Blog

In the 90’s Nepal fell victim to that most dreaded leftist political phenomena: the Maoist insurgency.  For more than a decade the countryside suffered the fate of those trapped in the crossfire.,  Maoists demanded food by night and the government punished pro-Maoist behavior by day.

Hostilities ceased between the government and the Maoists two years ago under a UN brokered cease-fire.  To everyone’s surprise, the de-militarized Maoists won elections to select a committee to rewrite the constitution.  The wildly unpopular King of Nepal seems on the verge of being deposed.  Nepal is in for some changes.

Among the Nepali people, relief is palpable.  People gladly rinse their hands of strife and happily see tourists return to all parts of the country (before they were restricted to government-controlled areas).  However, as we bike, I’m not sure how to feel.  We pass  numerous army bases on the road.  Though the firefights ended two years ago, you can practically smell the smoke in the air.  Loops and loops of razor wire defend the perimeters, stacks of sand bags and metal plates reinforce guard houses, and men, their hands stroking the barrels of mounted heavy machine guns peer out at us. 

We’ve conversed with stick-wielding members of the communist youth league.  They seemed friendly, but we also hear reports of stick-armed youth savagely beating the undeserving.  While biking past a camp of demobilized communist soldiers, I greeted a procession of well-heeled officers marching in the road.  They glared back stonily and did not reply to my “Namaste”.

Fortified snow mountains in Pokhara.

“The Maoists threatened voters with violence if they were not elected”, one shop owner told us.  Others have echoed this information, though most everyone we talk to was not personally threatened.  People we talk to can speak English and live in cities, whereas the Maoist’s domain is primarily the countryside.

It struck us as odd that the Maoists, who had started the insurgency to begin with, were rewarded for their violence with a win in the election.  Peter has expressed concern that an inherently violent organization, such as the Maoists seem to him, can only have complete hegemony as its end goal.  He remains pessimistic about the past and future elections in Nepal leading to peace.

However, most Nepali people, so glad to be done with war, have placed great hopes in the future.  They remain guarded about the Maoists themselves, but most want to see if the Maoists can follow through on promises to reduce corruption and implement a more federalized system of government.

I’m sure we can all join the Nepali people in hoping not only for peace, but for successful development.  Given the possibilities at the moment, however, possibility might well have to include more bleak options.  Let’s all hope against those, and pay close attention to Nepal, lest it wind up another lost country in strife.

Drivers on the subcontinent fling their high-decibel horns carelessly.  On nearly deserted roads, they shatter the peace by announcing their presence a few meters behind you, actually announced two minutes earlier by the roar of their engines.  They honk at hopeless traffic jams.  In place of power to change road conditions, drivers substitute the bravado of a loud sound, hoping it drowns out their impotence.

Honk, honk, honk! (courtesy Pete)

Horns have been with us since the beginning of the trip.  We’ve always had the Japanese motorcycle horn, feared for its dissonant and terribly annoying chords.  The chords are meant to ransack your attention and do whatever necessary to make it stop (get off the road, drive into the ditch, lob grenades at the source of the dissonant notes).

The old taxis in Kolkata, on the other hand, blast melodious chords at you.  It’s no wonder the folks of that city are so unresponsive to these pleasant sounds, so easily confused with a church choir or Brahms requiem are they.

Most distinctive to the subcontinent are the bus and truck horns.  Not only are they inevitably the loudest, but they blast out multiple notes; they come close to playing short ditties at the traffic situations or pedestrians they are meant to correct or warn or banish off the road.  Some horns rush up and down part of the chromatic scale—like a crazed organist.  Others play simple melodies.  “C,C,B,C” cried one horn.  Others low more complicated melodies.  Sometimes I’ve heard the first few notes of a particular horn and prepared myself to hear the Star Wars theme song, or perhaps revelry.  Other horns tend towards Happy Birthday,

Thank you for bearing with me.  These words will never make it to the eyes of the drivers of India and Nepal.  Thus this blog is merely a cry in the wilderness, unnecessary noise in the universe, and a bluster I substitute for my inability to do anything else.  In the final analysis, I am little better than the horn blowers themselves.

