The Cornell-Nepal Studies Program is a unique international opportunity available to CIPA Fellows. The program offers semester-long accommodations and coursework in field research, project management, and Nepali language in partnership with Tribhuvan University. Justine Lewis (’13) spent the spring 2013 semester participating in the program and took the time to reflect on her experience.
This past semester, the Cornell Institute of Public Affairs (CIPA), supported me in an amazing opportunity. CIPA helped to arrange and encourage my decision to spend a semester abroad through the Cornel-Nepal Studies Program (CNSP).
During my semester in Nepal, I took language and contemporary issues classes, participated in cultural exchange events, and made incredible new friends.
While living in Nepal and being a part of this study abroad program, CIPA also helped to support me in finding an internship, which provided me with the opportunity to work for an NGO that supports Tibetan refugees in the Kathmandu Valley.
During one point of my stay in this incredible place, we spent a week in a village high in the mountains above the city of Pokhara, which is 4-6 hours by bus away from the city, depending on the condition of the dirt roads. The village’s name is Sikles, and if you see on a map you’ll notice it’s in the Annapurna region. The Himalayas were always in my front yard.
This village stay was the epitome of the experiences I love—being with a real family, in a real home, and becoming a member of the family. I had that in Kathmandu, but it’s different when you have a mom and sisters around that lead you to the water tap and watch you while you brush your teeth, or show you how to do dishes in their home because you’re doing it wrong, or make you tea and look at you and wink and throw in another spoonful of sugar. My room was above the kitchen, and got very warm starting at 6 am when the wood fire smoke and heat would rise – that was my wake-up signal to climb down and start helping with breakfast. The home belonged to the girls’ brother, but he had left the village a few months before to go to Saudi Arabia and find work and send remittances home to the family. Not many job opportunities exist in the villages anymore, as the women are mostly subsistence farmers and the income generation possibilities are low. Many of the men have left, and send home money to their families back in the mountains.
The village, as all villages in the mountain regions of Nepal, has been claimed and reclaimed from the mountain through a series of terraces, which are maintained throughout the generations. To look across the valley as the jeep climbed higher and higher closer to the blue sky meant that to my left and sometimes right I could see terraces for miles, extending up from the valley floor and ending around a village, which is sometimes just a few houses clustered together—dots on the side of the mountain. The scenery was something out of a Lord of the Rings movie, and the only thing I lacked was a gold ring to throw at one of the Himalayas.
The language barrier was fierce, and put a fire in my belly to continue wholeheartedly in my efforts to learn Nepali so I could make and keep friends. In the village, the first language is Gurung, a regional language, and Nepali is second. Their version of Nepali is also different, and so much of my communication with my family consisted of smiling and laughing, but I did manage a joke or too, at my own expense. For example, I squealed happily when we brought in the chickens into the house for the night, as I love chickens and want a whole herd of them someday. We had to bring in the rooster as well, and I asked what his name was. My mother and two sisters in Sikles looked at me quizzically. I broke the silence and asked, “Can we call him Red Ama (mother)?” They looked at me and laughed, and my homestay mom said, “We will call him dinner”, and we laughed some more.
But it was with a little gravity that I laughed, as I truly felt the difference between problems and inconveniences in the mud covered home, with a tin roof that leaked in spots when the rains came. An inconvenience is when my blue Converse rips down the sides and I hold it together with zipties. But when survival is day to day and food security is always on your mind—that’s a true problem. There’s no time to name the chickens, not when you have to hike up an Annapurna mountain to collect firewood for the day on your back. Not when you are 65 years old and you walk two miles every day, up and down a steep mountainous path to collect fodder for your cattle. To me that sounds like a problem, but my new family smiles and calls it life.
Wherever I go and whatever I do, one of my big missions is to try and relate, and to put on another person’s Converse or boots and walk around in their footwear for a while. So on one hike led by our professor and teaching staff to tour a hydroelectric dam in the valley floor, I huffed and puffed and stopped frequently, even as I watched grandmothers loaded with firewood in their baskets seemingly skipping up the mountain. They do this every day – up and down. I wanted to experience what they experienced, so at one resting point I sat next to a hajurama (grandma) and asked if I could carry her load for a while. She looked at my red face and listened to my wheeze and laughed, and said sure, probably expecting me to take 15 steps and hand it back. But I was determined to walk in her shoes, and so I carried her load for the rest of the mile back to the village, up the mountain path. I had to stop 11 times to do it, but I made it to her home. She had walked much faster ahead, and when I finally made it to her house to drop off her wood, she peered in my tired but determined blue eyes and sweaty face and stuck both hands in my hair and rubbed my scalp. “Baaklo, baaklo (thick thick),” she clucked. My head was bowed and she was giving me a Nepali grandmother’s blessing, the pat on the head, which in my personal experience, having grandmothers of my own, is the ultimate gift for completing any difficult task.
The shoes that hajurama walks in carry her on steep paths and help her carry heavy loads, I found out. As I sat there, resting with a cup of tea in my hands after she gave me her kind blessing, I thought about my own two sweet grandmothers, and how much I love them, and that if they were from such a village, I would want to be sure and carry their firewood every day for them. I felt that this woman was my grandmother too. If I could manage to somehow ease the load of this woman in Sikles every day, and of all grandmothers everywhere, I knew I would want to. I sat and drank my tea, and finished my thoughts, and then my hajurama pinched my red cheeks and sent me on my way back to my classmates, down the road.
I don’t know a lot, “but I know this much is true…” I left a piece of my heart next to an old woman high in the mountains, but it doesn’t hurt. No matter how much of your heart you give away, it has that magical ability to multiply love so there’s always enough for all of us. I went to Nepal to learn it, but I know it’s true.