive, flexible, and less defensive.

The men, like men everywhere, were in control of their emotions throughout the conference. They didn't get angry or cry. Ii never heard one of them speak from their hearts and I felt that to do so was considered a taboo. I couldn't tell if it was their upbringing, meaning their caste, or if it is because in Asia the role of men is so different. At any rate, even in this lack of openness and awkwardness at being true to their feelings they were also like western men. I am not saying they don't feel. I'm just saying they keep their feelings hidden.

When I sat with them and listened to their jokes and remarks about life in general, about sports or politics, I felt they were no different than western men. They had power. They had little to lose and little at stake. They were enjoying the conference and the connection among themselves and for them it was enough. The women, on the other hand, were passionate, clear, committed, and one got the sense that it was their lives and their livelihoods they were fighting for.

2009-03-28T15:55:00.000-07:00

In addition to the sense of entitlemen exhibited by the Nepali men at the conference they also acted out the culturally fashioned separation of men from women that I've already mentioned. In the context of the conference it made little difference because it was the norm. The men ate by together and by themselves at each meal.

The men also worked together and were clearly more comfortable doing this during hands-on exercises as were the women.

2009-03-28T15:49:00.000-07:00

Tara was comfortable working on a project by herself only in this case she was finishing up for the group of women and attending to details as the other women got ready to do a presentation. Tara was also comfortable working with men. By the way she dressed in comfortable clothing and by her professional demeanor she had found her own "place" in the conference environment and established her authority in her consistent low-key approach to things. Both she, and Renu, were the most undefended people I had ever met

So, in the first two or three days the women stuck together as a group and talked energetically among themselves and occasionally to me. They would test ideas they had on me, fine tune them, and then go back to the group to present them. Their presentations were usually passionate, emotion filled attempts to get their more proactive views of the world heard clearly by the men. It’s risky speculation to say this but I think it is mostly true and that is that I saw the men splitting things apart and I saw the women strategically trying to unify things.

Tara, Renu and Laljahri, at about day three, began to speak more clearly about their definition of sustainability and how they interpreted the forces that constrained it including the accelerating global economy that was ruthlessly expanding to every nook and cranny of Nepal and the world. Again, they were more open than the men. They saw the globalization phenomenon having things to offer Nepali women if only recognition and acknowledgment. What Renu and the Women's Foundation was trying to create for Nepali women was legitimacy, equality under the law, and security, opportunities to improve their health and well being, for themselves and their children. They saw sustainability as a movement towards greater justice for all people. They saw it as a move towards better opportunities for all people including health and security. They did not expect Nepali women to immediately have the same opportunities that Western women have, but they desperately wanted to have nascent opportunities to take the one or two difficult steps out of their debilitating poverty.

Of the material that I presented at the conference the women like the story of Dan the Dairy Farmer from Indiana most. They could see parallels with their stories in feeling like they were in a "box". The particularly liked the idea that the whole effort to change his well being was about trying to improve the soil and the grass on his farm as a way of increasing his profitability so his family would be taken care of and the community, too, would be served. Tara pointed out that what he was doing was essential, that it enhanced and enriched the community and the environment. The process began when he decided to take a huge risk and reduce his material possessions and move towards keeping what was useful and what "mattered", as she put it.

The women pointed out that Dan reduced his own consumption significantly while increasing those products that were necessary to his family and the community. They felt like reducing the role of the bank (banks in general) in his farm was the more sustainable direction to go towards. They drew parallels between the increasing role of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Nepal to the point that the banks are gaining more and more control over the country's agriculture and natural resources. They reiterated information that the WB is telling Nepal to grow more products to sell to industrialized countries, like coffee and sugar, as has already been mentioned here. They also like the point made in Dan's story that in order for his farm, the agriculture he practiced to be sustainable it also had to be profitable. To repeat it, the point is that no one, not Dan's son or anyone else, will want to take over the farm, any farm, if they can't make money and stay out of debt.

Renu broke away from the women's "bloc" and took the initiative to sit and talk to the men.

I told a story at the conference about farming and debt. The story is true even though it sounds like a joke. It involves this farm family that owns a huge farm in the US. They are constantly in debt and struggling but then one day they win a huge amount of money, millions and millions of dollars, in a lottery. It's the largest prize anyone has ever won in their state so the newspaper and TV news teams rush to the farm to interview the family in time for the 6 o'clock news. The TV news trucks pull into the farm family's drive way, set up their lights and satellite dishes, get all their equipment organized and then ask the farm family to come out and stand on the front steps which they do. Then, precisely at 6 p.m., one of the TV reporters, holding his microphone close to the farmer, says: "Well Bob, you won a lot of money today. What are you planning to do with it?" The farmer looks at the TV reporter as if he's crazy and says, "Well, I guess we'll just keep on farming until all the money's gone."

Renu took a leadership position and moved into the men's "camp"and "joining" them, in a sense, by sitting with them and allowing them to use her as a resource since her experiences have been and continue to be even today so much more on the practical level than theirs. Of course, she had a strategy which was to help the men see the women's point of view of sustainability and some of the other issues addressed at the conference. Earlier I talked about the women's perspectives of sustainability and globalization and how they interpreted these two "forces" or issues in their lives. As the conference continued they gently defused the polarity by stressing their two primary issues: health and justice. They were eloquent in saying that sustainability revolves around the health and welfare of children, families and communities.

I'll talk more about Renu's inventiveness and courage in a separate entry below but these pictures, as spontaneous as they were when I took them, say a lot about the conference from the perspective of the women. Renu, at least it seemed, was always on task, always "present" and always committed to her passion for women's rights. She is, to me, an individual who thinks and works at the level of a Nobel Laureats with her combination of courage, commitment (passion) and her brilliance.

I am now going to introduce some of the women I met and worked with and that I got to know a little during my months in Nepal via the following photographs. Some of the photos have appeared before in this blog and in magazines but the idea of this brief detour is to kind of overwhelm you with the beauty and humanity of these people. One of my favorite poems is by Marge Piercy, the American poet, titled "To Be of Use" and I want to slip it in here because I was reminded of it everyday while I was in Nepal and working with the women. The imagery of the poem slides perfectly over my images of Nepal and the women working in the fields and villages.

To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Part IX Portraits of Nepali Women

2009-03-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

These women were carrying hay that would be used to feed animals from somewhere in the foothills down to a village along the Trishuli River. They'd carried the hay a long way and it's something Nepali women do constantly. They carry incredible loads like these, or it might be water or corn. The following portraits of Nepali women are hopefully a good cross section and representative of all Nepali women. I dedicated this blog to them because I was given a rare opportunity, a priviledge really, through my work with the conference, to get to know some of these woman, to be invited to their villages and into their homes, to sit and listen to their stories, and to work along side of them, and in all of that I was given a rare and wonderful gift, a rare glimpse into their everyday, ordinary lives. But they are not ordinary by any means. I was moved to tears, over and over, by their courage, their spirit, their brilliance, their stamina, and their beauty.

This mother and daughter are caught in a routine endeavor of moving enormous amounts of corn from the field to their home where they will spend hours shucking the corn and preparing it for food. As you can see by the expressions on their faces it is a daunting task and one, certainly, that they are inured to.

I'm not going to write comments under each picture as they photos speak for themselves in most cases. I'm tempted to exclaim about my favorites but I will desist.

2009-03-24T07:03:00.000-07:00

2009-03-24T06:33:00.000-07:00

A woman and her daughter-in-law on main street in Naryanghar on a shopping trip.
This is a dear friend, Tenzing Passang, who lives in a Tibetan refuge camp near Pokhara, Nepal.
A Tibetan woman and close friend of mine who lives in the small Tibetan enclave in Kathmandu with her family and her grandfather who is a very old, wise, and revered as a Lama and scholar.

A Gurund woman near Chomrong on the path to Annapurna base camp. The Gurund are a minority group but because of the famed Gurka Regiment that fought for the British for hundreds of years and now guard Buckingham Palace the Gurund still get subsides from the British government and are considered wealthy by Nepali standards.

2009-03-24T06:27:00.000-07:00

2009-03-24T05:58:00.000-07:00

Winnowing fresh rice that has just been harvested

2009-03-24T05:52:00.000-07:00

This is Anil's mother, Ms. Bhatteri. I was privileged to spend a day with Anil's family and take pictures of them. His mother never ceased working while I was there and she taught me how to do things that she did routinely everyday like winnow the rice as she is doing in this series of photos. I loved the way she got the rice to come up off the basket in a disk shape and was able to achieve that effect a few times. It was easiest for me to help by picking out the small stones and chaff.

I wrote in my journal that day: "When we got to Anil's village we decided to walk the mile, or so to his parents' house but within a minute ran into his mother who was shopping. She is about my age and very beautiful. Her hair is a silvery grey and her eyes have a wonderful luster. It was too much not to take her picture with the shop keeper (it was a beautiful portrait) but I sensed cultural tension and didn't take the picture. However, when we got to the house, she was totally at ease and let me take several pictures of her doing her daily routines. We just kind of hung out there. Anil's sister picked some mangoes and his mother sliced them for us with her corn knife. I was afraid I would not be able to stop eating the mango. We also had pomergranate, pineapple and limeade that was out of this world."

"It rained for some time so we sat on the porch and joked and talked for some time about farming stuff mostly. When the rain let up for a bit we went across the road to see a garden Anil's grandfather keeps. It's amazing. He had a tiered system, stacking plants up, with ginger on the "ground floor" with pineapple intermixed, then limes, lemons, and oranges, and at the top are bananas. He also has several varieties of squash and vegetable greens. He uses the squash, with their broad leaves, as weed control and they work quite well. In fact his wee control is unbelievable for this climate and his production ratio, for a plot of land less that's a little more than 40 meters square, is stupendous. His corn was sparse--there may be nitrogen issues, or maybe too much iron, but it looked good for an organic practice.

