Apologies for the gap in blogs! The last few days have been busy…

Sunday through to Tuesday Jeny and I covered off training session number 2 in Bhaktapur where the majority of women were less experienced in selling and growing their vegetables. Many were young girls who were either learning so they could work with their parents, or help train their parents who are ill educated but interested in learning new things.  The women we spoke to who were more engaged in vegetable growing were really great to talk to and presented some new perspectives.

Along the way Jeny also helped me with a few cultural things that are confusing to a foreigner.  For example, all the literature I have read explicitly states that levels of oppression include: caste, class, gender and ethnicity.  Gender was an obvious one for me but I personally felt uncomfortable asking people their ethnicity in the questionnaire, so I took that question out. The ladies from this last group were mostly of Mongolian decent, which Jeny of course knew because as it turns out, people’s last

I call this one "Chicken noodles and Heather)

names denote their ethnicity and caste.  So I have inadvertently included this information in my study and since its there, and present day culture still works within this construct, I will use it as a tool for analysis in the coming weeks.

For this three days we got a few less interviews done than hoped for, but I learned a bit more about how the training sessions go.  Hopefully when I create a report it will lend to better more fruitful sessions for the women (the full explanation of the ‘fruitlessness’ will have to be saved for a conversation over a beer I’m afraid).  The reason I am mildly obsessed with them have the best training possible is because of what the women have to do just to get to training. 

Over the three days I found the sessions started late, ended early, and had long breaks and random pauses.  For example, we quietly asked someone who was leaving about the buses for getting home and it turned into a 10 minute class discussion.  I felt bad because its like, we’ll get home ok! Keep teaching! Cultural moment though, is it a class discussion because they really just care and want us to get home safely? Probably, but I can't cut this Canadian compulsion to get back at 'er!   

Somboddy got paaaaid!

Aside from the poor use of time, again, the women have that triple burden thing happening.  They wake up, milk a cow or feed a baby or some kids, get food prepared for the family, send the kids off to school and then probably do some field work.  They do laundry, the tidy the house, everything done using arcane methods that are both laborious and time consuming themselves.  Then they make the, at times, quite long trek to get to training only for it to start late etc. and sometimes have the learning be way over their heads. So all this toil every day, sacrifices in sometimes labor or productivity for four days and they get there to attend what could probably be much better sessions.  Some women aren’t even able to attend the training because the cost to them of the 11-4 hours is too high.  Such is why (it was explained to me) its mostly ‘middle class’ women who attend training.

Anyhow, I hope I am not sounding too negative here but its frustrating.  We heard women say they were pleased with what they learned because it solved problems they have had for years.  It made me wonder, why did they have to wait years to have fairly simple agronomic issues solved?

This is a farm. Or two or three farms.

To be continued…