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.