"The afternoon was magical for me, with the first heavy monsoon rains, the sweet smells from the rain, the long walks through the fields, having the lovely and leisurely intimacy with Anil's family, the food, the colors and the light; the deeper immersion into Nepal--it was all simply wonderful." (end of quote)

2009-03-24T05:34:00.000-07:00

2009-03-24T05:28:00.000-07:00

2009-03-24T05:22:00.000-07:00

2009-03-23T05:48:00.000-07:00

This woman is an herbalist and sells her herbal remedies, medicines she has created using anciety formulas, in the street. She was always very busy but also enjoyed talking and I spent a lot of time with her comparing notes on medicinal plants.

These women worked in the most abominable place, a dye works, where they dyed cloth for women's saris. To the right in the back ground you can see Surya being a ham.

The water in Nepal was superb but there was not system for moving it so the women went to central locations where there was a stream, or as in the photo above, a public facucet, where they washed clothes and collected water for use in their homes. In the dry months it was common to see women and young girls carrying the brass pitchers like the one in the photo below on their heads, full of water, up steep trails, for mile and miles, all the time worrying about being attacked by a tiger.

The well at Rampur where we washed out dishes and bathed

2009-03-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

2009-03-23T05:33:00.000-07:00

It's astonishingly hot in Nepal in the summer months. The temperature is often over a 100 degrees (F) / 40 degrees (C). These Kumal women and children were escaping the mid-day heat under a palm frond shelter in their village.

In their finest clothes.
These women are worshipping the tree they are standing under. Every month, using the moon to set their calenders, for one entire day they go out and worship a tree. They dress up in their finest saris and bring offerings to the trees in the form of food and water and they meditate for hours as a group.

When I took these photos I was first yelled at by some men that I shouldn't and then told by the men that I couldn't even talk to the women so I tacitly withdrew only to be called by the women to come over and take their picture and talk to them which I did and they were thrilled that I was curious and open to what they were doing. I sat with them and they explained their relationship with the trees and why they worshipped them. This was another example of how confusing communication between the genders often is in Nepal and how deep the cultural roots of the separation between the genders are.

Women in the foothills of the Himalaya

2009-03-23T05:04:00.000-07:00

This woman is also a Gurund and lives near the base of Annapurna. She supplements corn with barley which she was beginning to harvest when I took these pictures.

A woman on the path to Annapurna base camp.

Young woman grooming her sister's hair.

2009-03-23T04:56:00.000-07:00

This girl was grooming her sister's hair first looking for lice and nits and then combing it out. Often I would see several girls, whole families, sitting back to back to back each member grooming the hair of the sibling in front of them.

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2009-03-23T04:35:00.000-07:00

Mothers and grandmothers

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2009-03-23T04:24:00.000-07:00

This woman gave me a ride in her boat across Lake Bagnis very early one morning as I was leaving Surya's village and heading for Pokhara. She saved me many miles of walking and the time it would have consumed. She was so gracious in her humility and her physical strength and stamina. Paddling the boat across the lake was kind of symbolic of what most Nepali women do not have and yet there she was happy for the company and finding pleasure in what she was doing.

This is Surya's older daughter who he has "liberated" in the sense that he has given her freedom to do what she wants with her own life, given her autonomy in other words. Her reaction, at first, was confusion because she didn't really appreciate or know exactly what to do with her liberty, her freedom, but of course it wasn't long before she realized how unique it was to be able to say she could set her own course in life: do what she wants to do, marry who she wants to if she wants to be married, have a career, travel, study, and to not be tyrannized by that freedom.

These two young women in these last two photos in this section were standing on a stone wall as the sun set behind them. They were dressed in their finest clothes and were very excited when I asked if I could take their picture. They hopped closer together and stood in perfect poise as I took several frames. The picture below strikes me in a much different perspective than it did when I took and I see them now as standing together looking out towards the world. It represents Hope in a way I didn't quite see when I was actually there. My hope is that Nepali women are given their autonomy and allowed educations, political access to the government, health care, and legal protection under the constitution and local laws.

As for that level of hope, however, as I write this in May 2009 I just received an email from Renu in Kathmandu saying that the upheaval in the Nepali government during the past week casts a pall over the plight of women and any progress they have made in the Nepali courts in the last few years. Renu cited several cases she has been working on at the Women's Foundation during the past two weeks, since May 4, 2009, one, in particular, in which a woman reported being tortured, raped, threatened with death and then beaten on the head with bricks until she lost consciousness by her husband who also tortured their children by raping their mother in front of them and binding them by their hands and feet and leaving them without food. It's hard to think of anything to say after you read some of Renu's emails.

Part X. Back to the Conference and a Field Trip to an IPM Research Station

2009-03-20T17:26:00.000-07:00

My adventure mid-way through the conference of planting rice didn't count as a "field trip" per se because we were really there to conduct a meeting with the village leaders. I had played hooky was all. But we went on bonafide field trips in which we got excited like kids at summer camp and electrified with anticipation as we squeezed into the landrovers and headed off into the wilds of Nepal.
Monsoon season presented a few problems for us as we explored outside of Naryanghar. In this picture we had hired a small van which was top heavy and got caught in a flash flood from a heavy monsoon cloud burst that washed out the road and almost took us with it down a steep embankment on the left side of the road. It was good excitement.

Several of the women from the conference and a few new faces, mainly administrators of NGOs who were attending the conference only for the day, came along on a field trip to an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) research station which was a relatively new entity in Nepal. IPM is part of a strategy that emerged in the 1980s after the dramatic failure of the so-called "Green Revolution" to increase food yields from existing agricultural lands in the third world. Skewed thinking and experimenting with hybridization of crop plants, super fertilizers, pesticides and industrial agricultural production methods. All of this involved using a lot of chemicals that were going to "change the world" but only created havoc. The new hybrids were vulnerable to insects, diseases and the climate. The remedy was to go back to the drawing boards and find more sustainable crop production methods.

Ram Chandra, the tall one in the center, rarely looks this serious. He's a consultant and an IPM expert with a lot of practical insights that we all found useful. IPM requires educating farmers to adopt new ways of looking after their crops. One goal for the farmers is to develop methods to farm without using pesticide and that's where IPM comes in. In a nut shell, the farmers are taught about insects until they are able to discriminate between the beneficial insects, like lady bugs that increase crop productivity, and non-beneficals that destroy crops. Then the farmers are taught how to set up transects which are lines, real or imaginary, across a field or paddy where crops are growing. The farmer uses the transect as a way to "sample" insects that are present. The farmer moves along the transect looking for insects and takes a count of each type of insect he/she sees. Then the farmer takes his data to agroup of farmers, already organized as part of the IPM project, that grow the same crops he/she does and between the group of farmers a decision is made on how to respond to the insects. If all the farmers are seeing an increase in the population of a non-beneficial insect they might decide to spay some insecticice, or based on their collective experience they may not spay but wait to see if a beneficial insect might attack the predators. Another name for this process is "participatory research" or action planning. It's effective in the realm of sustainability because it improves the capacity of the farmers to make decisions that include the health of the environment where they used to just consider the economics.

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The woman in the photo is from a village nearby the conference site and she came just for the oIntegrated Pest Managment (IPM) workshop. She was intent on learning everything she could about IPM and was an excellent student. She learned quickly and shared some astonishing insights with the other participants about how IPM works.

The importance of integrated pest managment (IPM) is that it relies on observation made by the farmer/grower who then makes decisions on how to resolve a problem effecting his crops based on his/her own experience. It is not pure science and it does not rely on scientific training or equipment. It simplifies all of that and puts the process firmly within the control of the farmer.

Like most of the conference field trips the IPM workshop was as much about learning as it was about connecting and building relationships for the future. One of the goals of the Chitwan conference was to create a "pool" of people who would be resources/leaders in the future for both practical and political purposes. The field trips, if nothing else, were fun and relaxing. The IPM field trip was also practical. It taught the conference participants the direct methods for observing key factors that could destroy crops including factors other than insects. IPM is idealy suited for crops like corn, rice as well as orchard and tree crops like apples, peaches, mangoes, pears, or even for flowers and ornamentals. The conference participants first learned how to make a "transect". The transect is usually a straight line but doesn't have to be. It can be a line of sight, say from a rock on one side of the field to a tree on the other side, or it can be defined with string stretched across the field where the crops are growing. Once the transect is defined the grower simply walks along it observing everything he/she can .

These men were looking at a plantation of young chuiri trees and inspecting them for tree pests like thrips and curcillo beetles. After they established the transect across the plantation they used a random sampling pattern to indentify both non beneficial and beneficial insects. While one team member observes and counts the others wrote down the findings. Often they had to ask Ram Chandra for a precise identification of an insect. The teams also looked for any sign of stress in the plants from heat, drought, fungal infections, or over watering.

After everyone had a chance to walk the transect and make observations the group met to discuss what everyone had seen. This is a key aspect of IPM which is the group response to the observations made along the transect. IPM is successful because of the reliance on more than one opinion. It utilizes all of the available wisdom and experience of the group. In the case where everyone does not know the scientific names of the insects they have seen so they invent name of their own. In one case they named a beetle the Red Motorcycle Helmet Bug which was a bit cumbersome but effective.

IPM was developed for use by farmers in the under-developed countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal after the "Green Revolution" of the 1970s failed in its goal to double crop production in those countries with exploding populations. Since the 1980's IPM has had a successful track record where ever it's been used. It's quick and to the point and allows the farmer the discretion of his/her own experience. In all these ways it is described as a "sustainable" practice.

Field Trip to a Kumal Village on the Naryani River south of Naryangarh

2009-03-20T14:53:00.000-07:00

One afternoon as monsoon clouds swept in from the east, from the Bay of Bengal, a number of us bicycled ten miles or so south to Kumal village that was about to be moved to another site. We bicycled along a deeply rutted path that paralleled the river until we came to a group of kids playing on the bank of the river and down in the river were several of the Kumal's large, dugout canoes, piloted by young boys not more than six or seven years old, deftly plying the canoes in and out of the swift current.

Like the Mushar people theKumal are extremely poor, poorer than one can imagine. Their village is a far, far cry from anything resembling a European village.

