Health, wealth and now education

Anamika's niece and classmate.

Inevitably I found myself in a school again today.  The children were learning quite a bit of English too so we played hang-man and drawing games where the answers were rowdily shouted: Miss! Miss! M-I-L-K-MILK! Miss! Miss! R-A-B-B-I-T-RABBIT! And so forth. I nearly went deaf, but we had fun.

A good lesson for children and adults. 

The school belongs to Anamika’s brother and sister in law.  Private Montessori’s account for over 90% of the education in Nepal meaning that 90% of the children educated have to be able to afford the monthly costs.  I have met a number of people who own their own school; in fact Anamika is working on opening her own school at present. For those who cannot afford Montessori, the children go to the public system however it is generally thought that the quality of education in the public system is poor.  And, it’s not entirely free, so if your family is in the more extreme category of poor, your children simply do no get educated.

After hanging around school for a while we headed over to where the Kalimati Fruit and Vegetable Marketing Board market is.  Luckily Anamika’s brother had some business to attend to right near there, so he dropped us off for an hour.  First we met with the Women’s Cooperative Society CFO who was the very gracious Mr. Amrit.  I picked his brain for about half an hour about the topics I am seeking to uncover in this research.

Then to the market which was really interesting for a few reasons… I was thinking I could take my translator down to the market to do some interviews, but after interacting with vendors just in trying to buy their produce we quickly discovered they were rather busy or generally disinterested in interacting.  That saves us a fruitless trip (too bad there is no vegetable pun).  The other interesting observation (one for the field journal!) is the quality of the produce available.  Before I left my prof was quite excited at all the nice fresh stuff I’d be able to eat, but really, the quality has been variable at best, unless it’s imported.

I’ve also heard stories about the heavy or improper use of pesticides, to the point where the farmers themselves don’t eat what they grow, so that is a bit disconcerting. It is also a bit difficult to figure out why people would use way too much pesticide, which in relative terms is quite expensive.  My understanding with pesticides is that more is not necessarily better… but anyway, this is not my domain of expertise.

Things for sale in Bouddha

So far the strength of spending time with locals in any given travel destination is the ability to get under the skin of their society. When Nathan and I were in St Lucia at an all inclusive, the best thing we did was book "More Than A Cab" which is the business of a tenacious local lady who tours you around the island answering all the million questions you may have about the health, wealth and education of the nation.  Certainly there is more to any country than jus those things, but these topics are common to the human experience and offer a good framework to use when trying to better understand just how things tick.