Intervention

This week the vegetable training is in Bhaktapur, a place many tourists know because of the old city with its insanely amazing architecture.  But outside of the small ancient core exists a larger area where the real people live. It was here on the top floor of a school that the training was happening.

The class is noticeably younger than last week; many women said their mothers made them come.  They also unanimously failed the pre-test which means they are perhaps less engaged in vegetable farming, and certainly less aware of the practices involved therein.  The room was small and noisy and I found the women were distracted or maybe the fact that we showed up an hour late (again) caused them to get restless.

Things pretty well followed the same order that the previous training had, with the exception that these women are really interested in tunnel farming because it is a great way to extend the growing season for virtually any vegetable.  The women at the other training are arguably more engaged in selling than these women are and were already ‘been there done that’ on the tunnel front.

 

We managed to do one interview after inhaling our 12 momo lunch (vegetable and spicy, as usual) and then near the end as one woman was leaving we were invited to interview her before she left. So we went over and found a quiet spot at which point she suggested she didn’t live far away and we could come to her place and maybe more people would be around to interview. 

For some reason that sounded reasonable so we went.  The walk started up a steep hill and went on literally for about 1.5 – 2 km which isn’t so far but was probably farther than we bargained for.  Then we sat to do her interview on the edge of a cliff that overlooks the famous NAME temple that is there.  Her situation is the she basically farms with her mother, and she is taking the training for when her mother isn’t around and she needs to rely on herself.  She also named the secondary source of income for the family as “alcohol distilling’ and later added that her father drinks much of the product himself so as far as faming goes, its mostly the women in charge. 

The last question of the questionnaire is “do you have any further comments that you would like to add?” to give participants the change to speak their mind.  In this case, it took longer than any other participant yet.

The short version of her story is excruciatingly common for many young girls living in a village.  She attended school up to the 8^th grade but had to drop out because the family ran out of money.  She is literate in Nepali and very basic in English, her dream language that she sees as a ticket out of this society.  After leaving school, she tried working in a hotel in the city, but she found out that all the neighbours had started a rumor about her chastity so she returned home to dispel the rumors and keep her family happy.  A women’s perceived purity is very important if she ever wants to get married, which this girl said her family is pressuring her to do.  She also said that if her family was ‘rich’ and she lived in the city with a job, no one would say anything about her.  All these things to deal with at the ripe old age of eighteen.

This brings us to the farmer training, as I have heard from most of the women we’ve interviewed, farming is a last resort for making any sort of living.  Many women have said that because they lack education, the only other option is farming.  I have asked the question, “are there any good opportunities for young women in farming to make a good living?” and most say something like “No.” There is a stigma around farming for various reasons, but considering Nepal is a net importer of food, in economics terms a considerable drain on the global economy, this is really a sad reality. 

Farming for many here is incredibly laborious and the means by which they farm are techniques used for decades which wholly involve physically labour including tilling the soil, planting, collecting and spreading manure, carrying goods to the market—the list goes on.  I am continually surprised by the age of the women we interview, as by appearances they all look way older than their actual age.  All I could think for this young girl in front of us was ‘do everything you can to not become a farmer.’

But I give full credit to Jeny my research assistant, because she heard this girl saying things that were simply fatalistic like she can never go back to school because she’s too old to learn and that there’s no way she could ever afford it anyway and was furious.  Jeny had a long discussion with her and we left with a promise to seek out options to find sponsorship for her.

I have found over the past little while that entering the villages is a little bit of a danger zone and when I was telling Anamika about this girl last night she warned us to be wary because you never really know if people are telling the truth or not.  The sobering cloud of reality quickly blew in over this little episode, and it gave me something to think about indeed.