While working our way out of the Himalayas we paused for a break near a small shop.  A man wearing a tank top and orange shorts initiated a conversation, and we soon found that he had spent the previous six months as a guard for a DEA (the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) compound in Kabul. His slight build and easy manners belied his military training, but speckles of spit forcefully punctuated his more emphatic points. 

Trained as a commando in the Nepali Army, Saraj found ample work opportunity after he quit.  His employer is ‘Global Logistics Security’ or some other equally ambiguously named international private security company.  His co-workers come primarily from the U.S. and British special forces, who swell the ranks of private contractors supporting low troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Saraj is by no means the only Nepali lending man-power to the U.S. war effort.  We met another gentleman in Eastern Nepal who had spent a year in Iraq working as a cook.  With domestic salaries low, many Nepali men flock to the Middle East, Malaysia and other places with higher pay rates to cash in on globalization.

There’s something odd about the U.S. looking outside of its borders for manpower for its wars.  Before the collapse of the Spanish empire, they began outsourcing important trades like ship building to other countries.  They became lethargic and unskilled, while their neighbors built up their own empires through crafty use of revenues coming from Spain.

The wars the U.S. currently fights seem managed by bureaucrats who’s ideology finds little root at the grassroots level in America.  They push the affairs of the country in a direction most citizens do not wish to follow.  Perhaps our the shortage of soldiers to execute these wars should be an indication of the lack of support they have.  However, the bureaucracy simply looks outside the borders of our country for manpower, and continues trudging in the same direction, sustaining conflicts their own citizens refuse to support with their lives.

Maybe this situation is more a sign of the global times in which we live.  Wars without outsourcing may be as impractical as manufacturing without a global supply chain.  I’m afraid I, for one, will remain ill at ease having my countries dirty work be done by non-citizens.

Published in the Livingston Enterprise May 6th, 2008.

Bike trip pauses battle with Indian traffic to smote rural poverty 

    Three gaudily decorated trucks careened down the road towards me.
Behind me, a cacophony of deafening horns indicated another convoy
fast approaching from the rear.  The road being barely wide enough to
accommodate two trucks, I had to jump my loaded bike off the pavement
and onto the rock and refuse-strewn shoulder.  The trucks roared past
me, not slowing a bit.  I regained the road, only to be forced off a
few moments later by more trucks.
       It took us little time to discover biking on India’s national highway
was no fun.  For a major road, the traffic is light, but passing cars
leave no room for bikes.  Luckily, India has a considerable network of
small roads that wind casually through the countryside.  On these, we
could take time to enjoy the fresh green rice paddies gliding all the
way to the horizon, the huge trees standing protectively by the
roadside, and the small villages clinging to high spots.
       Because it is impossible to legally bike through Myanmar, we
reluctantly boarded a plane in Bangkok, Thailand that took us across
the Indian Ocean to Kolkata, India  We intended to push as far west as
possible.  Although other routes to Europe from Thailand exist, they
would involve considerable time, and would have forced us to bike over
the Himalayas in late winter.
       Flying meant missing out on the gradual changes to which biking had
accustomed me.  While I missed easing into Indian culture, I wasted no
time appreciating it.  Kolkata, unlike most Chinese cities was never
razed to the ground and rebuilt.  Decaying stone buildings erected by
the British connect one with India’s past. Rebuilt fifties-style
automobiles serve as taxis, and streetcars, rickshaws, bikes, ancient
buses and motorcycles compete with pedestrians for street space.  Few
cities possess such energy as Kolkata’s bustling thoroughfares and
back alleys.
       The women of India wear the most striking fashions I’ve seen on the
trip.  Bright saris and shalwar kameezes in pastels and neon colors
set women apart from the drab clothes of their male counterparts.
However, it seemed the women were always on the move.  They rarely
paused in their march through the streets.  They never sipped chai
from the many stands around which men constantly gathered.
       In Southeast Asia, women were almost always the owners or proprietors
of restaurants and hotels.  However, in India, I rarely talked to any
women, because men exclusively worked in the shops and restaurants.
Women, it seemed, remained at home, and I only saw them on the street,
hurrying from one place to another.
       After acclimatizing to our new environment, we set out on our bikes
to visit a friend of mine doing development work north of Kolkata.
The organization with which he works, Street Survivors India, is run
by a woman named Shabnam Veraswamy.  This woman, with her perfect
English, staff of workers, and private car, seems out of place small
Indian village.
Her organization aims to increase quality of life in the countryside
by providing education and work opportunities.  They focus on women,
who not only usually take more responsibility for raising families,
but are more vulnerable to exploitation due to the patriarchy still
alive in parts of India.  By increasing their knowledge and
self-reliance, Shabnam hopes to help not only them, but to raise the
standard of living for the whole village.  She saw in our ability to
play music an opportunity to widen the horizons of village life.
Consequently, we found ourselves on a stage in front of the Street
Survivor’s compound, lit by lights powered by a generator thumping
away nearby.  Sound equipment amplified our voices and instruments so
the crowd of villagers could hear us over the generator.  Ironically,
despite our location in the middle of the undeveloped Indian
countryside, it was our biggest and most technically sophisticated
concert.  Between Shabnam’s spirited explanations of our mission and
the novelty of watching foreigners, we held everyone’s attention until
a storm threatened rain and everyone retreated to shelter.
Later, we visited the Jalgriti School, another Street Survivors
project, and one of the best hopes for empowering the girls and boys
in the village.  It was the first day of school.  Crowds of excited
children strolled about the grounds in their snappy brown uniforms.
Younger children wailed their anxiety.
The school had not yet hired a music teacher, so we filled in by
playing for the music classes.  We gave those children brave enough to
try brief lessons on how to play the instruments.  They impressed me
with their excitement and intelligence.  It occurred to me that many
young minds would go to waste were it not for the school.
Regretfully, we took our leave of Katna and headed back on the road.
Though we felt welcome and helpful in the village, we still had a long
way to go.  Our mission is not to fully understand one area, but
rather to better comprehend many areas, so we returned to do battle
with the horns and exhaust and baroquely bedecked trucks.  Now,
however, we had a much better appreciation for education’s role in
beating back rural poverty.

