Electricity:
We actually have planned power cuts 8 hours a day. It’s called load shedding. My students now say, “I had load shedding” instead of “My dog ate my homework.” It sucks. I often go to bed in the dark (well I wear my headlamp around and have a few candles) then I get up in the dark with no power. It means no toast and my alarm clock doesn’t go off with the power out. It’s hard to get ready in the morning in the dark. It’s hard to read by candle light. Hard to grade papers, to do anything. It just makes one want to sleep more. I sleep a lot more. The ironic thing, once again, is that Nepal has the world’s best potential for Hydro-electric power. In fact we sell much of our power to India and China is investing in Hydro-plants in Nepal near the border. Why don’t we have any? Again, no storage capacity. It’s maddening. It seems such an easy problem to fix.

Fuel:
Nationwide shortage of fuel, all types: gasoline, diesel, cooking fuel, propane… etc. This means that people often wait hours, even overnight in line at the gas pumps. Apparently, Nepal has been getting subsidized fuel from India for years and hasn’t paid the bill for it. So India has cut us off. Unless we pay. So the government raised prices on fuel two weeks ago and there were massive protests and demonstrations. They were burning tires in the streets the whole city shut down. (No school for me!) In response to the protests, the Nepali Oil Authority dropped the price increase and we are back to a state of chronic shortages and huge queues (lines) for gas. This also means that there is a shortage of fuel for our heaters and it is very cold here now. None of the homes come with centralized heating. So you just wear down everywhere- to eat dinner, in bed, etc. and try to stay warm. I have gone to bed with my jacket on, hat and gloves. At least I have heaters. All around the city, people huddle in little groups of three around piles of burning plastic bags for warmth; you can imagine the smell of constant burning plastic in the air. The good news is that it should warm up soon.

Garbage:
There are garbage workers here, apparently. But they’ve been on strike. So the trash just sits in plies that grow to mounds and eventually into road blocks, rotting everywhere. It’s not pretty. But it does serve as a feeding method for all the street dogs and cows. (Yes there are a lot of homeless city-street cows wandering around here.) We actually do still pay for garbage collection. Men come by our alley and the gate to our house calling out chants. I never knew what they were saying, in fact I thought the first one I heard was asking for food, and I gave him some oranges and bananas- much to the amusement of all my neighbors. I later learned that he was collecting newspapers. It’s hard to tell, because they all ride a bicycle with a cart attached to the back and they ride around singing out to the houses. I guess our cook, Shiva, or cleaning lady, Bina, bring them our trash and they pedal it away on their bikes, just to dump it in the street in front of our house. Lately, it has been picked up from the piles on our street. But they can’t take it to the garbage dump because the community next to the dump is protesting. They were promised that in exchange for hosting the dump they would get some benefits, like a school and some basic services from the government. Since they haven’t gotten a thing from the government, they have stopped allowing the garbage to go to the dump. So they revert back to the original method, before the dump, which is just to throw all the garbage into the river. That’s also where the raw sewage goes. I refuse to eat any fish while in Nepal. The recycling is post-consumer. That means that you throw it all away in the same garbage and if it makes it down the river, the lower caste people who live near the riverbanks, wade around and pull out the plastic, the bottles, the cans, newspapers and bits of scrap cloth. Then they recycle it somehow.

We still pay bills for all of our services. But since there is no mail service, these same guys on bikes come around, chanting and singing for bill collection. I hadn’t paid for our water for 6 months, because I didn’t realize that’s what was going on. Luckily Shiva (cook) figured it out and when my phone was disconnected, he went around the city and paid all our bills: water, electric, and phone. I know who the garbage guy is now; so he gets paid when he come singing. Craig and I are practicing the chant and will try it out back in Bellingham to see what happens. Who knows, it works like magic here.

Did I mention that Kathmandu has the second worst air pollution in the world? I’m not sure who is first, but some weeks, when we’re burning lots of plastic and tires, we’re sure we’ve beat them.

All of this is daily reality here. But somehow it works. People keep living, having happy and fulfilling lives. They just accept and move on. It’s people like me, who are used to things making sense- to problems being solved- who don’t deal as well. I’ve learned a lot about myself. On one hand it’s nice or empowering. I’m confronted on a daily basis with how much I consume and what the daily impact of my existence on the globe is creating. In the US, it just wasn’t as real. Now when the lights suddenly flick back on, I’m alarmed at their brightness and at first it’s an intrusion. It teaches me not to take things, even water, electricity and heat for granted. It also provides another perspective on appreciating life: the stars are much more noticeable in the dark- with no city lights!

Next time you throw something in the garbage, turn on a light, come home to a warm house, or just use water, appreciate it for us.


PS Don’t worry about us; we do have a maid a cook and a gardener who take excellent care of us! We foreigners really are incapable of caring for ourselves here. You just can’t figure out how it works.