The Kumal women told us about a "revolving loan fund" they had created which was based on everyone in the village putting aside money they saved by quitting smoking and drinking (rice beer primarily). The women were concerned about the high levels of alcoholism in the village among the men, they said, and felt that instead of spending money on alcohol it could benefit the village in other ways. The loan fund required each person to contribute, each week, the rupees that would have been spent on beer and cigarettes into the “loan fund” and it would then be saved for future money-making or money-saving projects. The purpose was to eventually have enough money saved to create a local bank with the capacity to grant low interests loans to village members. The loans would be granted to proposed projects that could benefit the community and help the community emerge from it's debilitating poverty. A woman had been trained to administer the “bank”.

The women had intially agreed to stop smoking and put their cigarette money into the loan fund to make the men jealous enough, because they had money to spend and the men didn't, to put their beer and cigarette money into the loan fund. They succeeded and the men began making "installments" into the fund. One proposed use of the money was to buy a few long-haired goats, like Angoras, and breed them. The women would use the "wool" (hair, actually) from the goats for weaving scarves and the goats would also provide milk and an occasional meat supply for the village. For the moment, as of the week we visited, the loan fund was a successful but still a novelty. The women feared that the novelty would wear off all too soon and the men, and some of the women, would become dissatisfied and go back to drinking and smoking.

2009-03-20T08:09:00.000-07:00

The Kumals’ primary livelihood is fishing in the Naryani. They are also masters at weaving nets and using them to fish in the river. They are subsistence fishermen but try to catch a consistent surplus to sell in neighboring villages.

They carve their long "dugout" canoes out of Saal, a strong, native wood that resembles the white oak (Quercus alba) of North America. They have amazing and even enviable skills, even the youngest, handling the dugouts efficiently in the swift current. The dugout have flat bottoms which makes them much more stable than a conventional canoe.

At the time we visited the Kumal hte Nepal government was in the process of forcing them to move from their ancestral home, here where I photographed them on the east bank of the Naryani, to make more space and river access for the Chitwan National Park that was nearing completion when I was there. They were also being forced by the government to cut down on fishing quotas because the government was leasing fishing rights to contractors just down the river in India to create revenue.

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This Kumal dugout that was recently carved from a single Saal log has been left out in the sun and the rain to "season" and to dry fully so that it will be light in the water.

In addition to fishing they also grow corn but there is a pronounced lack of fertility in their soil caused possibly by a long history of overuse as well as poverty. The soil is predominantly clay from the river which is poor for growing corn in. The corn yields are low and the ears are spindly.

They have tried intercropping peanuts and other legumes (plants like peas, peanuts, clover and alfalfa that "fix" nitrogen from the air and release it back into the soil), to try and increase soil fertility by increasing the nitrogen content. They’ve also added composted manure and sand to help break up the clay and improve the soil by helping it to drain better. The day we bicycled to their village the women were busy bringing in the corn stalks that they would use as fodder for the village's many water buffalo .

A Kumal girl who eagerly wanted her picture taken.

Two ideas were taken back to the conference for discussion. The first was their dire poverty and the impact on their poverty by being forced to move by the Nepali government. Moving seems to be the destiny of many indigenous groups in Asian and North American history. For the Kumal the move was emotionally taxing but it also taxed their slender resources generally. A bright note was that the new site of their village may have better soils for corn and rice.

The second point taken back to the conference was the quality of the soil and how that is such a strong consideration within the concept of sustainability and sustainable agriculture. Soil is a valuable resource in any locale. It is absolutely essential to all life on earth. From the standpoint of sustainability the question came up of how to improve soils when they are heavy with clay, or lack organic matter like sand?

This was somewhat my department. I stressed the importance of seeing soil as a living thing that needs air to breate, needs to be crumbly and not compacted to aid breathing, and it needs to be fed. It needs a constant supply of food and enzymes to help break down the food so that it is absorbed by the soil. Like humans it needs digestion-aiding microbes, enzymes, and constant interactions with a huge range of soil fauna and flora. These range from worms, beetles, ants, fungi, the microrhyza of these fungi, certain algae, and microscopic organisms, too. Soils are the result of the actions and interactions of weather, plants, and animals. I also told them my pet theory of soil that it is a living tissue that is protected by the plants that grown in it. The plants act like white blood cells in mammals. When the soil is wounded, a scar is opened, the plants rush to cover it up and heal it. What we call "weeds", and all plants essentially, are the first line of the Earth's defense system when a wound has been opened up in the soil's surface.

2009-03-18T05:30:00.000-07:00

We also visited a Mushar village close to the conference site where I was introduced to an elderly man who what a healer or shaman, and who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the medicinal plants of the region and of Nepal generally. There was a controversy in the village regarding this man because he was getting old, developing cataracts and the village feared that if he died the knowledge he had would die with him. There were no young members of the village who wanted to carry on the tradition this man represented.

I spent an hour, or so, talking to him through a young interpreter and told him stories from indigenous groups that I have worked with in South and North America and their profound fears that they, too, have lost or are in the process of losing this knowledge and are struggling to preserve it. I told him about my friend, Iona, an Iroquois woman living in Canada who has the same fears he has about the impending loss of the “Old Ways” and specifically the knowledge of wild plants as medicines, food, fibers, and dyes.

Before I left Nepal I went back to the village several times to talk to the medicine man. I was able to borrowed a small motorbike and I steered my way drove across the broad valley following myriad rutted tracks between the corn fields and rice paddies constantly looking to the north and the hoped-for break in the clouds that would give me my glimpse of Annapurna. The heat in the unbelievable under a searing sun. It was well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. When I arrived at the village I would sit in the cool Bokino grove with the medicine man. Women brought plates of fresh fruit, pineapple, mangos, chuiri and jack fruit. We sipped water from cool, stainless steel tumblers and talked about plants and medicine and fate of Nepal’s indigenous people and the indigenous people around the globe. Before I left Nepal I was happy to hear that a young man in the village, someone in their early 20s, was going to apprentice to the medicine man to sustain the medicinal plant tradition and knowledge.

Part XI: Laljahri Mahji, community organizer, fisherwoman, farmer, and entrepreneur

2009-03-15T11:34:00.000-07:00

This is Laljahri Mahji, a 30-something year-old woman from a remote village in central Nepal, as she prepared for her famous role play in which she asked the men in her village to be women for one day.

This is a scene in Laljahri's village which is located on the Trishuli River in central Nepal.

Laljahri heard about the conference because she was one of Renu’s “students” in a literacy program Renu and the Women’s Foundation had established for women throughout Nepal. The program, started in 1992 was created to teach women how to read complicated legal documents, law books, write formal letters that could be used as legal documents in courts, and to take on leadership positions in their communities. This program was “jump started" when two of the foundation’s staff, and it may have been Renu and Tara, took on 25 Nepali women who wanted to learn how to read and write. Over a six month-long period, working nearly every day, the women met as a group and practiced reading and writing for hours. They were taught by their teachers but eventually helped each other. The degree to which they were taught, meaning the amount of skill and knowledge they acquired, is the critical piece. After graduation the women, working in pairs, took on 25 new students and taught them everything they had learned and in this way, with a miniscule budget, these women catalyzed a successful literacy that reaches thousands of women a year.

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Laljahri was an active participant in the conference and was able to redefine sustainability as it applied, with all its variables, to her experience in a small village in a poor nation.. Intimidated by the educated men at first she resolved to sit quietly and listen to everything she heard. Later, after dinner, she would approach me and Renu and ask us to explain what she had heard.

In my first conversation with Laljahri she said, “I don’t know much.” I asked her if she was just said it because she was thinking that I knew a lot because I was from far, far away and she laughed and said “yes.” I laughed and said she should be really careful because people from far away might not even know half of what she knows about lots of things.

Laljahri and Renu are too mature and polite to laugh at me for being silly, but I was trying to show what giants Nepali women are!

Laljahri said she was about 32 years old. Her name means Red Monsoon and refers to something that happened when she was born that's supposed to help her keep a record of her chronological age. She told me she's been married since she was a teen and was one of those Nepali girls at risk for being sold to a brothel because her family had no money. In rural Nepal girl infanticide is also a common practice so going to a brothel, to some, (not Laljahri) is better than drowning. She accepted marriage to a local man instead. He already had a wife but he agreed to keep Laljahri if she “gave” him a son. She told me that she had been pregnant 13 times, had gone to term three times but the babies were all still born. The other 10 pregnancies were miscarriages, she said. She told Renu and I that she was concerned for her life because if she didn’t have a child soon her husband would throw her out of the house. He had already taken another, younger, wife and Laljahri said the younger woman is trying everything she can to get Laljahri out of the house, to get rid of her. Laljahri added the unsavory details of living and competing with a conspicuously jealous younger wife and how she has to lie next to them at night while they have sex. At one point during the first week of the conference she told me, “All I want is to have my own children, my very own children!”

I am just under six feet tall so you can see how tall Laljahri and Renu are. They are both normal height for Nepali women.

Laljahri urged me to come to her village after the conference. She wanted me to come and stay for awhile and work with her, mainly for moral support. Her role in her village was making fishing nets and fishing in the river using a canoe like the long dug outs we had seen at the Kumal village. She wanted to teach me how to make a canoe and how to use it on the river. I was impressed because the river is quite large and fast. She didn’t know how to swim, she said. She wanted me to help move the community out of and away from poverty. She, herself, wanted to encourage her neighbors to start a “loan fund”. Inspired by Surya she also wanted to start a permaculture project using banana and orange trees, coffee, rice, and ginger which the village could both use and sell and make a profit.

2009-03-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

Laljahri preparing for her role play that she and the other women in her village performancd with the men taking the role of village women and the women assuming the roles of the men.

I, Renu and a few other conference members, went with Lalhari to her village principally to help her conduct the role play she had rehearsed at the conference. We all felt it was brilliant and I was anxious to do whatever I could to assist her. I purposefully didn’t take photos of the role play at her request because Laljahri was afraid just my presence would be distracting to the men and other villagers. If I was snapping pictures she felt it would be too embarrassing for the men. I will describe it though.

Laljahri waited until the late afternoon the day of our arrival in her village to announce the role play. She gathered everyone in an open space near the houses. The houses were small huts made of sticks and mud and the roofs were thatch. She had everyone sit in a group and she explained that at the conference she had learned many things and that from her experience at the conference she wanted to put on a role play for the whole village. She asked if everyone would volunteer to participate without any exceptions. Everyone agreed to participate.