For whatever reason, I’ve gained about 16 lbs since I started this bike trip. It’s a good thing that means absolutely nothing to the people of rural India, where the more love handles peeping through the curtains of your sari, the better. Skinny married women are ostracized for staying skinny after having kids. The main priority of my new friends is to feed me.

“You eat breakfast, ma,” they say after wetting my palette with a seasoned cucumber and fresh coconut water, an appetizer to the real meal of coconut poongal (a kind of fried rice  cereal) and chutney they sneak in at the end to make me stay. Is it possible for your stomach muscles to get strung out?

When I ask some of my unmarried women coworkers what they do for fun, they say that they go the temple to pray and buy jewels (fake gold earrings, bindis and the likes). Otherwise, not much. Life seems to be an endless cycle of cooking, cleaning, eating, working, drinking tea, eating, drinking coffee, chatting, eating, catching buses. And this is only amongst the women who have jobs. At least they have an outlet.

“You take more, ma,” as they refill my plate with another heap of rice and chutney. I eat so much here – in between meals, when I am not hungry, second breakfasts, second servings – that I wonder if there is any other social pastime.

True, alcohol is reserved for men.  There is no similar social tool for women. It seems that friendships stop after marriage when women leave their childhood towns to live with their in-laws. Relatives and next doors neighbors seen in passing replace friends.

Men play cricket while women stay at home. Men go to tea kiosks to read the newspapers and catch up on the latest job opportunities. Women stay at home, where they get news from the neighbor, who is often their sister-in-law. Men migrate to urban areas like Chennai, or international job centers like Dubai or Singapore to earn salaries in higher currencies and escape demeaning farm work. Women stay home and wait for the checks.

My neighbor whose apartment has indoor plumbing and tiled floors, a luxury in this mud hut village, showed me pictures of her husband who’s been in Malaysia for four years. It wasn’t clear if he was making or selling the pottery he was sitting behind. I asked her if she had ever visited. She said of course not. Then served me a deep fried snack with tea (the tea is boiled in milk and strained through a filter).

When I left the fueledbyrice team in Kolkata, I joked that they would have fabulous adventures biking the Himalayas while I got fat down south. This was an omen.

But like I said, it’s a good thing fatness doesn’t matter in rural India. Even if I had the trimmest little body, I would be asked to cover it up in a sari or a salwar kameez or at least a scarf.

