Oh what a day, quelle jour…

I woke up this morning with the realization that I had nothing to write about for my blog today. Literally nothing. I hadn’t eaten anything new, or met anyone of great note or even seen some interesting part of the city I am in worthy of a post. Yesterday’s interviews offered no great insight but they did offer an alternative view to the types of farms I am working to find out about.

Ezina working the network to get us connected to farmers in the area.

For example the one dairy farm had three brothers running it one of whom had a bachelor degree in business. Apparently it is increasingly common for people like him to retire early from their careers and return to the farm with the intention of making it a profitable business.  As we sat with them though, there was something missing there for me, some strange feeling that in order for them to be businessmen they needed to be cold and hard. Certainly they gave us some time to tell us about the operation, but only whilst wearing dark sunglasses or working on a laptop and vaguely listening in on the conversation.  There was no great interest in the broader community it seemed.  Now, this is of course a greatly judgemental statement and no privately run business has any responsibility to their neighbours, but literally, the one employee had a baby that very morning so she wasn’t around to clean the stalls, thus the cows lay in their own filth that day.  I couldn’t help but wonder how soon she would be expected to return to work to clean up the mess.

I don’t mean to sound bitter, but certainly in the vast piles of literature I have read on women’s issues in Nepal, one paper clearly outlined that women indeed often work right up until delivering their baby, and work just as hard shortly after, and continue to work through the next cycle of baby (all the while breastfeeding a toddler).  Seeing this made me feel really frustrated, but it’s sort of a useless feeling unless you plan to do something about it.

Our driver's car was decked out in everything imaginable.

So that brings us to today.  Ezina has been amazing at working her network of contacts, even tapping on the door of a group that I have, shall we say, a failed relationship with, or even more accurately an aborted relationship.  No reason given, just plum failed.  Anyway, they directed us towards a particular farmer leader who went to this group looking for a job but since there was no openings received training to do some record keeping for all of his neighbours. He tracks the milk amounts including dairy feeding regimes, fat percentage and volumes, and the produce amounts for the various mixed vegetables grown in that area.

This man is what is known as a ‘professional farmer’, someone who has been elevated away from subsistence farming by training that goes well beyond the traditional learning that happens from generation to generation.  He is motivated by increased profits supported by IPM practices, the use of crop protection (pesticides etc) and by more precise methods of farming that works to increase what can be grown on small plots of land.  He’s doing quite well really, but I’m skipping ahead a bit.

To get to this man’s place, we hired a taxi to take us the 1-hour drive up into the hills. It was a neighbour of Ezina’s who recommended this guy.  So we talked him into waiting about 3 hours for us so we could walk up the hill where the taxi couldn’t go to find this house.  Honestly that took about 30 minutes, straight up this 45 degree hill, us huffing and puffing and of course me sweating like it was 80 degrees.  It was a warm day!

After winding our way back and forth up this gravel and stone road we stopped to eat the roti and curry we packed for lunch.  It was only at that point that we saw the green house we were seeking, just up the bend another 300 metres or so. So we downed the rotis and after a couple more ever narrowing bends in the road we finally arrived at the top of the world.  Ezina made the comment that I should note in my paper that we literally travelled everywhere to find what we were looking for.

We were greeted by the husband and wife who invited us in and offered tea (I declined but was given hot milk instead, I do need to give a shout out to my guts who have treated me very well these past 15 days despite milk, and tea and meals from sources every guide books says to avoid).  They were sort of welcoming, but had been given our contact from the group I mentioned earlier… so what were they expecting?

Well here was a big difficult learning—they were expecting something, a point that we were reminded of over and over throughout the 4 hours we were there.  But, I’ll leave it there. No one wants to read pages and pages of self indulgent blogging so I’ll split this into 2 installations in case I wake up tomorrow and begin my day feeling that I have nothing to write about, and in case I find out what happened to our taxi driver between now and then.

The return to paradise. The city of Pokhara.

Peace Pagoda Stupa (small blob almost centre) and the types of farms that are terraced, in fact,
many many farms look like this…