People doing stuff

So the two ladies in the top picture are cleaning up after a ceremony/meal using basins of water since there isn't any running water at this particular temple. Most people, even many in KTM, don't have their own running water and there are community taps on every block. At these taps people wash dishes, bathe, you name it. It's really rude to photograph people bathing, though, so use your imaginations! The sidus in the bottom picture are posing for tourists (and getting money) but that's not to say that they aren't sidus, who are holy men who own nothing, beg for their food everyday and meditate a lot. Some of them cover themselves with ash to protect themselves from the sun and insects. Note the guy on the left is smoking which I suspect is a little less than ascetic. But it's pretty interesting and impressive to see regular sidus walking around the neighborhoods asking for food donations; it's just a part of life here.

So this weekend was really busy and fun. On Friday evening about a dozen of us met at the American Embassy (which looks just like a giant prison surrounded by barbed-wire fences) and drove and then hiked up to a house/restaurant to dine and see the full moon rise. The house is adorable, has three bedrooms, and people can rent for the weekend just to get out of KTM and into the foothills. And there are some good hikes that can start from there. The meal was great and it was fun to hang with Embassy and USAID people. As I've said before, they kind of live in an alternative universe from mine. They have big houses, Land Rovers and personal drivers. They have toilet paper in their bathrooms at work. They are not asked how much they pay in rent, (I was asked at work twice last week...you think they'd give up.) But it's also fun to not really care about all of the diplomatic political stuff that they all worry about. The woman who's basically the #2 American in the country behind the Ambassador was there and you could see people trying to saddle up for a chat. Of course she ended up talking a great deal to Janice and me, who could have given two hoots. But man, people who are in the development/diplomatic service are travel junkies and have all lived in 5-10 countries each. It's like a game or something and one of the rules is that it's a big priority to fly back to the US to give birth so that one's child can be eligible to be President of the United States. Apparently children born outside of the US to parents on foreign service are still eligible but people don't like the gray area. Who'd a thunk it? And then Saturday night we went to a fund-raiser for the World Food Program and there were a ton of hipsters there to hear a few bands and then see one of the guys from Thievery Corporation DJ. It was pretty cool. All of the teenage kids of expats who work in KTM turned out to be as American as they could; it was cute. Something that surprises me is that all development people are expected to do a turn in Iraq or Afghanistan even if it's only 3 months. I was talking to this guy who was explaining how crazy it was in the Green Zone for 3 months, rockets falling everywhere, and I had to wonder what's the use of sending someone anywhere for just 3 months. It takes that long just to figure out the lay of the land let alone affect change. It seems a little crazy and very expensive to me but of course I smiled and nodded because these guys really do do some important work. Now that I've been in Nepal for 3 months I'm just getting over the newness to the point that last week I forgot to look both ways in the street and some guy hit me with his bike. It wasn't too bad but he just kept on peddlin'...nope, wasn't me who hit whitey....I'm just riding my bike the wrong way down a one-way street minding my own business... So it goes.

There is a massive electricity, petrol, diesel and kerosene shortage that is really becoming sad. As I've said, they cut the power 8 hours per 24 hours and now there isn't fuel and so the generator only works for part of the 8 hours. I live in the lap of luxury and had stored up on kerosene for the stove but average people literally can't cook let alone have lights. There are few cars on the road in a city of 3 million people and people walk for hours to get to work. Outside of KTM many areas have curfews after 3 PM during which no one is allowed on the streets so the army can try and get trucks from India through to the rest of the country. The biggest ethnic group that lives all along the border with India is fighting for their own state and have cut off shipments for weeks. I don't know what sick people do during a curfew...just die I guess. So KTM, and especially my apartment building, is like a peaceful oasis in a desert of crazy and it'll probably be like this until the April 10th elections. After that.....let's just see. But given how gentle the average Nepali is it's not big deal that people just casually wait in petrol lines for DAYS, and I'm not exaggerating. DAYS. And the cap is 5 liters per vehicle. Imagine if that was Detroit.
Goodnight and best, best wishes to Dave's dad who's having surgery on Tuesday. xoc

Happy Valentine Day

Only young people celebrate Valentine's Day in Nepal since it's a new American holiday, but work suprised me with a cake from a local hotel. I'd have taken a shower that day if I had guessed! Note that it's really cold indoors (out of the sun) and so we all wear many layers. These are upper management guys (Dr. Durga in the hat) except for the guy all the way on the left who is the senior tea delivery man. For the first time in three months he returned my daily "namaste". I almost fell over and am redoubling my efforts to have the tea boy speak to me. It's a pretty nice group of people. xoc