A boy in the village caught these fish for his own consumption. Laljahri goes out on the river in a dugout canoe as part of her daily routine and uses nets she makes herself to catch a lot of fish, a principal food of her village.

Laljahri then said that the role play would involve something different and she didn’t want anyone to be upset and she hoped they would all be open minded. She joked a bit and got everyone laughing then she announced that what she wanted to have happen was for one day she wanted everyone to switch gender. She said beginning the next morning she wanted the men to act like the women are supposed to and the women would be the men for a change. The men all roared with laughter and began immediately to act like women in somewhat demeaning ways. Laljahri let them play out their anxiety but reminded them that the next day they would have to take their roles seriously.

The next morning Laljahri woke the village up and told the men to start doing the women’s chores by lighting the fire and boiling milk for breakfast and then go to the fields to work and she and “the other men” (the women) would call them when it was time to come back. She told the men not to forget the children. The men began complaining instantly and looked at me as if they blamed me for what was happening.

A family group from a Kumal village similar and not far from Laljahri's community.

While the men were out of sight Laljahri and the other women got ready for the main part of the role play. The called the men back early for lunch (Kana) and told them to sit in a group on the grassy sward near the center of the village. The men sat down, some of them clowning around a bit. The women came out as a group from behind one of the houses and stood silently with very serious expressions on their faces and, standing in a rigid line, watched the men intently, like really strict teachers. Two of the women stepped out of the line and went towards the men and began uttering terse commands, barking at them, to them to sit closer together. They carried little buffalo twitches and kept commanding the men to move closer in some cases pushing them physically. They pushed the men until the men were sitting on top of each other.

Nepal, in July and August, is incredibly hot, well above 100 degrees fahrenheit every afternoon making it necessary to seek shade whereever it can be found. Flying to Nepal and at a refueling stop in Dubai, passengers from the plane went outside only to run under the planes wing, to the shade there, to keep from passing out.

Then four women left the line and went behind one of the small huts and emerged pantomiming carrying something long and really, really heavy. The two in front walked heavily, bowed slightly at the waist, staggering almost with their hands held up to their shoulder where something painfully heavy was supported. They mimicked some one carrying a heavy bag. The other two women walked several yards behind the first two and doing everything the same as the first two, the same heavy steps. Then these four women walked in a circle around the group of men. They walked around two or three times.

The men were silent, watching. Some of them made inaudible wisecracks among themselves. The two women who had pushed them closely together were still there looking sternly at the men in case any of them tried to bolt. The women carrying the heavy load stopped. Then four more women came from the line and “picked up” one end of the “something” lying on the ground and pantomimed pulling it with all their might backwards. The four women who had carried the “something” around the men then took the other end and pulled in the opposite directions. As they pulled with all their strength the two women near the center kept barking at the men and pushing them even closer together. It was a chain. Everyone got it at the same time. The women were wrapping a huge chain around all the men. They pulled and pulled pulling the chain tighter and tighter.

I was amazed how well these women acted. The made it all feel real and vibrant the way they moved their bodies, flexed their muscles like men, and grimaced when the load was heavy.

Finally, Laljahri who was still standing and watching went behind the same hut and came back carrying something really heavy so that she staggered under the load. She put it on the ground near the other women and two women helped open something and then they took the ends of the chain and pulling it even tighter took what Laljahri had brought and put it through the chain. It was obviously an enormous padlock. Everyone seemed to get that at the same time, too. Then Laljahri turned something, a key. She had put a huge lock on the chain and she had locked it with a key. She then walked quickly across the grass to the edge of the river and made the motion of throwing the key way out into the middle of the river.

All the men understood it. They got the message and understood exactly what Laljhari and the other women were trying to say. Some of the women who had been watching and some of the men, too, were crying. It had been very powerful! It was amazing to watch the reactions. The women who acted out the role play went back and stood in their line with solemn expressions and quietly gazed at the men. They weren't judging the men. The men, for the most part, remained in their tight group wondering if there was more and afraid to move. After 10 or 15 minutes Laljahri gave them permission to get up and the role play ended. It was incredibly brilliant and one of the most effective "group therapy" sessions I had ever seen particularly that was geared at provoking change in the mens' consciousness. Laljahre’s hope was the it would provoke discussion between the men and women in the village. It worked. The men were in shock afterwards and my sense was they could see and understand how their behavior impacted the women and children. So it did, I feel, shift their consciousness towards what Nepali women genuinely feel.

2009-03-15T09:12:00.000-07:00

I’ll move the narrative away from laljahri’s village and her role play for a bit to go to another place, another small village further west than Lajahri’s that I visited later in the summer with Renu. We traveled by bus for about many, many hours and then walked for a ways to get to the village. It was the location for one of the literacy classes that Renu’s program was offering to some local women. The class was filled with about women that ranged in age from late teens to mid 40s. They were lively and curious and again I was in that awkward position of being the only white man some of them had seen in person, or up close.

In the evening as the women were beginning the literacy class a stranger came to the door. She looked disheveled and sad. She could have been in her early 30s. She looked exhausted. She said only that she had walked a long way and was tired. The other women made room for her to lie down on a pallet. They got her a little food and a clean sari. She promptly fell asleep. The suspense had the women in a tizzy. We were all speculating where she had come from and what had happened to her.

This is a typical cooking alcove, tucked into an outside corner of a typical Nepali farm house, and where the cooking for the family is done. It has health benefits because open flames and smoke inside the house would obviously be bad, if not fatal. That's buffalo milk for chia cooking in the black pot on the fire.

In the morning as we had moki and chia the woman told us this story: she said she had been cooking food late in the afternoon for her husband and brother-in-law who were finishing plowing to get ready to put in the rice. This was two days before. She was standing in the small cooking corner on the outside of the house and was boiling the milk for chia when she looked up and saw that her brother-in-law had lost control of the two oxen he was plowing with and they were running straight at the house pulling the plow behind which was bouncing wildly. If they struck the house, or the plow did, they would demolish it.

This is a team of water buffalo working in a rice paddy and being driven by an experience teamster, but you can see the size and power of the animals relative to the size of the teamster so in this woman's story you can get an idea of her courage in succeeding to thwart the buffalo team from destroying her home.

She described what she did. She ran towards the bullocks in utter desperation as they came towards the house and, holding her hands up in the air and waving them, tried to ward them off but they kept coming. She finally placed the palms of her hands on the flank of one closest to her, making contact with it, and pushed with all her might.

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She succeeded in getting the bullocks to turn a little and then the plow started to swing in an arc towards the house so she grabbed the end as it went by and with every bit of strength she had held it just high enough so it missed hitting any part of the house. Then she dropped to her knees in exhaustion. Next her brother-in-law came running towards her in the wake of the two buffalo and yelling to her, “I’m going to tell your husband that you touched the oxen and the plow! He’ll throw you out!!” And that’s what the husband did. He came back in a rage and told her to leave. The basis of this was that women are not supposed to touch the buffaloes or the plow because it "pollutes", or “contaminates” them.

So she was thrown out of the house with her few belongings. She went to her sister’s house but the sister said if she took care of her in that her own husband would throw both of them out of her house. So, the woman felt like all she could do was kill herself (seriously). It was the only choiceshe could see, but her sister told her that she had been on the bus that day and seen a tall white man traveling with a Nepali woman from Kathmandu and they were going to a village nearby. The sister told the woman to go and ask the white man and the Nepali woman from Kathmandu what to do. And that it what she did.

2009-03-14T16:22:00.000-07:00

A team, or pair of water buffalo, also referred to as oxen, with the heavy Nepali yolk and the plow extending towards the rear of the animals. The plow and the yolk are made from Saal, a dense, durable wood like the white oak of Europe and North America.

Now, the whole point in writing all of this is to overlap the outcome of this story with the outcome of Laljahri’s role play. Renu asked the women in the literacy class what the woman should do. There was some whispering and heads were nodding up and down and then a young woman in the back of the group eagerly raised her hand and said she had an idea. “Let's all go to her village and touch all the plows and all the buffalo!” And that's exactly what they did. We were suddenly all up and all walking to the woman’s village which was hours away. When we arrived the women divided up like an army into four groups and went to the four quadrants of the village and each woman touched all the plows and all the buffalo. They walked out to the fields where the men were working and touched the animals and the plows. Then they started back to the center of the village, to the small crossroads where I was waiting. Before the women got back a group of men came up one of the paths and confronted me. It was a bit of a showdown like in an American Western movie.

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The men accused me of stirring up the women, giving them the idea to be defiant, telling them, basically, what to do. I smiled and said they shouldn't make accusations until they heard what the women had to say. I repeated that I didn’t have anything to do with it other than walking there with them. The women came back and there was a meeting. The men were angry and the women were exuberant. They had enough energy to walk across Nepal and touch everything. In the midst of the talking a man standing close to me laughed and then muttered something. It was a loud belly laugh. He tossed back his head and let out a good laugh that got everyone's attention and he muttered what in English would have been, “We’re such ass holes!” The the man standing next to him asked," who are you talking about?" The first man then said, “Us.”

I thought the whole episode was remarkable beginning with the woman’s story of being thrown out of her own house which she had just saved from the stampeding buffaloes, her long walk to where all these brilliant women were, and the women reacting the way they did; their strength and courage. Finally there was this one man, one at least, who could see the absurdity and how extraordinary it all was. I talked to him later (and took his picture) and he said that when he saw me sitting on the wall by the road and heard the men starting to blame me before they had talked to me he had an epiphany where he thought, "we're almost in the 2060th century (on the Nepali calender) and still treating women the way we do.” So here was this seed of change, a shift in his consciousness. The other men in the group listened to him explain what he was feeling and then they all nodded and admitted that the way the way they behave is wrong.

2009-03-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

The men in the village after the women had run through the field and touched all the plows and water buffalo.

