shifting worlds, teaching photo to womens, getting compliments from womens, spray-painting 'rebels', violence in the home

When back in Sankhu after a weekend in Kathmandu several things always happen. I generally spend my first day reading a lot and relaxing, probably because my time in Kathmandu, although a break from the home, is often more stressful and cluttered than being here. Along with the benefits of Western food and my own bedroom I get irritants like air and noise pollution, traffic, opportunistic salesmen and the general difficulty of getting anything done efficiently, be it finding something like spray paint, or visiting a Nepali home/organization. While my last two Kathmandu visits I managed to avoid getting sick, there is still some kind of energy recovery that is required after getting back, and yesterday I tried to eschew my guilt about spending the first half of the day reading a Terry Pratchet book and eating 1/3 of my dark chocolate store for the week.
Likely because of the pretty significant lifestyle shift in Sankhu, I also feel pretty antsy (hehe, an ant just ran across the computer screen), like there is something I need to do but have forgotten about. I have to relax back into the pace here, which is increasingly easier to do with all this practice (and my new knitting skills!). The most difficult part of adjusting comes when I shif my mind back to Nepal- the city is often where I spend the majority of my time with Westerners, do lots of e-mailing or phone calling, deal with job applications, post my letters and taste good old fashioned brown bread. This means my mind is pretty full of home or college when I return to Sankhu, and I have to make a little mental nudge back towards, for this week’s example, the final photo project, Easter egg hunts, spray painting with stencils, and rousing myself for a pre-midday hike.
This weekend in Kathmandu was a little different than usual- I taught a photo skills workshop at Raksha Nepal, the women’s organization I did office work for last time I was in Nepal. In typical Nepali fashion I showed up at the pre-arranged time, 10:00am, only to be told that half of the women were at their other job training. Could I come back at 3:00? My western half rose up like an affronted snake: “Can’t we do anything on time? I have a schedule to keep here!” I lulled the snake using my friendly eastern snake charmer side: “Chill out, man- what else do you really have to do today? Go run some errands and come back.” That’s what I did, and I’m sincerely glad I waited, as 20ish women got the chance to learn and take photos instead of only 10.
The class itself went really well too, despite my worries that I hadn’t prepared the curriculum thoroughly enough. Basically I planned on going in, drawing different parts of the camera, describing what each button does and when to use certain functions, and then showing them how to upload to a laptop. The benefit of this loose plan was that I didn’t stress in the face of small obstacles or delays. For example, very few of the women spoke English, and those who did spoke very little. Rosna, the coordinator for the organization, translated everything I said, which was difficult as she was learning everything at the same time. I found myself playing a weird kind of ‘camera charades’ meets ‘photo pictionary’ involving sound-effects, pantomiming, and lots of drawings on a white board. Despite the challenges, the class almost felt like a party- the girls were falling in love with photography, or at the very least with the new ability to take photos of each other and themselves. I would go around the room and demonstrate to each partner group (2-3 to one camera), and they would ask me questions in Nepali and we would both laugh when I just shrugged my shoulders and made an awkward face (signaling my total lack of comprehension). I actually liked the fact that the class underlined our mutual strengths and weaknesses- while the girls knew nothing about cameras, I knew little to none of their language. This made for a lot of laughter, and lots of friendly joking as I spoke utter grammatical nonsense and they accidentally took hideous pictures of their friends with double chins.
The biggest effect of the class may have been on my vanity, as all of the girls wanted to take photographs of and with me, and everyone kept complimenting me on how thin or beautiful I was, which basically meant I was blushing and embarrassed in almost every photograph. After we had finished uploading (which took awhile because people kept taking their cameras back and taking more photos thus perpetrating an unending cycling of uploading), they gave me tea, and were quite unwilling to let me go to my dinner date with a Swedish friend that evening. They kept trying to hoodwink me into spending the night, but I promised I would bring my dad for dinner when he arrived, and bid them all a warm goodbye. I left with a wide, unconquerable smile on my face, because I felt I had given those friendly, companionable women at least a small something in exchange for their incredibly welcoming kindness.
Yesterday I embarked on Part II of the spray-painting saga, as I helped five girls make stencils last night which we will spray this afternoon. Weeks ago, when we first sewed our t-shirts I told the girls we could also spray paint designs on them, but by the time I’d tracked down spray paint in Kathmandu, the final exams had started. After being asked “We spray now?” and “What color spray do you have?” twice a day all last week, I finally tried to teach some of them before I went to the city. Due to general Nepali flakiness, only Binita, one of the most excited girls, actually made her stencils, and we went up to the roof to “do spray” on her three shirts, ending up with a t-shirt saying “(Heart) U”, one with an Axe on it, and another with a Jesus Christ Cross (as she put it). A curious crowd surrounded us, and I had many more requests to “make spray” from most of the girls, something I knew would be problematic due to the crappiness of Nepali razorblades, and the necessity for spraypainting and razorblades to be highly supervised, never my strongpoint. They definitely had trouble with cutting when we made the stencils, but most everyone prevailed. Because I told them to make whatever stencil they wanted I now have in my possession a stencil with a heart with crossbones, “U n’ I” and (my favorite but the most disturbing) “HATE YOU FOREVER”.
While we did get to spraypaint most of the girls shirts, Sagar Mama (the man who runs the home) arrived in the middle of it, and definitely 'crashed the party'. He angrily spoke rapid-fire Nepali at the girls, who scrambled to clean up the stencils and newspaper on the roof. Today, when Danny, Kristel and I tried to spraypaint our own shirts with a golden calf, Kabita and Bimala leaned over the balcony and told me that they needed to talk to me because it was an emergency. Apparently Sagar had given them a 2 hour lecture yesterday, saying that if he caught them spraypainting again he would beat them in front of "the volunteers" and that the girls needed to tell me that this was bad behavior that shouldn't continue in the home. Why he couldn't deliver this message himself, like a mature individual, when he saw me multiple times and delivered the lecture nextdoor, i still don't know. This kind of incident is the ugly part of my time here- the beatings in the home are something i haven't discussed very much because I would rather not think about it. The volunteers are helpless to intervene, only sometimes using our presence as witnesses to curb violence from Sagar or the other staff. Last night at dinner one of the boys was beaten so that he bled, and then cried for the entire meal while we sat in silence, eating. Each time something like this happens I know that I will never beat my children, and wish that Nepali people didn't shrug these incidents off and say "that is our habit" or "that is Nepali culture". There are so many more ways of keeping discipline and order, I only wish that the people in the home, boys and girls alike, were more interested in exploring them.