Hey. Pssst. Nepal... You're Dirty

Some days Nepal is my friend. I enjoy its company and taking part in its life. Some days we share some poignant moments. If I can find the rhythm of the day I am happy. Those days filled with successful meetings, and crossings of the street. When I don’t overpay too much for a cab, or get dropped off by a tempo in just the right place. When I say something in Nepali and I am understood. When I try something new. When something, anything, makes sense. I don’t mind the load shedding. The rains, when they come, are a relief.

Other days I struggle with wanting to yell at it. Tell Kathmandu to be quiet, clean itself up, pull itself together. Walking down the street being trailed by a child trying to sell me a postcard or pulling at my arm as if my skin were a sleeve wears on me. The honking grates at my nerves, especially on those mornings when the city wakes me up before the birds get the chance to. The black exhaust that coats me when I walk by. The dirt, the poverty, the confusion. The lack of sidewalks or street names. These things sometimes culminate to a point where I want to bubble over and shake this country. Walking over the Bagmati River that smells like dying animals, lined with slums.

I live in an area that is overrun by NGOs, INGOs, IGOs (basically every .org acronym you could think of has set up shop here) but no one seems to be dealing with these simple things. There should be no reason that I can see for Kathmandu to have such a water problem. Yes, I understand that it is dry for much of the year, and the monsoons are an essential part of the health of this country. But there are so many rivers here, why no one is cleaning them up I just can’t understand. Yes, of course there's more to it than that. But still. Clean up the damn river. Make it an asset, not a liability. Utilize the resources that are here. Build capacity. Empower people. Educate. Do all the things that these organizations tout. In some ways Kathmandu seems primed to be at the cutting edge of the environmental movement. Based on the lack of clean water, many houses practice rain gathering. Because of the shortage of electricity many houses have solar panels. People compost. People walk and take public transportation. But there is a lack of infrastructure and more importantly the city seems to lack a plan. All of these simple things that are done out of necessity, stemming from financial and natural sources could, if developed into cohesive policy actually make a big difference in the functioning of the city. Or so it seems from the naïve foreigner's perspective who has only been here a month. I’m sure it’s more complicated. It has to be. Otherwise why wouldn’t things be different?

So here we are, it’s the 4th of July, and I have to admit I am completely uninterested in doing anything particularly American. Not that I think there is anything wrong with celebrating, and I thought that I would be much more interested in doing something quintessentially American on this day, but it turns out that I'm not. Everyday in Kathmandu I walk around with an overt understanding of being a foreigner. My foreignness is undeniable, and while on first glace I may be pegged simply as just being white I am constantly aware of my Americaness. For this reason, today I did not feel the need for any further patriotism. And since everything feels so latently coated with meaning I don’t think I could set off fireworks to celebrate independence day in a country that continues to struggle to define itself as a state in a fragile political climate. With the news of the Prime Minister’s resignation, and the need to establish a new government within the next three days, eating apple pie in the rain just doesn’t seem like something I want to do.

All that said, I can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else this summer. In many ways the same things that are challenging or overwhelming are what make this experience so interesting and fun. Those moments of frustration never last, and at the end of the day the satisfaction of a day spent learning and being exposed to new thing makes it all worthwhile. I can handle the constant state of being overloaded with stimuli if it means I get to feel like I am enmeshed in a novella, complete with tales of love, death, intrigue, tradition, family, conflict, and mystery. I mean, really, let’s face it. How often does one get to live fiction?