Now let’s go back in time to Laljahri’s village the day after her role play. The men were stirred up and still discussing it. They wanted to know what I felt. They asked how women were treated in my country. I told them as honestly as I could. I said that women’s rights were protected by the Equal Rights amendment to the US Constitution just as they are in Nepal in the 1990 revisions to the Constitution. I said I felt good the women’s movement had firmly established women’s rights in the US and that the whole country took a giant leap forward as the women’s movement pushed against the status quo. I said that it was far from perfect, though, that women, in many areas, were still not treated as equals across the board and that there would probably by more legislation, more law suits and more conflict before my daughters and their daughters would see complete and final parity between the genders.

I asked the men what they felt seeing how women were treated in Nepal and if they saw anything wrong with the status of women. I asked how they felt about the young Nepali women, their daughters essentially, being sold and used to provide prostitutes for Indian brothels. It was rare if a man I asked these questions would commit himself. They usually shrugged their shoulders saying, in kind, “not much I can do about it..” The man might suggest with a nod of his head that it’s bad but, at the same time, telling me they were not going to commit themselves to any force or action that would abolished it per se.

As a white man from far, far away I was on thin ice. I was not in a position to give advice particularly since women in America are still are not equals with men and there are myriad examples of this. Women are becoming more equal every day but women are still treated like objects, as sex objects, and as part of a multi-billion dollar pornography industry. These practices will probably be around as long as there are two sexes. I told the Nepali men these things and suggested that meneverywhere had to get involved and support women and women’s equality, that everyone had to work togetheron this. I said I felt it was essential for men to support women and some of the Nepali men, just a few, agreed with me. They may have been being polite, however, Laljahri’s role play had an impact, it had got them thinking

2009-03-14T13:36:00.000-07:00

These photographs of Laljahri were the first anyone had ever taken of her and she wasn't sure how to act in front of the camera except feel self conscious.

Another issue had come up regarding Laljahri. During the week of the conference I had spent time with Laljahri, Renu, Tara and Besun and had gotten to know them a little. We had become friends. In Nepal that is expressed as “Didi” (dee-dee) meaning friend, brother, sister. I had become their “Didi”, or brother in this case, and I reciprocated and called them Didis as well. A conversation we all had fairly often concerned Laljahri’s miscarriages and the issue she faced at home with her husband threatening to throw her out of the home. I was curious and concerned what was causing her miscarriages; if it might be toxins, or parasites, or even cancer.

Renu and I had a conversation with Laljahri focusing on two questions. The first was what would happen to her if she was thrown out of her home, where would she go, what resources did she have? The second was how could she find out what was wrong with her reproductive system that was causing the miscarriages and stillbirths. Renu said if she was thrown out of her house she would be able to live at the Women’s Foundation, at least for awhile. Renu did some research and found an OBS/GYN in Naryanghar, a young Chinese woman doctor, who said she would be glad to examine Laljahri and try to find out what was wrong. The problem for Renu and Laljahri was that it would cost money that neither of them had, but I did. The cost of a comprehensive gynecological exam was roughly $10 US. I said I would be glad to give Laljahri the money if it was discussed with people in her village and the members of the conference first, just so they knew where the money was coming from and why Laljahri, Renu and myself, felt it was important.

So we had several discussions. The people in Laljahri’s village at first had no objections but later some said they though there were more important needs in the community that the money could be used for but no one mentioned anything specifically. Some women in the village had been having miscarriages and stillbirths so they hoped that they’d benefit from anything Laljahri found out.

A few of the men in the conference, however, were incensed by my offer to pay for the exam. They felt I was meddling and being arrogant like the “Ugly American” in the novel by that name published in 1958. One man said , “You’re just doing this so you can feel important!” Another man said “there are thousands of women in Nepal with health problems. Are you going to fix them all?” This was consistent with reprimands I received from one or two of the men earlier when I wanted to talk to women, or take their pictures, or plant rice with them. I would hear them say (punitively), “You can’t do that.” I would ask the women and they would say they'd be happy to talk to me, happy to have me take their picture, or plant rice with them, happy to interact with them, that it wasn't inappropriate. Laljahri was overjoyed when I said I would help her.

I told the men who disapproved that I felt our conference was about change and about sustainability that one of the core issues in sustainability children’s health and well being which, by extension, includes the mother’s health and well being. Laljahri had become our friend and colleague. She had become like a sister, I told them, and my main reason for offering to help her was I felt it was important for all of us at the conference to know why Laljahri (and perhaps other Nepali women) was having so many miscarriages and stillbirths particularly when she so desperately wanted to have her own children. I did not bring up the money itself. I never said “oh, it’s only ten dollars.” I did remind them that Laljahri was a brilliant, courageous woman, who was willing to take enormous risks to work towards sustainable change in Nepal and that she, in turn, needed to be sustained by the rest of us, to be nurtured, and supported in every way possible. I was somewhat convincing but it is important to note that not all the men objected. It was only a minority who were rigidly opposed.

Renu, Laljahri and I took the bus back to Naryanghar from Laljahri’s village and Renu took Laljarhi to the doctor’s office for the first of four visits needed to complete all the tests she would have as part of the exam. I went back to the CDO and began packing things so I could continue my work in other parts of the country. I saw Laljahri that afternoon and said goodbye to her. We knew it would be the last time we would ever see each other. We both cried. I wanted to hug her, or shake her hand, but, that wasn't permitted under Hindi law. So that afternoon we stood and gazed at each other as we frequently did and then gave a final wave.

2009-03-14T13:33:00.000-07:00

A year to the day after I got back to the US I received an email from Kathmandu saying, “Laljahri gave birth yesterday to a healthy baby girl. Now everyone here thinks you are a god!” Oddly it was from the man who had accused me of wanting to feel important! Anyway, I did feel a tiny bit like a god, a very humble one, and I was very happy for Laljahri, her husband, and her baby daughter who has a great mother, a born leader, and a strong, courageous, and brilliant Nepali woman.

2009-03-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

After I left Nepal I also heard that Laljahri had successfully created a “community savings and loan fund” in her village following through on the first step in her plan for leading the village out of it’s debilitating poverty. Now that she could read and write herself her next step was to teach others these necessities and introduce a second kind of education to the villagers about dealing with money and finances. She wanted to learn how a person could develop a “business sense”, and know “how to run a business”, she told me, and she wanted to teach others in her village how to run small businesses and how to invest money. She saw these as essential for people to know to escape from the vacuum created by poverty that is so hard to get out of. A key part of her antipoverty program, too, that all important facet of sustainability, was to to improve the physical health of the villagers, particularly the women and children. A chunk of that was to try and eliminate alcoholism and cigarette smoking.

Part XII: Surya Prasad Adikiri, permaculturist

2009-03-08T18:31:00.000-07:00

Surya, like Laljahri, appeared at the conference as a surprise participant. He heard about the conference by word of mouth, knew some of the other attendees, and had come on his own volition. The first moment I talked with him I was enthralled with his sense of humor and his vast knowledge of plants and agriculture. He was like a gnome (as you can see in the photos) and totally enchanting.

He started by talking enthusiastically about Bill Mollison, an Australian, and one of the gurus of Permaculture, a method of agriculture that relies on perennial (permanent) crops like nut and fruit trees and less on annual crops like tomatoes and corn that have to be planted each year.

Mollison has written a number of books that promote permaculture and he speaks at workshops and conferences around the globe. He's work is part of a larger world focus by farmers, activits, environmentalist and food system analysist who are trying to transform current, high input, and minimally sustainable, industrialized agriculture, to a much more resilient food system that is sustainable for a long term.

Surya came to the conference primarily to talk about and promote permaculture 'systems' for Nepal and had a great deal of practical knowledge about agriculture, generally, in Nepal as well as about Permaculture.

The first time I had a chance to talk to him he told me the following story. He said that one day about two years before the conference Surya had at the rural bus stop at Bagnis where the trail to his village begins. His village is tiny and very remote, accessible only on foot and a good four hour hike from the road. As Surya waited for the bus to the central Nepali city of Pokhara he saw a flier taped on a pole announcing that Bill Mollison was speaking in Kathmandu the following night. Surya had never heard of Bill Mollison and he also knew nothing of permaculture at that point in time. He was drawn, he told me, only to the name and felt he absolutely must attend the lecture, that his future depended on it. So, he said, he walked a considerable distance to another bus stop and took an overnight bus to Kathmandu. He arrived there the next morning and spent the day wandering around Kathmandu. He was the first one at the auditorium in the evening to hear Mollison and after Mollison finished his lecture Surya waited for a chance to talk to him and ask him some questions. When he got his chance Mollison he told me that he was so enchanted with Surya that the pair stayed up all night talking.

Surya was three days late getting home, he said. He walked to his village fueled with intense energy. He was feeling that the chance meeting with Mollison was transformative for him and his family and perhaps others in his circle of friends and neighbors. The minute he got home he went to his wife, Santi, saying to her "your free” (as one would free a slave), and telling her she was free to do anything she liked with her life, that he acknowledged that he did not “own” her. He went to his older son and daughter and told them the same thing. (They told me they were slightly confused at the time by what he was saying). The next day he went to the village elders and asked to buy from the village a small, one hectare (2.4 acres) paddock that had once been used for grazing water buffalos. He told the elders that he was planning to use as a pilot permaculture project.

2009-03-08T17:55:00.000-07:00

Surya performing a dance based on a story about a farmer in ancient times how is beseiged with problems that he eventually is delivered from by devine intervention. The story goes on for an hour and the dance is elaborate with subtle hand gestures and precise movements of the feet. Surya knew the dance by heart and several others that he performed at night after the conference discussions had ended.

Surya's story was entrancing. He had been offered a kind of gift. Living as remotely as he does you would not expect him to have personnel access to someone like Bill Mollison, but the fact that he was in the right place at the right time and was able to meet Mollison, exchange some ideas, and come away from that brief meeting a changed man, is remarkable.

Like Laljahri, Surya had been catalyzed by both the meeiting with Mollison and by an spark he contained within himself, curiosity perhaps. He had become an agent of change. Like Laljahri and Renu he was inspired, passionate, intuitive, and bold. Like Laljahri and Renu, too, he possessed the courage to go against what is conventional, "go against the grain" as we say. In his case he's gone against traditional Nepali culture, particularly it's patriarchial structure and tradition. He’s a revolutionary.