sunday

Today is haircut day! It's been 6 months and so it's time. So let's see...for anyone with a skype account search me in Nepal (my first and last name typed together without caps) and let's talk. And a really fun itunes podcast that I found is NPR all songs considered free concerts. They have shows from bands that sound like they'd be cool like Arcade Fire but you never wanted to invest in an album without hearing them first. Hooray for technology.
A great example of how hard it is to figure out Asian culture is a conversation that I had with my boss KT. First she goes on about how great adoption is and how she helped two people adopt Nepali babies. There are a lot of orphanages here. Then she said that I should adopt a Nepali baby. Then she keeps talking and finally says that it's just better that Asians adopt Asian kids, Africans adopt African kids, etc. so that the child isn't confused. All of this in one conversation without any indication that there's a contradiction. It's often impossible to figure out what's really going on.
So my Nepali lessons have become so much funnier now that Janice is often in the apartment when the teacher visits. For instance, the Nepali word for "very" sounds like "dairy", the word for "tall" sounds like "a-gli" and the third person conjegation for "is" is "ho". And their sentence structure is subject-object-verb. So just imagine when the teacher helpfully built the sentence for Janice is very tall: "Janice dairy a-gli ho." We couldn't stop laughing and the teacher just sat there blankly. So of course Janice had to protest that she isn't dheri a-gli and certainly isn't a dheri a-gli ho. It shall never die (for you phis out there). And the verb for "to blow" sounds exactly like "f**k you". I actually had tears in my eyes when conjugating that verb. You can't make this stuff up. But sometimes I say things totally incorrectly because I can't make some of the sounds of their language and my teacher's eyes will get really big and I can tell that she's trying not to laugh.
Finally, I just have to admit that my favorite news network is Aljazera English. I fear that Jenrose is going to get on a plane and come rip those loofa mits right off my hands, but it's true. They have clearly made a big effort and reportedly hired a lot of BBC journalists and a friend told me that they actually have hired a lot of Jewish people. And the US government is obviously making an effort at better PR because they get to interview very high-ranking US officials and generals. But the programs are longer, like 30 minutes per topic, and totally dive into topics like inter-Shia rivalries in Iraq or all of the sides of woman and Islam in Turkey. Plus they cover Asia and Africa more than other networks and the future, good and bad, is going to be understanding these parts of the world. Plus, they really drill into topics like what supporting democracy really means when the developed countries (the US and Europe) support countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Ouch. But then they'll cover how crazy various groups are in those countries and so what's better or worse? It's like the New Yorker magazine of news programs. Does cable carry it in the US?
Enough pontificating for one day. Goodnight! xoc

Oh Man

So the handicapped sales manager told me what an honor it'd be if I'd come to dinner at his house with his entire family. Oh man. Next Sunday. I so need to figure out how to not have him get fired. And also my boss KT gave me an excellent speech on how I need to get married: (insert non-PC accent) "There's nothing wrong with you. You're pretty. You speak gentle. You should be married." Oh KT, I've been there...and returned. Then she looked all thoughtful and said "not married maybe not bad. Freedom. Maybe 60% not bad." I can only imagine all of the parties she had to host as the general's wife. I just smile and nod. But I think that I'm going to dinner at her house tomorrow night so that might be interesting. Back to American Idol on Indian TV. xoc

Work

Where's Christy?

So I have a few initiatives happening at work. First, we have a sales program that is seriously off track. Or program's main core competency - the thing that makes it unique and successful - is its network of 53 clinics (to be 60 by the end of the year). Our Senior Management Team is basically 5 people who can do each other's jobs and so they can seemlessly open clinics. We have quality clinics in areas in which the government can't even keep a small health post open and so we are literally a life-line for people with few options. But when we started a contraception sales program we funneled everything through a small sales office in KTM and the manager basically dumped lots of product into the market to book sales without collecting any money and so our receivables are astronomical and the market is flooded with our condoms (despite our envigorating sales events such as I described earlier). So based on input from lots of people who actually understand this market (not yet me) we have decided to move sales to each of the clinics with the clinic managers in charge of each sales team. This makes more sense because each clinic already has 10 promoters who spend their time in the community and each clinic is already set up as an autonomous business unit. Also, different geographic areas are culturally very distinct (Indians and Muslims in the South, urban wealthy people in KTM, Mongolian hill people in the hills and mountains) and so individual clinics can cater to these different customers. The problem is the original sales manager is still working away as if he didn't almost ruin the program and it's even worse that he's disabled and has trouble walking so I don't want to be the person who gets him fired. But I'll tell you, every day he makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Plus we'd like to introduce new products that might even include vitamins and antibiotics; whatever makes a little money for the program. Otherwise my other big focus is pushing for the diversification of services offered at the clinics so that we're not dependent on one donor for all of our outside funding. Of course our focus is family planning and sexual reproductive health but the market's needs are changing and I think that five years from now new competitors are going to heavily erode our clientel. And so with some help from contacts I'm pitching to management maybe starting some small projects (for which there is funding from various small donors) on offering more pre and post natal care, cervical cancer screening, prolapsed uteruses, etc. We can't ignore our core mission but it's really risky depending on one donor and one kind of service. Maybe the program isn't ready but I think it's a wise conversation to start having. The problem is that the program thinks about itself as a family planning provider and I hoping that they can begin considering themselves to be a clinical servces provider since no other NGO in the country has a clinic network like ours. Anyhow, we'll see. So that's what I do all day. Oh, that and obsess about LinkedIn (the networking website). It's my new thing and if I haven't harassed you to join then get ready..... Goodnight! xoc

Back at 'cha

Hmmm, if I live in Nepal but have an elevator AND a cook can I really call it the developing world? I did breathe in a lot of funeral pyre smoke today...that's gotta count for something....