Cycling everyday with men for 6 months, I haven’t felt my womanness in a long time.  And I like my womanness. I come from the land of consumer feminism where women make enlightened investments in cosmetics and fashion to procure their youth and sexuality so that they feel empowered.  A recent Citibank ad in which a woman used her kitchen as a closet pinpoints this new postmodern feminism: I’m too hot to cook.

But after visiting Brian Heilman’s Muslim village in West Bangal, where I caused social havoc by wearing a fitted shirt, a below-the-knee flowing skirt with leggings underneath, AND a scarf, I was sharply reminded that yes, I do indeed have D-cups, and yes, they do cause erections.   Men in another village were calling Shabnam’s (Brian’s boss) cell phone complaining of their discomfort.

Things haven’t changed down south, where people are mainly Hindu, more educated, and said to be more socially relaxed.  My co-workers gasp whenever I wear Western clothes and they beg me to wear a scarf when the male staff are around.  

I am no anarchist. If I want to understand a culture and the reasons behind it, I have to abide by its rules. I have to suspend my disbelief and let it unravel itself to me on its own terms. So I am giving myself time to fumigate my innate annoyance at the irony that men’s owns inability to control themselves is made the responsibility of women. I am waiting for the day that this salwar kameez and scarf feel less like the infernal insides of a camel’s colon and more like a natural more modest extension of my skin.

Maria, Brian’s roommate from New Jersey, said, that after a while, she felt naked without her full dress. I am too starting to feel odd whenever I walk to a kiosk to buy soap or the newspaper without my curves hidden. I don’t know if the cause is modesty or embarrassment or guilt. Sometimes, I don’t know what is right or wrong – a salwar without the scarf? A scarf over the T-shirt? Surely, I can’t wear the same two kameez’s every single day. It’s hard to feel sexy in a shapeless dress. Maybe I am oversexed. Maybe I should pretend I’m a Japanese meiko, and that sexuality is all in the mind.

Maybe I should just stay home and drink tea.

The women elected members of the local governance[i] with whom SCORD, my NGO, works, would shake their heads and yank me by the arm out the door. They are the leaders of self help groups (SHGs) which empower women by giving them a platform to support each other, address their issues with a unified voice, save money and receive loans for group and individual enterprises, train in income generating skills, educate themselves on their rights.

 In such a patriarchal society, these women have had to work through that icky feeling of having done something wrong every time they left their homes to attend a meeting.

During the formative stages of SHGs in Tamil Nadu (a leading state for women’s rural development) in 2002, women regularly faced teasing and hissing when they “dressed up” on their way to meetings.  Their mother-in-laws refused to take care of their children while they were away and asked blankly, “Who will cook when you are out there organizing?”Their husbands were interested in what, if not money, they were going to get out of it, and didn’t want them to go to another village to attend the meeting as they were often organized by the male directors of grassroots NGOs.

Yet, these women blasted on. Their need to control of thier livelihoods and the future of their children outweighed the odd feeling gurgling inside whenever they did something out of the norm.

It seems that everything about the unofficial marriage system is set for men’s ultimate domination: a woman must pay a dowry (which is illegal but still immensely practiced even in the cities) to the groom, which must be sufficient to avoid the wrath of abusive in-laws, she must move into her in-laws house often in another village and so is cut off from her own family, and a bride is preferred to be at least four years younger than her husband, and less educated.

Even the heavily clothed, ankle length sari seems the Indian equivalent to the impractical Japanese kimono in its symbolism of planting a woman’s feet firmly in the house.

Still, some resourceful women work it by pulling their saris up around their thighs while working in the fields.  In the absence of husbands who have died or migrated for work, many women take up farmwork. Economic demands in a newly globalized society, much like industrialism during WWII in the US, are pulling women out of the house and into the workforce.  SHGs or sanghas (the rights-oriented term) have become a necessity for these newly employed heads of the household to defend their rights and demand their needs.

Women’s rise to local governance in rural India, the only place in India where women’s leadership is a de facto reality with a 33% reservation fully implemented and taken advantage of (in Nagapattinam, a tsunami hit district, women make up 47% of the local governance), have extended those strides out of the home and into banks and classrooms and the offices of politicians.