Aas I've already mentioned, Surya brought to the conference a much needed practicality and wisdom based on his years of experience as a hill farmer. He helped ground the conference in reality, helped bring it back to the basics, back down to earth. He contributed knowledge which he was able to share in an open, patient way that was refreshing. Like Renu and Laljahri, he "added his light to the sum of light" and created deeper understanding. Like Renu and Laljarhri, he emerged as a leader of the conference.

I refer to this group as "The Gang". From left to right, Suvenda, Renu, Laljahri, Surya, and Anil. This was the group that spoke to the more difficult issues, the challenging questions regarding sustainability and globalization, during the conference, and who showed initiative, leadership, and creativity. It was an honor for me to be there with them.

2009-03-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

At the end of the conference I put enough clothes for a couple of weeks into the smaller of my two backpacks and, right behind Surya, climbed onto the roof of the bus that would take us to Bagnis where the trail to his village begins. The bus left Naryanghar in mid morning and traveled all day to Bagnis where we arrived late in the afternoon. Despite some risks riding on the roof of the bus is preferable to being inside because of it being slightly clasutrophobic inside the bus and because of the heat inside. The fresh air and view from the roof is luxurious.

Leaving Bagnis behind we started up this trail late in the afternoon. The trail is ancient. It could be hundred of years old and in the afternoon light it was enchanting, pulling us quickly up the mountain. It was a four hour hike from the road to Surya's village and we added an extra hour by stopping for chia a few times so Surya could chat with people that he knew well. He was excited to bring them news from the outside world.

We passed this small house after only a half hour, or so, on the trail and it was like Shangri-La with the gorgeous view down the south valley on one side and the more lovely view (below) of the Lake Bagnis to the west.

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This woman waited on us when we stopped for chia in one of the small hamlets along the trail. We had to wait for some time while she rekindled the fire and boiled the milk. Surya talked to some people that he knew and I sat and watched the ambered afternoon light flicker on the tree leaves and the adobe walls of the small buildings. While we sat there the clouds came down again and it got dark as if it was going to rain.

Then suddenly the clouds broke up a bit and it cleared towards the east very quickly and there in front of me was the precious rock and snow I had been dying to see. It was a mountain wall, a spectacular, dizzying precipice rising thousands of feet above us. My eyes followed it up to where it disappeared in clouds again. It was Ghanapurna, a mountain more than 24,000 feet above sea level and if seemed close enough for me to touch. I began to cry. Everyone looked surprised and Surya laughed. “He happy,” he told them. As quickly as it appeared the mountain vanished again.

I was energized by seeing the mountain so close at hand and wanted to see more but the monsoon clouds came in as thick as pea soup again and we finished our chia and started climbing again. Just above the village I looked up the trail and saw this yogi coming towards us.

He knew Surya (Surya knew everyone we met) and the exchanged greetings which included a fair bit of news and we went with him off the trail to this spring where the yogi drank some water and blessed the water. I was totally fascinated by this guy who had come down out of the clouds looking a little like a cloud himself.

He told us he had come down from his retreat high on the ridge to get fresh "curd", or fresh yoghurt made from buffalo milk (which is magical stuff) to take back up the mountain. He said that is pretty much all he lives on. We said goodby and he continued down while we continued up.

Climbing higher and closer to Surya's we got muffled by the clouds again and they made the landscape a bit eerier and mysterious looking as the trail, now practically a stair case, hugged the side of the mountain. With the clouds it was impossible to see how far down and how steep the drop was below us down the side of the mountain.

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We finally came out on this high ridge where Surya's village was located as it was getting dark. We'd reached the village in the last light of day. Surya could see his wife and two oldest children silhouetted against the sky sitting with their neighbors on the crest of the ridge and waving to us. They yelled to us happily as we traversed across a steep, wide pasture. They said they had been expecting us. The villagers, Surya's told me, his family included, sat up on the ridge every night to gossip late into the night.

During the evening villagers took turns tending the buffalo as they grazed on this commons. There was ample grazing but water was a problem as the only spring on the ridge would dry up in hot weather and it was a hike down the mountain to another spring. Bringing water to the animals and to the houses meant carrying it uphill. The buffalo were occasionally preyed upon by tigers that ventured up out of the dense jungle on the south and east side of the ridge.

Just as we began the last part of the ascent across the steep, open pasture, Surya pointed out a buffalo wallow, a small man-made pond, a bit down and off to the right, with a curb of large stones. The buffalo "wallowed" here when it was hot. They wade in and roll around in the mud and water to cool off and wash off flies and parasites. He pointed to a small bower in the trees close to the wallow where a large female tiger sometimes comes in the evening to prey on the buffalo. Each night after that, as the light faded, I went with some villagers to watch for the tiger and, sure enough, one evening the female tiger was leisurely lying a 100 feet from the wallow, lofting it’s tail and warily gazing back up at us. She was more than beautiful.

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I first got to meet Surya's wife, Santi, who, you remember, Surya "emancipated" after returning from his meeting with Bill Mollison in Kathmandu two years before my visit.

Then I met his two daughters who he also emancipated and (below), his son
Surya's son and oldest daughter were somewhat confused, they told me, by Surya's sudden act of "freeing" them and weren't quite sure, at first, what it meant because Surya had never really treated them as if they were his "slaves". They now understood it, they said, as a largely symbolic gesture on Surya's part. He was forsaking the traditional Nepali culture where men rule everything and he was, additionally, making a statement that he wanted to make his life sustainable and it could not be if he treated his wife and children as indentured servants. Surya's daughter said she was a little embarassed by the suddenness of her emancipation because she had never heard of any girls in Nepal being "liberated."

These two neighbors of Surya's followed me around constantly observing everything I did and bringing people to me who wanted to ask me questions or point out things they thought I might find interesting. They were like my agents but much more helpful. It was depressing for me when it was time to leave the village finally and say goodbye to everyone.

2009-03-08T12:16:00.000-07:00

It didn't surprise me that Surya built his own house and that it was well planned, sturdy and efficient. All the doors in Surya’s house have large steel brackets on either side of the inside door jambs and are bolted right through the thick masonary walls. The brackets are designed to hold in place a thick piece of wood, heavier than a 2 x 4, to bar the door and keep tigers from entering the house at night. The village is located on a high ridge that has been cleared for pasture but the dense forest comes all the way up the slope on the south side of the ridge almost to the top.

2009-03-08T12:12:00.000-07:00

Surya looking more and more like a gnome of the surrounding forest plays an ancient Nepali instrument that sounds like stringed instruments from China and Vietnam. It has a lovely tone and he use it, along with his faithful drum that is sitting next to him on the wall, to accompany the elaborate "Farmer" dances/narratives that Nepalis love to perform. The stories are elegant and rich in detail and very old. They reminded me of the Illiad and the Odyssey, in some ways, as they are meant to be spoken and sung and, most of all, to entertain. The kids even know them, so they are popular and not considered old and stale.

2009-03-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

Surya played the drum while his son danced a version of the dance Surya performed for us one evening at the CDO during the conference.

At night, after the sunset, it is bible black outside the house. There is no ambient light except on clear nights when the stars are as bright and profuse as one could imagine, particularly for those of us who live in areas where cities and towns throw so much light into the night sky that the stars cease to exist. On clear nights in rural Nepal I looked up and saw paintings by Van Gogh.

2009-03-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

The next morning Surya took me to his permaculture site and we spent the rest of the day there. On a mere postage stamp of land he was growing enough food to feed his family and he had enough left over to sell and make a decent profit. His permaculture project was a scant two years old. He was trying to achieve five “stories” of plants on the parcel of land which was not an easy task, even in a forgiving climate like Nepal's which promotes rapid plant growth.

His genius was that he knew which plants, which crops, would be beneficial to each other when they were planted close to each other in this multi-storied complex. In other words, the crops, herbs, shubs and trees, he selected needed to adapt to the site but also to each other so there was a synergy between them and the 'system" would be more productive than the 'sum of its parts". This means that the lower story plants had to be good producers in a shaded environment. The top story plants had to be adapted to full sunlight. They couldn’t cancel each other out.

2009-03-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

Surya and I did some planting that first morning. One of the crops we planted was some coffee 'starts', small coffee plants, he had grown out from seed. Surya didn't like or drink coffee but he was curious to see if it could be a good cash crop in Nepal. As was discussed at the conference one of the dangers of development to Nepal is the potential loss of it's "indigenous' food sytem, the traditional diets and foods. Coffee is not consumed much in Nepal but Nepal is urged to grow it by the World Bank and the IMF so it can be exported to the developed countries, Europe primarily, to work of the national debt. What happens is that the exportable crops begin to take over the locally consumed crops because of they represent profit. Nepal has already started to import rice from India and Bangladesh. So, what happens down the road, if rice prices jump because of shortages in that part of Asia? Nepal slows down repaying its debt. It's a very fragile, vulnerable system.

Surya had planted a lot of pineapple, a crop that does spectacularly in Nepal. It is so good and like Mangoes, it is always being harvested and, therefore, available throughout the year. There isn't a particular 'season' for these fruits. The upside of that is that a lot of money can be made to the farmer that can provide a steady supply of pineapples and mangoes.

These are Chuiri fruits Surya is growing in his top 'story', 40 feet above the ground. He is also growing an Asian banana which is cold 'hardy' meaning it can endure colder temperatures and survive better than some tropical bananas like those grown in Central America and Africa.

For the first “story”, the one closest to the ground, Surya planted quite a few herbs, ginger in particular, plus a large area of what is called “dry” or upland rice that doesn’t have to be planted in water. He also planted melons, and the coffee and pineapple in the second story. Coffee and pineapple, at maturity, will be five or six feet high. In addition to coffee, he's also experimenting with other crops (Surya is always thinking and planning). In the other stories higher up from the ground he grows oranges along with the mangoes, bananas, and chuiri already mentioned. Chuiri, remember, is the small fruit that has a tantalizing flavor and is being used to make a health drink and being bottled as Nepal’s answer to soft drinks, like Coca Cola, from the West.