Funeral pyres. After the bodies burn the ashes are swept into the sacred river.

Sorry for taking so long…it’s been crazy here. Between 8 hours a day of power cuts, an unusually busy work schedule and two of us needing the internet, it’s a lot. But the good news is that we just got wireless internet and I’m told that we can put it on a plug that works during power cuts and so that’ll be lovely. Let’s see...Janice started class (a month-long class for her international ESL certificate) on Monday and I think is enjoying herself aside from the fact that she’s more qualified than the course teacher. She immediately bought a face mask considering the pollution and now I'm wondering why I have been waiting so long. The part time cook Kumar started and works on Mon, Wed & Fri and so we’re eating really well. He’s a middle-aged Nepali man who has cooked for the American Embassy and he’s quite handsome in an Omar Sharif kinda way. A teeny, tiny Omar Sharif. He comes in the morning, checks for any notes/requests, does the grocery shopping, makes dinner, and leaves it for when we come home. Dreamy. So one day we had Indian food, one day we had Thai food, and one day we had spinach lasagna because my neighbor (for whom he also cooks on those days) bought an oven, which is a bit of a rarity here. Right now we’re eating vegetarian and it seems to be working well. Also, Kumar goes through the trouble of washing salad in bleach water and then rewashing it in filtered water and so for the first time in months we have salad that tastes fine through some magic Kumar knows. Very, very dreamy. The Hyatt here in KTM is really, really nice and they have this swanky all-day spa package. Our bargin is that if we follow a good diet and also exercise five days per week for one month then we’ll go to the spa for the day. We also found a Japanese store today with tons of really nice frozen fish and so have found a good salmon source. A consultant from London (working on a project that we need to implement here but kinda don’t want to) has been here for a week and so I picked her up at the airport last Sunday and have spent nearly every day and evening with her for a week. By the time Thursday came around we were all a little punchy when, I kid you not, the government called a national holiday for Friday. They do that kind of thing here on a day's notice. When we told her you could see that she thought we were making it up to ditch her for the last day and on top of that our work internet AND the financial controller’s computer system went down on Thursday, as well. Then our back-up generator ran out of diesel (of course there’s a shortage of that, too) and we all sat in the dark and secretly breathed a collective sigh of relief. On the way out of the building she asked if we two could get together to work on Friday, anyway, and I must admit I pulled the B card. I mean, really. Friday was a big celebration of Losar, the Tibetan New Year, and I said that I have some Buddhist obligations and stuff and was unable to work. At least a few of us expats attended the celebrations but I fear that I might have picked up a little bad karma with the exaggeration. Anyway, she’s been working in the international NGO field for a long time and that community is small and tight-knit. So twice I went out and met some people that she knew (even though she’d never been to Nepal before) including the second-in-command at the US Embassy. I will not be admitting this new acquaintance to any Nepalis looking for visas, of course. It was really fun. I must admit when you start to mingle with these career people who have lived in 5 or 6 countries, etc. etc they are very smart and knowledgeable people. But something must change after so many years overseas because they were just so AMERICAN in that they all brought their furniture, dogs, full wardrobes, whatever else with them at costs that surely exceeded the costs of all new everything and the fancy French restaurant at which we ate last night was like a country club or the American Embassy’s other office. People were actually critiquing the quality of the blue cheese. This is Kathmandu, people! On the other side of the wall people are competing with the cows for something to eat from the trash pile. But who am I to say after only 3 months here, I guess. Sitting in my marble-floored apartment with dinner waiting on the stove. Blogging via my wireless internet. But I was FINE with the blue cheese! Oh, I heard Michigan got 11 inches of snow last week…it’s now about 70 degrees and sunny here (although still cold at night). I’ll gloat until the monsoon season, thank you. More photos later thanks to the new awesome camera and new awesome photographer. xoc

Wow

Thanks everyone for the good wishes. I should pass out more often! Oh wait, no more bug jokes. Dave H emailed me that at least I didn't pass out IN the bathroom like in the old days. Nice, Dave. I'm doing great aside from an increasingly narrow window through which to blog from home given the power cuts. Janice arrived on Thursday night and her luggage arrived a few hours ago (Sunday night). But it all seems to be there and so no problem. It sounds silly but I think I'm most excited about the U of M stocking cap that she brought for Dr Durga, my fellow alumni. It just strikes me as so silly and I can't wait to see him wearing it around the office, (work is cold and he is old and so he wears a hat all the time). Well, that and the awesome camera that my parents gave me for Christmas. I hope to post much better pictures just as soon as I figure out how to use it. Janice is a little shell-shocked but the nice apartment with an elevator, the nice grocery store that I discovered, and the good pizza joint made the transition pretty smooth. She starts a month-long class Monday morning. Today we both went for massages at the nice spa and let's just say that massages in Asia tend to be a bit, well, personal. I mean, REALLY personal back and front. I just couldn't meet her eyes in the lobby for fear of cracking up until we were out of there but was so glad to share something so outrageous. More catching up later. xoc