Kanika Kaul, the Tamil Nadu state project co-ordinator of The Hunger Project, an international NGO that promotes women’s leadership and a ground up approach versus aid giving to development, said that her organization promotes women because they are the one’s at the basic level of society who would therefore understand society’s most fundamental needs the best.

Her organization has partnered with SCORD for three years to help rebuild the tsunami affected district of Nagapattinam with a stress on strengthening the local Panchayat and women’s leadership in such.

According to Kanika, women will fight for education because women know what its like to be deprived of their education as children. They know what its like to be dependent on their husbands and in-laws because without an education, there are very little jobs they can do. They want their children to have more opportunities. Women will fight for healthcare because they are the ones who have to take their children to get immunized at  local public clinics. Women ask for clean water tanks to prevent illness in their families.

At the recent Gram Sabha (monthly Panchayat board meeting) in Nagapattinam, men board members pressed for better infrastructure and electricity to fuel the economy.

At a recent SCORD organized women’s leadership workshop, Panchayat women board members pinned alcoholism as an economic problem. They, the ones who balance the books at home, have done the calculations and deduced that their husbands’ chronic profligacy of 50 Rps at the wine shop, half his daily earnings, is driving their families, the village families, into perpetual poverty.

At this level of development at least, it seems as though men are concerned with the bigger structural problems, while women look at the problems that are more intimate and practical. And in this way, more sustainable.  More responsibility is put on the shoulders of the needy rather than victimizing them into a perpetual position of asking for aid. Not that demanding one’s due benefits from the government is wrong, but until people understand what they really need as opposed to what they want, they won’t know where to properly allocate those benefits to procure real development.

Perhaps it is my womanness crying to be let loose from the swaths of cloth I must wear to stay modest in rural India. Maybe it’s the fat rolls. But sitting at this workshop and watching women work in a country where women’s leadership is not to be taken for granted, I suddenly felt a powerful sense of sisterhood. That maybe the womanness I was seeking to emblazon, the take-back-the-stilettos sex-powered feminism, was out of place.

Here, womanness lies in the powerful position of the traditional wife and mother, who understands society at its most basic level, because she lives at its most basic level. She knows how to manage its most basic resources so that they last, so that they benefit women, men, and children.

Here, a woman’s body image lies in its ability to provide for her children.

Both feminisms, and I do dare to call them that – the sex-powered modern and the subservient traditional woman – are valid as they are crafty. They both embrace the man-authored roles that have typically relegated women to subordinates and sexual objects respectively.  They’ve willingly donned the aprons and the mini-skirts, but have inverted their roles into a female directed design in which women decide how they will play the cards they are dealt.

Like African Americans have changed the word “nigger” (at least among each other) from degradation to endearment, like GLBT individuals now use the formally degrading “queer” as a cool term to describe sexual ambiguity, women have taken a bad thing and made it good.

Identity inversion.  Fat you’re matter doesn’t it.   It doesn’t matter if you’re fat. Being fat is phat, yo. Love your curves, they love you.

It’s the exposure, the experience of the opposite, the possibility of an alternative, this widening of scope that gives us perspective on our lives. For the consumer-feminist who invests in diet-crazed beauty magazines to empower her sexuality, it’s sobering to know that real women invest their energy and money in bigger issues than the size of their waists.

[i] Sorry for the annoying usage of this seemingly contrived word. But “governance” is a term specific to Indian village leadership because, being so far removed from the central government decision making, and so reliant on non-governmental structures like grassroots, national, and international NGOs, youth groups, school groups, federations, self help groups, and sanghas (rights oriented SHGs), the term government is actually inaccurate, misleading, and non-inclusive.

Before Kathmandu, we dived off the perfectly good main highway and headed for the bush.  We traversed good roads and bad, but wound up on terrible roads.  The rocks projecting out of the surface often bounced the fun right out of riding.

While the jolts tormented our joints, sunsets fired narrow draws with the soft warm light of molten metal.  Narrow terraces dived steeply down thousand foot hills.  We had airplane views of the landscape earned by the sweat of our constant climbing and descending.

