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.