2009-03-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

Permaculture has vast advantages over so-called conventional agriculture. Energy savings is the primary one, more efficient use of sunlight and other environmental factors, is another. Energy wise, too, is the fact that although permaculture tends to be labor intensive at first it quickly becomes less and less so. In conventional agriculture the same crop has to be planted each year because a lot of crops come from annual plants. In permaculture the crops come from perennials that are planted once and produce crops for years and years.

Surya (top photo) in his garden showing some of the newer plants he has added and (bottom) Anil, standing in the permaculture "plot" that resembles the nearby jungle in many ways.

In Surya’s case, if you look at the photos, the plot looks wild, like the nearby jungle, and they're similar. The permaculture plot is multi-storied, like a forest, and each "story", or level, in the permaculture site is in succession meaning the trees are growing at their own pace and according to thw way the trees are "designed" genetically. Each story is made up of diverse plants, shrubs and trees all of which produce crops for human and animal consumption. Surya desinged his permaculture to function as a small and complex forest ecosystem. He designed it to "work" for him and he also has to work, as well. His is a very productive production system measured across each story as well as vertically. At the time of this writing Surya is busy teaching others about permaculture and he's still learning new ways to do thing and how to adapt permaculture to Nepal in different ways, in different areas, and for different needs.

For any reader interested in Permaculture there's an enormous amount of information on the web that can be found by searching with Google or other search engines. There's lots of references for Bill Mollison that are informative along with access to his books. Two personal friends of mine, Eric Toensmeier and Dave Jacke, are building a foundation for permaculture suitable for temperate climates and have written a number of books which are also available on the web.

2009-03-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

Surya carring corn stalks to his water buffalo. Corn creates a huge amount of biomass in addition to the corn itself. The stalks will be converted to valuable manure, urine and milk plus work energy.

This way of raising food might seem revolutionary but it isn’t new by any means. It was practiced for eons and is still practiced in native cultures like that of the Sequoia people who live on the upper reaches of the Amazon River in Ecuador. It’s the earliest form of agriculture and where the vast knowledge employed in our present day, "modern" agriculture evolved from.

One last thing about annual plants versus perennial plants. One of the regular meals we had during the conference was buckwheat pancakes made from freshly harvested buckwheat and hand ground into flour (really yummy) that were served with a tomato sauce that was spicey hot and adictively delicious. After asking some questions about the tomatoes in Nepal and going to the gardens to look, to my delight and surprise, I discovered these were perennial tomatoes! They’re small like Mexican tomatillos, and tart, and very, very tasty.

2009-03-08T09:41:00.000-07:00

Two days after Surya arrived back in the village some of his neighbors came to visit. The day had the feeling of a Sunday back in the US as the group of farmers gathered on Surya’s porch. They wanted to hear about the conference and to meet the “white guy”. I stayed in the background taking pictures and listening to the others talk about what Surya shared from the conference. Surya also stayed in the background (he's crouching in his doorway looking gnomish) and made occasional remarks or answered questions. It was interesting to watch him after seeing him at the conference where he had been active. Now he was primarily listening.

The topic that came up was how one of the young farmers seated with us (not the man in the foreground. He's just listening to the discussion) had packed a new (heavy) plow all the way up to the village from the bus stop in Bagnis. The new plow looked like a traditional Nepali plow but it the "shoe", or the part of the plow that has contact with the soil, was made of cast iron. The plow was made in India and the salesman was from India as well. The initial questions from the man seated in the background was why the farmer decided to take the plow from a foreigner.

The young farmer said he had made a deal with the Indian sales rep that he would try and get three of his neighbors to each buy one of the new plows. If he was able to sell three of the plows he could keep his for free. The question then turned to how much more effective the new plow could be compared to the traditional Nepali plow. The man who was doing most of the talking was doubtful the new plow would make the work any easier or faster.

The conversation continued for a few minutes and became heated at times because this man in the photo, who was still doing most of the talking, felt the young farmer had acted irresponsibly.

2009-03-08T09:23:00.000-07:00

At the mention of the word "irresponsible" this man, one of the village elders joined the argument and began to upbraid the farmer who had brought the new plow up the mountain. He asked the farmer if he knew who made the plow. The farmer replied that he didn't know who made it?
The elder then asked him who in their region could repair the cast iron shoe if it cracked? The farmer said he did not know anyone who could fix it. The elder then asked the farmer if he felt like the new plow was more than marginally better than his older plow. And the farmer responded that he didn't know. He said he felt like the metal shoe would work better in the soils on the ridge but he had not been aware of how brittle the cast iron is and how easily the plow might break if it hit a ledge or a large rock hidden beneath the soil.

The elder expressed his opinion that this deal he had made was to benefit the company in India that makes the plows and the saleman who gave the farmer (now seen in the yellow shirt) the plow but the deal did not benefit the farmer in the least. He had had to carry it all the way up to the village and he would not be able to convince three other farmers to buy one of the plows so he was stuck with it.

I was impressed by the course of the discussion and the thoroughness of the investigation. It seemed to be a model of sustainability where sustainability was as much about technical facts and hard science as it was about human values.

I was reminded of a speech by Garrett Hardin that he made in 1968 titled "The Tragedy of the Commons" that is, for all intents, a discourse on sustainability through the argument for imposed controls on population growth. In the speech Hardin states that one of the tragedies of the commons is that men, over time, are compelled to ruin the commons through greed and misuse. He uses an example of an early civilization where the commons is a pasture where village herdsmen can graze their cows. He observes that each herdsman will try and increase the number of cows so he can increase his profit but as he does so he will eventually destroy the pasture. This, Hardin concluded, is because no one is overseeing the commons. The commons, he says, are in the hands of the people who use them.

As I watched this elder discuss all the issues of the new plow versus the old plow I realized he was really talking about the commons and sustainability and he was the one overseeing the commons. He was legislating the commons based on the values instilled in him by ancient laws.

Where he touched on the commons was not so much about the plow and the system that is in place to sell the plow and how it creates an increase for the manufacturer and a decrease for the buyer, but on another example he used about a new water system that a contractor tried to sell the village a few years ago. The village's water is limited to a few springs because they are high up on a ridge. In the hot dry season of late summer the water decreases to a trickle and villagers must descend the mountain a few miles and carry water back up from a spring. The contractor thought the village would be ecstatic about a new water system which would pipe in water from many miles away through a plastic pipe. The elder explained all this to me as he waved his hands around and made these theatrical facial expressions.

In the end the village elders rejected the contractor's proposal because they found out there were a number of hidden costs to the project which eventually would have drained the village's money. They would end up paying for water by the gallon and they would also be responsible for repairing the water line if it broke. It was not a sustainable proposition, they thought and turned it down.

These are reasonable points in this discussion given that we were sitting in one of the most remote villages in the world. It was a discourse in sustainability. Hardin said a number of things in his now famous speech that were seminal and that should be reviewed often by anyone interested in sustainability, but he did miss one point: the commons were regulated and in most cases by the village elders. It has only been recently that the commons have been diminished.

2009-03-08T09:15:00.000-07:00

Surya at rest. He could plunk down and fall asleep instantly anywhere. Here he is at midday after a morning of working around his farm. The papers at his side are things he is always carrying as he always thinking of new ideas and writing and sketching them.

Surya is an exceptional person. I was quite moved by his thinking, his intelligence, and his energy. It was wonderful to spend the week with him and get to know him and his family at such a close level of intimacy that would not otherwise, if it wasn’t for the conference, have been available to me. I was very grateful and delighted to have “run into” him. I learned an enormous amount from him in just a few days and still think how rare that is, how rare he was. After all, he went to see Bill Mollison on a whim, he took a risk, and he was transformed by it. He learned an enormous amount from Mollison and put the information directly to use only to have it catalyze, or beget, even more information, more knowledge, through Surya. He also came to our conference on a whim and now I was at his home below Ghanapurna on a whim.

I admire Surya and Laljahri because they are both “change agents” in their respective locales. They seem to effortlessly know what to do, what the next steps are. They both are "free" to admit when they don’t know something and they push on anyway. Yes, like Marge Piercy’s poem and the line about Hopi vases being in museums but really meant to do work. They’re admirable, too, because the world desperately needs people who embody sustainability in the way they interact with their environment, the whole environment. I think of it as a genius Laljahri, Surya and Renu share. They demonstrate it in how they approach change, head on, but with what the Dali Lama refers to as “warm heartedness”. Seeing the same qualities in Renu, as well, I see her doing this on a global scale where Surya and Laljahri work mainly on a regional level.

Part XII: Women and trees, protecting the forests.

2009-03-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

One of the days I was planting rice and I was sitting and eating lunch with the women I noticed that the hillside I was gazing at had large rectangles of different shades of green in each, like a patchwork, indicating different succession stages of the trees growing there. I asked one of the women why new trees had to be planted there. The woman told me that young tree seedlings were planted there at different times to replace forests that had been cut down illegally. “Who planted the seedlings,” I asked? “We did,” the woman replied pointing to the four of them sitting there. “And others, too,” she added, “all women.”

She explained that the Nepal government had sold the forest and trees growing on the hillside to a large international company who wanted the timber and were planning on exporting it to China. The large company, in turn, hired contractors from Indians to cut down the trees and haul them to a place to be shipped to China. Probably reading my thoughts the woman said that what the government had done was illegal and that the forests, by decree of the King of Nepal some years ago, had chartered the forests and given them to the Nepal’s indigenous women. So it was law and the new government, she said passionately, had no right to sell the forests.

This photo appeared earlier in the blog and it's of a group of women who each month, in a specific phase of the moon, go out and worship a tree by making offerings of food and water and then they meditate as a group sitting beside the tree, or around it. This group of women were gracious and invited me to sit with them and they answered my questions and didn't mind me taking a few photographs.

The Women's Tree Party symbol

2009-03-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

The logo of the Women's Tree Party in Nepal painted on the side of a house. The Tree Party was created in 1990 with the change over to a democratic form of government that gave permission to Nepalis to create as many political parties as they liked. The tree Party gave women a voice in protecting the national resources of Nepal in light of the governments desperate need to pay off large debts to the World Bank and the IMF.