The Nepali people also sent us on roller coasters.  Children followed us up hills, panting their pleas for money, chocolate, food into our annoyed ears.  We could not escape, the hills were too steep, the children too determined to milk us into compliance.  Before, we had encountered beggars only in cities, but here normal children with houses and fields and parents harassed us to no end.  Our respect for the people diminished.  Before, we held their tough mountain culture in high esteem.  After several kilometers of mobile begging, we began to reassess the impact of tourism.

The children had been taught to beg.  Tourists (that terrible T word!) had pitied their slightly dirty clothes or tough lives.  No doubt, they have tough lives.  However, handouts haven’t helped anyone; they only breed dependence and encourage roguery.

Goofing around, not begging.  Hooray!

The children made me sick.  We tried to discourage them with words, by begging back to them, by pointing their behavior out to their parents.  Our efforts to rid ourselves of the beggars sometimes only rewarded us with rocks lobbed harmlessly by small hands.  Harmless maybe, but it is, as they say, the thought that counts.

Later we found we’d been biking on the road to Everest.  Not all kids begged.  Some unquestioningly threw their shoulders into the trailer and helped us push it up the hills.  Some merely ran alongside, happy for the unique experience-as were we. To them we will be grateful, but as for the others, they make me ashamed for my fellow travelers who have so carelessly bred dependence into a people and erected a hopelessly tall wall between me and kids who-save for their eager greed-I might have had a chance to befriend.

Perhaps I am a callous, hard-hearted miser.  The number of requests and demands and complaints I often receive in touristy areas have encased my compassion beneath a thick crust of suspicion.  Yet, I still struggle to treat people with respect, even as they cling to me and block my path.

We met two gentlemen, Andrew and Jesse, in Kathmandu who worked for a Christian service organization called Word Made Flesh.  They have committed to three years of service in Kathmandu, providing physical and spiritual help to drug users, victims of prostitution, homeless children and the infirm elderly.  Only in the country for a few months, they already have a truck load of emotionally heavy tales.  It is no half measure of faith that compelled them to come.

Over lunch they related their own struggles to see Christ in everyone who approached them, from drug dealers to beggars to sales people.  This sentiment resounded with me.  Not everyone is a Christian, but there is a fundamental act of metaphysics in the manner in which we approach each other.   “Seeing Christ” in a person guarantees a failure to objectify.  Christian or not, objectifying people serves only to degrade them, to isolate yourself, and to fail to create a connection, and denies people their spiritual autonomy.

Through a connection of Andrew’s, we met a pastor in Kathmandu named Mani.  We shared dinner with him, and he in turn invited us to a prayer meeting with a few college students to whom he ministers.  I found not the calm bible interpretations I expected, but instead challenging questions from the pastor and his students.  For an hour we talked about the reasons for the trip, difficulties we experienced, and happy moments, both spiritually and otherwise.

What humbled me was the belief held by meeting participants that they could learn something from us.  I suppose I pompously inscribe opinions into this blog, but to have someone actually ask me meaningful questions about my experience was illuminating.  Such experiences would be impossible without first shedding prejudices and opening one’s self to what someone has to give one, not what one wants or expects.

After an therapeutic hour of meaningful discussion, I found myself recharged and ready to confront whatever sort of person Nepal might through at me next.   We all felt especially great after the pizza Mani procured for us.  I guess the positive truth I gained from this experience was a little hospitality goes a long way.  The children of demands left a bad taste in my mouth, but my palate was cleansed soon enough with tomato sauce and cheese.  I can only hope other travelers on the road to Everest have the gumption to act responsibly and the luck to find those authentically friendly Nepalese who make an experience truly meaningful.

Pastor Mani (middle holding daughter) with FBR and local students at a prayer meeting in Kathmandu.

Three bearded boys from FueledByRice made it to the center of Nepal two days ago, to a town called Pokhara.  This is the gateway to trekking in the Himalayas, and so it is the most tourist-visited area in Nepal (according to one guide book a-skimmed).   The beauty is certainly an attraction.  The town is situated on a mountain lake, hemmed with pines and the green slopes of foothills.  When clouds aren’t cloaking them, the white peaks of Anapurna and M…. rise from the Himalaya heights for a stunning backdrop.  (I’ve seen pictures — the clouds haven’t yet lifted but enough to see just a glimpse of white rocky slopes one afternoon after a rain).

