Willy Wonka Goes for a hike, continued

Heading down was as torturous as down hills are. When doing so, you are using your crappy hamstrings instead of your awesome quads and glutes.  Your balance is off and your footing always feels a little unsteady, like a skid on your bum is imminent at any step.  And the stones and rocks and silty dirt suddenly become the rug that gravity wants to yank out from under you.  It’s a tough go, and you’re still hot and a bit tired from going all that way up there.

It’s the only way down though, so you do it and as you move along you realize your heart isn’t pounding as much and the sweat is drying from your forehead a little bit and maybe it isn’t so bad to have to go all the way down again. Who knows, maybe a cab will be waiting at the bottom that you can take back to town?

At this point in the season the rice is nearly all harvested in this area, so the farmers are working hard on making their paddy stacks (the hut shaped rice chaff piles) which is actually really interesting to observe.  They stick a tall post into the ground and spread the first chaff all over the ground in quite a thick pile.  Then they take two ox or three scrawny horses side by side and walk them merry-go-round style around the pole, letting their legs wind the chaff tighter and tighter creating a solid,  circular base to stack everything else on in a nice, tight pile.  Then after piling the bundles of chaff up and up and up, they complete it with an angled roof to deflect some of the rain over the season.  I hadn’t considered how the stacks were made so hiking when this was happening was neat.

On the way up, everyone was working but on the way down people began to break for lunch.  Most people called out a Namaste to me and I would reply but not stop walking.  Then a boy of about 15 came chasing up the paddy to say hi to me, he seemed genuinely happy to greet me so when he invited me down to where lunch was happening I thought, sure why not go convene with the locals? Besides, maybe I could ask a few questions about what they were doing.

His family was about 6 or 7 women, one quiet old man and himself, a 7 year old brother and about a 4 year old boy.  I was engaging him and his brother asking how much English they spoke, which they both did because they go to an English school so I was thinking it was pretty neat to stop and chat with the locals in my own language and everything.

The ladies kept calling things out to him so finally he stopped and asked, “So do you have any chocolates for the baby?” which instantly deflated my interest in being there in that moment.  “No, I don’t have any chocolates, do you have some for me?” I replied, with a friendly smile but also an interest in seeing his reaction.  He looked a little confused, because why would he have chocolates for me when Willy Wonka Foreigner was walking through his turf?  He also quickly asked if I wanted to take pictures of his family, which I sensed would come at a financial cost, so I politely declined and headed back to the path.

I was really disappointed that happened and all the rest of the way down and back to the guesthouse I was quite bothered by the whole encounter.  I thought I read the situation right. I thought maybe it was a novelty for the family to talk to the strangers that visit their country, but I was wrong.  It seems like a simple encounter and that someone asking for chocolates is no big deal, but here is basically says, you’re not from here, you have things, give me those things.  Would you ever ask a random stranger for chocolate? Not likely.

I felt a bit reticent to write this post so bluntly because there’s something about being negative that makes me pause and think about my assumptions and as well, about how fair it is to discuss them in a forum to which the parties I am talking about are not invited.  I recognize that I could have read the situation entirely wrong, but then a conversation this afternoon with the owner of Sacred Valley Inn where I am staying (a UK born Canadian cum Nepali resident) made me feel less crazy and cynical about the experience.  She even said that in her 20 or so years here she has developed a certain ear for a genuine Namaste or the “I want something from you” Namaste.  Mostly though, she says she ignores calls from strangers because even after this long here, people in her own neighbourhood pester her about giving them things like treats or chocolates because she appears to be a foreigner despite marrying a Nepali man so long ago.

She personally feels that the people living in the areas where tourists frequent (Sarankot in this instance) have been a bit spoiled by handouts, or have developed a culture of begging where there never was one before.  We, westerners, go to developing countries with trinkets to hand out because we see that people don’t have as many material goods as we do and we figure, hey, it’s just a pen or a balloon or a soccer ball, people need this stuff.  But they don’t, not really. 

In my opinion, it creates the impression that Santa Claus has come to town, that we have so much wealth that we can instantly give it out like a no-strings-attached ATM machine.  Meanwhile, myself, and many other travellers, devote quite a bit of the household budget to go places and experience new cultures.  We are not endlessly wealthy, we are relatively wealthy, but the ratio for my cost of living to the cost of living here still leaves me as part of the working class strata (when I have a job that is, right now I’m just a bum student—even worse!).

This idea of handouts is quickly becoming one of my pet peeves about travelling because I saw it happen in Senegal where I lived for 2 months, in Guatemala where I was part of a mission’s team for 2 weeks, and in in many other places where begging or stealing or swindling has become part of the imbedded local culture. 

Where does it stop, you might be wondering?  It stops with people from developed countries or privileged positions not handing crap out to local people, I think it’s as simple as that. If that were to happen, it would take time to undo the culture of begging because it took long enough to develop it.  

Tomato tunnel money makers.

I’ll also add in a thought that Nathan and I both agree on, which is begging, like proper asking for money begging, also causes harm because it’s an unsustainable and shallow income stream.  Unsustainable because the beggar doesn’t know where the next dollar or rupee is coming from if it’s coming at all, and shallow because the skills people are being paid for aren’t transferable. If you think of ‘beggar’ as a work position, what are they qualified to do outside of begging?  What are you really paying them for?  Especially in the instance of children where the window for long-term reintegration into ‘normal’ society is so wide open, why encourage them to stay on the street so their family, or Maribou or brothel owner can make money off of them?  Right now in Kathmandu many street kids, mostly boys, are self-funding an addiction to huffing glue thanks to the generous handouts they receive.

At any rate, I welcome your comments, thoughts, or experiences on this topic, because I find other people's take to be really interesting.