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.