The town’s feel is laid-back, a nice contrast to Kathmandu’s Thamel area bustling with hustling and hawking and honking.  So, we run into other tourists and have English conversations and go to eat together at times.  Last night we met a nice Dutch cyclist for dinner who’s doing basically the same route as FBR, only backwards in time for the Olympics (anyone inform CCTV?).  We also met a German cyclist who gave us tips about Europe and a warm invite to his place if we go by.  A group of three Israelis are motorcycling, but are interested in trying out the Bi-Cycle, motored by legs and rice.  They’re staying at our same hotel.

So, we poke around Pokhara, not trekking–to the chagrin of many-a-would-be-trek-organizer–but rather resting and eating and reading and frizbeeing and meeting others, with a little time here or there on the vast network we like to call cyberspace, and resting the puzzling soreness of our posteriors (as Jim might say).

Small Villages, Big Imaginations

I am big shit in this tiny farming village in rural South India. I am a foreigner and I have the default status of being knowledgeable in everything from computer programming and how to run a local NGO despite my educational or occupational background. I also have the added advantage of being black among the chocolate hued people of Tamil Nadu.

Holding their forearms up to mine, natives contently comment, “Same color.” They are thrilled that someone from the big big foreign land where everything is more developed, where there are jobs with higher wages, and where everyone is richer and more educated, with bigger houses and nice cars, is the “same color” as them.

In villages this small, imaginations are big. Most women get the news from their neighbors as they fetch water from the street pumps in the morning. Most don’t know where Europe is.

The men are more aware. They read newspapers, watch TV, and talk about the latest strike with their morning tea at the local kiosks.

They often leave their wives and children at home, and move to Malaysia, Singapore, or the Arabian Peninsula to rake in higher wages in the booming market for unskilled and semi-skilled Indian laborers. Daily, I am asked if I would sponsor someone to my country to find a job and work. I am then grilled about the types of jobs, working hours, salaries, and the visa procedures for an Indian coming to my country for work.

This is despite the fact that I currently have no job in India or at home in The Bahamas.

Though 99% of Tamil Nadu’s population has access to education, the tendency to drop out is still high. Teenage boys want to leave asap to start making money. Girls, who often achieve higher test scores and are generally more interested in learning, are often taken out of school because their parents deem their education not a worthy investment since they will just be married off to live with their in-laws.  While the West views tertiary education and health as indicators of development, the new wealth made through the emigration process is often apparent only in the size of the house, its fixtures, and the types of vehicles (car? motorcycle?) owned. The men who return build lavish two story concrete mansions across the street from their neighbor’s grass huts, thereby fueling the imagination of the youth to take the chance and go abroad.  Life must be better in this distant land.

Even the people working at my NGO seem to get some sort of guilty pleasure out of the popularity they garner from their association with SCORD. My friend Gunar said that everyone knows her and Nadiya (her partner) as the two SCORD field workers always riding their bikes around the area counseling and collecting data. The men like the officiality of sitting behind a desk, writing checks, and managing projects in a village where the main occupation for men is farm labor. They too, are big shit in a small town.

The Exposed Village

I have terrible reactions to people trying to rip me off in the market. I take it personally when someone tries to sell me fruit for twice the normal price. Our experience in Vietnam was almost shattered by the people who would raise prices suddenly in a restaurant or overcharge at a hotel. I called these people greedy. An Indian I met on the train describing Indian investment in Africa called them good businessmen.

The world is globalized. Every dusty pint-size village we rode through in China had internet bars loaded with youngsters playing online games.

People in villages tucked behind the coconut groves that curtain the rice paddies of South India have cell phones. Companies like Airtel and Vodafone have even tapped into the Self Help Group (microfinance and rights focused groups for the marginalized) and NGO market as a way to link village women to banks and networks with clusters and federations.

People who live in thatch houses on stilts leaning against the splintering wind of passing trucks on Laos’ highway 1 have TVs. I sat with about 25 villagers in the living room of such a family who let me sleep on their floor as the sun went down in Laos, and wondered what a shampoo commercial featuring a Laotian woman with white skin and smooth thick hair had to do with the sarong wearing, lice-infested, brown woman with six children, and a coughing husband at whose house I rested.