In response, the woman told me, all the women in the district where the forest were being cut mobilized in protest and picketed the cutting areas where the trees were being logged. The contractors kept cutting while the women protested and wrote letters trying to get the government to stop the destruction. The men kept cutting. They cut faster, inefficiently, damaging the hillsides and causing erosion. The women protested more aggressively. Women went up into the logging areas on the steep hillsides and tied themselves to trees. The men pushed the women away and went ahead and cut the trees down. Then women chained themselves to the trees. That held things up for a little while and then, according to the woman telling me this, the loggers cut right through the women and the trees.

At this point I have to be careful. I have not validated this story by doing additional research and because of my poor Hindi and the woman’s poor English, there is room for discrepancy. I double checked with her to the best of our combined abilities and the story she repeated seemed to indicate that a lot of the protesting women were killed in this way, to be cut in two by a chain saw. Again, I haven’t verified it. I do not know how many women were killed, but I think that it is true that some women died. Finally the government stopped the cutting and sent away the loggers.

During the 1990 re-organization of the government of Nepal, the pro-democracy movement, the women organized a Tree Pary. The women who protested the logging were at the forefront of the party and sought stronger laws to protect the trees. Women formed teams to replant the forests that were cut down. They also took up a public display of worshipping trees, particular trees, but saying articulately that trees are sacred.

2009-03-08T08:50:00.000-07:00

Renu and other conference participants look at a sign proclaiming that a well know environmental organization, a global non-profit, had create a literacy program at this village where we were visiting, but no such program existed.

During one of our long, precious conversations in which we compared her culture and mine, talking about the myriad details of our thoughts, and what we want to accomplish in the way of fostering sustainability Laljanri said, “All they do is talk. They just talk and talk and nothing gets done. Nothing changes.” She was referring to the men participating in the conference.

A few days before that we were on a field trip to a nearby village and heard a car coming up the path. It was a pristine white Land Rover. Seeing a vehicle of any kind at the village was rare and everyone came running. While they stared two Nepali men got out of the Rover, took out a shovel and pick, measured something, and then dug two holes about four feet apart. They dug down a few feet and took a sign out of the Rover and carried it and “planted” the sign posts in the two holes, tamped in some earth and made it level. Then another man, not a Nepali,got out of the Rover all dressed up in rugged outdoor clothing (brand new) and posed next to the sign while one of the Nepali snapped a few pictures. Then they removed the sign and put it back in the Rover, filled in the two holes they had dug, and drove away. The sign said that a certain (well known) agency had been working in this village teaching children how to read and write. The villagers laughed. No one from that agency, or any other, had been to the village to teach anyone, anything. It was merely a fund raising ploy.

Rice and Annapurna; The Full Circle That Sustainability Relies On

2009-01-19T16:18:00.001-08:00

I've used this photo a couple of times in the blog, I think, but I love the picture. I worked a long side of this woman planting rice for a number of days and had a chance to listen to the story of her life in that time. She was amazing and brilliant like many of the other women I met and her story was similar to many I had heard in how she had almost been sold when she was in her early teens but had married instead. I told her my story and in the process mentioned Annapurna a few times. She had noticed that I looked up sometimes, towards the north, when I stood up to stretch after planting rice for long periods. She and others asked me what I expected to see and I said I wanted to see Annapurna and they reminded me I wouldn't be able to see it even if it was clear because it was far away and hidden behind other mountains. They were right but it didn't stop me from looking. Then, one day, this woman explained that she, too, wanted to see Annapurna. Annapurna to us means "full of food" she said. I was used to the usual translation of the name as "Goddess of the Crops" or variations of that. I like the "full of food" interpretation better. Then she told me that every morning when she gets up she goes out and looks for a flower blosson, basil is one she likes to use, and she puts it in a tiny, stainless steel vase she has, the size of a thimble, and places it on an alter in her home. The flower is for Annapurna, she said, and it brought tears instantly to my eyes. That's thinking sustainably.

XIII: Renu Sharma Upreti

2009-01-19T07:25:00.000-08:00

I met Renu the first evening I arrived in Nepal on a street corner in Kathmandu. I was with a group of men walking to a restaurant when I saw a woman who was living on the street near a small park and I stopped and tried to talk to her through an interpreter. The conversation with the woman was confusing and my interpreter was anxious to get to the restaurant. We began walking away and then I turned to go back and try once more with the woman and that's when I noticed Renu who had been standing close by all along. She said, "he didn't translate one of the questions you asked her and he didn't tell you one thing that she said to you." I asked her if she would meet me at that spot the next morning and she said she would. The next morning she was there with a group of women including several in the photo above. These were women who had been sold by their parents when they were 14 or 15 years old andthen sold into prostitution in India. Meeting Renu at that time in my trip to Nepal was more than fortuitious. It transformed by sojurn in Nepal into an astonishing adventure.

Renu encouraged Laljahri to attend the conference which was transformative for Laljahri and for everyone at the conference. Laljahri, as you have already read, was an amazing voice and force within the conference. Laljahri was a student in a literacy project started by Renu in which Nepali women were taught to read and write and highly proficient levels including being able to read and write legal documents and prepare documents to be used in the courts. Renu's deep commitment to women's rights and women's equality within the law and in education is transforming Nepal.

These are some of the conference members playing outside during a break in the proceedings.
From right to left: Anil Bhattarai, Surya Adhikari, Laljahri Mahji, Renu Sharma, and Suvenda. Renu and Anil had been friends and colleagues long before the conference. I only mention Anil a few times in the text which is an oversight because he was so supportive of my curiosity and making sure I got to see all different aspects of Nepal, and he helped me understand many things I would not have otherwise. He opened a lot of doors for me and together with Renu I valued his friendship and collaboration enormously.

This is my favorite photo of Renu. We were driving around on her small scooter one afternoon after the conference ended and we came upon this scene near a temple in the middle of Kathmandu. Several women were protesting the absence of women's rights and there was a group of policemen about to arrest them. Renu screeched to a halt and ran to the women with her motorcycle helmet still on and began taking notes as fast as she could. She wrote the women's names and addresses so they couldn't just disappear into the prison system and she interviewed each of the women. This confused the police. In addition I began taking pictures as if I was a journalist and the police backed off and left the scene at least for the time we were there. This action was typical of Renu. I admired her courage and bravado but it's the level at which she cares, her commitment to everyone, that makes her so unique. Renju sent the next five photographs to me via the internet. I do not know who the photographer was I regret to say but will give credit to Renu.

Photo provided by Renu Sharma

These next three photos were taken around Kathmandu in April 2006 during a short "revolution" in Nepal during which the king abdicated and left the door open for the country to elect a prime minister and a parliment. I was in constant contact with Renu during this period and helping her manuver around the city by using email and cell phones to relay messages particularly about where the fighting was heaviest and where there were injured people. Renu and several others from the Women's Foundation took it upon themselves to take care of the injured on both sides of the fighting including a police officer in one of the next photos.

Photo provided by Renu Sharma

According to Renu this young man was thrown from the roof of a building by Nepali police and fractured his skull. He was lucky to have survived. Renu administered first aid and took the man to the hospital.

Photo provided by Renu Sharma

This Nepali soldier was shot in the hand and asked Renu and Tara for assistance. Renu observed several times when I was talking to her via cell phone that she could hear and feel bullets passing just over her head on several occasions.

Photo provided by Renu Sharma

On April 16, 2009 the Women's Foundation and the Coalition of Women's and Children's Rights (CWCR) of Nepal, of which Renu is president and coordinator of respectively, held a conference in Kathmandu that was attended by Prime Minister Pupsa Kamal (above) who advocated for the end of violence towards women and children and for all political parties to work together to accomplish this end. Kamal stepped down from the PM position in early May and at the time I am writing this in mid-May 2009 there is political upheaval again in Nepal.

Renu's message in the conference was clear. She and 13 other people spoke about the urgency of re-writing a Nepali constitution that will guarantee "that men and women in Nepal have the same rights in law, in education, and in leadership."

Renu stressed that he leadership of Nepal, members of the government must set an example for the country by not perpetrating violence towards women and she cited a recent case where several members of parliment inlcuding ministers were caught by police having illegal sex in a house in Kathmandu. The ministers and parlimentarians were released but the women they were having sex with were all put in jail. Renu urged that police officers who engage in rape, government officials who torture women or who have more than one wife should be taken to task and "their positions of responsibility should be taken from them."

Photo provided by Renu Sharma

Women at the conference, members of the CWCR and the National Women's Commission of Nepal, wrote and signed a petition advocating for political change for women.

Ms Lila Pathak from the National Human Rights Commission said Nepal must create a nation where "children are protected and guaranteed a good education, health support and security." Pradeep Pokhrel, past president of Amnesty International of Nepal, join Pathak by saying that "basic health, education, safety should be fundamental human rights."

Photo provided by Renu Sharm

Other speakers at the conference included this member of one of the Nepali communist parties who urged member of parliment to work together. He said it was challenging to write a consititution when all of the parties are fighting each other. He said "all social, economical, gender and cast inequality should end in the new constitution.

XIV: Men and Change. What Will it Take For Men To Change?

2009-01-19T06:28:00.000-08:00

We can elect intelligent, compentent, progressive leaders like US President Barrack Obama who are committed to change towards within a working, pragmatic vision of a more sustainable society, and who want this change in the same areas that most of those who elected him. In other words there's concensus on what the change will entail in concrete terms because we can talk about change endlessly, but it comes down to the people, you and I, men and women, what actually will change. If we're all not involved, or partially involved, then the change won't be sustainable. It is essential that men and women learn to do this together, to develop a vision, respect each other’s ideas and methods for accomplishing the vision, and then collaborate at a high level. The rest is easy. For the moment looking at Nepal through Laljahri’s observation that “the men only talk”, and a few years after the 2006 April Revolution in which the Monarchy in Nepal capitulated and a new government took over, I want to explore what we men need to do, need to learn and to believe (because what we believe is intrinsic to what we do and how we act), about our lives and our destinies. What is it about men that needs to change?