Three Cups of Tea

Dear Book Club,

I just finished reading three Cups of Tea while trekking in the Himalayas. If I recall correctly, we selected it as one of our summer reads. It’s been interesting to read about the Balti mountain culture and the life of porters who support Westerners in their mountaineering tourism, while observing it first-hand. I’m not sure what to make of it or how to understand it; I’m still processing and I’m still conflicted. I think feeling conflicted is probably going to be a continuous feeling for the next two years. Let me try to explain:
At UN Day two weeks ago, an American named Ben Ayers presented a slide show and speech on “sustainable development” to the secondary school and their parents. He started out as a climber while in college who took a climbing trip in the Himalaya and was captivated by the Sherpas or porters he met. He graduated from college and returned to Nepal, this time to work as a porter. The typical porter can carry 120 Kgs on his forehead/back (That’s 265 lbs! And they’re really small people.). He worked as a porter for two years learning the trade, the culture, the language and at a grassroots level, learning what type of “development” the porters needed. He organized a non-profit called “Porter’s Progress”. Their concerns were that often times the wages a porter made, a few hundred rupees a day, did not even cover the porters’ own costs for food and lodging, which they paid themselves. Also, many porters suffered injuries and even death while working in extreme conditions with no consideration to their safety or health. Finally, child labor was common among the porters.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/careyeubank/sets/72157602766170753/
The trekking or climbing tourists all seemed to have the latest top-notch clothing and safety gear, while many of the Sherpas wore plastic flip-flop sandals and ragged clothing, hauling heavy loads for the tourists over exhausting and dangerous conditions. He told us about porters who lost toes to frost bite, of child laborers working as porters hoping to raise enough money to pay their school fees, and of porters who acquired AMS or altitude sickness and were left to die. It’s true and here’s where it begins to get hard or conflicted for me. I have a nice pair of gore-tex REI full leather hiking boots, my down and gore-tex ski gear, and if I were to get AMS or any life-threatening injury, help is a helicopter away. What’s worse is that once I get to the tea-house or lodge we’re staying at, everything, from the toilet to the tomatoes in the soup have been carried up the mountainside on someone’s back. By being there as a tourist, I support the local economy, but the catch is the local economy is built on exploitation.

Another argument supporting this exploitation is based on some sort of biological determinism (which always raises an eyebrow for me) - it’s that the Sherpas are biologically the world’s strongest or heartiest people. Genetically, they can carry these enormous loads supported with the structure of their skeleton and their ability to handle high elevation. Really. At one small lodge, we stayed with a Sherpa family- the father was a guide (or porter?) and had summited Mt. Everest; he had a wife and three daughters. A Japanese physician was also staying there (along with a crazy Romanian and an anti-social Kiwi), this doctor had brought a little fingertip oxygen sensor that could measure the oxygen in one’s blood. We all tried it out for fun at the dinner table and at 3,500 meters (or 11,500 feet) my blood oxygen level was at 85% while the Sherpa family’s was between 90-93% (Just for perspective, 60% is cause for evacuation and 30% means you’re dead). Even the six-year old daughter had a 93% blood O2 level- while the rest of us tourists ranked in the low to mid 80’s.
So, we hired a guide and a Sherpa. We ordered whatever we felt like that was on the menu at guest houses, beer that was hauled up on someone’s back. Toast with honey, butter and jam for breakfast with eggs or muesli with hot milk were all among our favorites. We were giving someone a job, right, by purchasing the goods they were paid to haul up there to please the tourists’ pallets? Or were we simply contributing to an exploitative system? It’s the whole globalization question that I face at home, but just on different terms. At home it’s easy to just not shop at Wall-Mart and to try to buy local when I can. But this is different, or is it? My conscience says, do as the locals do, (or when in Rome…), but I really wasn’t into one meal a day with Yak butter tea and porridge balls.
Since the Maoist revolution in Nepal, some things have begun to get better for the porters. They aren’t supposed to carry more than 60 kgs at a time (although we saw many, many loads that looked to be way over that), and children are not supposed to work (we did see some children carrying loads, but it was hard to tell if it was part of regular family life or in commercial service), also, the wages are supposedly set at 600 rupees a day (or close to $10 US dollars). Porter’s Progress has also brought some positive changes and awareness to the situation. Actually, it’s hard to tell what the changes are or who is responsible for them. We did have to stop at an extortion check point set up by the Maoist revolutionary forces and pay a $1.50 foreigner tax.

My way of dealing with it was to induldge in the services offered. I mean who hasn’t gone backpacking and dreamt of paying someone ($10 a day!) to carry your heavy pack? And after a long day of hiking, who doesn’t want a cold beer?! And, I made an effort to make friends with Chirring Sherpa, the porter we hired. He was 18, and spoke very few words of English. I walked with him, when he wasn’t hours ahead of me, and tried to learn more Nepali words as I tagged along behind him. I smiled at him a lot since I couldn’t communicate much more than that and I also threw in some pantomime episodes trying to have a conversation with him. I asked him to sit with us and hang out, although I began to sense that he was more comfortable on the fringes rather than in our small group of English speakers. I made sure to give him money for food and that he got a good tip from us.
It brings me back to Ben Ayers’ speech: sustainable development is not about barging in and thinking you know what’s best or that your way, the way of the West, is best. It’s about listening, being present, and most importantly, about building relationships.
And for those of you who’ve read three cups of tea, you’ll appreciate that development comes along with many conversations, much listening and learning, over many cups of tea.