In villages this small, the internet, TV, and cell phones are magic wands that stir big imagination. It is the same as putting upscale apartments across the street from the projects in New York City, or mansions in Santa Barbera overlooking the slums of Oakland, California: when people see wealth, they want to have some. Even if they’ve sufficed without it for most of their lives, looking at all the jewels the world has to offer gives us more to shoot for, broadens our horizons.

And shouldn’t it? Isn’t this how it’s always been? Haven’t people always tried to achieve more, work harder to give their children what they didn’t have?  To strike it rich, haven’t people always moved?  Migrants in China move from the rural areas to the cities to find jobs. Indians move to nearby countries with more jobs and better salaries. Mexican migrants have populated rural Minnesota to provide farm labor.

The rags to riches story has spread through the wires of transnational companies and their factories and outsourcing agencies. Schemes to achievement (migration) are as quick as the instant exposure (TV, mobiles, internet) which provides instant gratification in a world of increasingly shorter attention spans. 

Perhaps this deserves more research than I am willing to present for this blog, but I tend to look at lavish hip hop videos as manifestations of this romance that the marginalized or traditionally poor have with instant riches.  For the young person sitting in the window of an apartment (or trailer park) crowded with dysfunctional family members, no clear way of achieving his or her dreams, a hip hop video with all its profligate scenarios, its hot women, its tight beats, is an escape, much like the 1930s Gone with the Wind and Shirley Temple musicals were Depression era escapist movies.

And like TVs and cell phones, they give people a heightened view of the riches that exist in the world.  They put people who resemble target audiences, only prettier, more bejeweled, lighter skinned, and with more lustrous hair, in front of cars or kitchen appliances, and sell an image of self-betterment, which comes arbitrarily with the message in fine print: what you have is not good enough. Get better.

Village Voice

Being black in dark-skinned Tamil Nadu, I suppose I am an image of that very same message. Only, I am real. I can talk and explain things, dispel myths. Reveal to the people at my NGO that even though I do have a college degree, I am in fact less skilled than they are at handling the computer or organizing a grassroots level NGO sensitive to the needs and rights of the people of their own community, people who they’ve gotten to know and respect through countless field visits to counsel and organize.

I can tell the people in my village that I have no idea who the famous West Indies cricket player, Brian Lara is (but where would the fun be in that really?).

I can tell them that not all Caribbean people like to or can dance well. That all black people are not from Nigeria, nor do they run.

I can tell them that contrary to the images taken out of context on the big screen, Western women are in fact not easy. And the fact that we are educated make us less easy, more in control of our sex lives, and not to messed with. That not just because we choose how we dress and we like to feel sexy doesnt mean that we actually want to drop trow right now anyhow anyway.

And I can tell them that though the currency is stronger and the salary is higher in The Bahamas, the cost of living is through the roof, and that there may not be provisions to protect the rights of illegal immigrant workers.

When I first started this bike trip, I had a serious issue with our philosophy and the fact that we even had a philosophy. I mean, who gave us the right to “spread cultural tolerance”? I promote cultural tolerance everyday as a black woman living internationally for the last 9 years.  To promote biking as an alternative to cars or planes… in China or India?  Such a project, I thought, would be better felt in the US, where people are dependent on cars.

But having seen how people in the West – through media, transnational and international cooperations, and globalized products – are often producers of what people strive to attain in most developing countries (The Bahamas included as a developing country), I now see the point of setting a better example. Here, face-to-face with people who look up to me, I see the power I have to influence, to alert people of the consequences of energy excesses of hyper-industrialism in the West. To give people confidence in their own slow mode of transportation by riding around the world on a bike and loving it. To give people confidence in thier own simple towns and cultural life by riding there in the first place instead of just sticking to the five tourist spots mapped out in the guidebooks. 

 I have the power to dispel racial myths and fantasies about Western women built up through movie and music images taken out of context. Doing this in India and in China is even more important as these countries’ influences on the global economy and business environment will grow exponentially in years to come.

Spreading a message on a slow-moving bike, without aid of loudspeaker, is the most grassroots way of silent and peaceful protest against the world’s energy excesses and cultural hang ups. And I am more of a small-steps-kind-of-girl than big-shit-in-a-small-town.