Only in Kathmandu

So I don’t write for one day, and now there are a million things to say.

First, they put the article about me in the Herald Leader on the front page! I’ve never had anything remotely like that happen before. PJ has been delivering papers in the morning so she had like a million of them. My dad said Ashur saw them and said “Hey, mama, mama, Aunt Chandle’s on the paper.” He then proceeded to make up what the words said about me. They probably went something along the lines of the email I sent him, telling him that if he lived here, he would have to carry Izzy on his back, and there are cows in the middle of the road and you have to take a shower with a bucket. Jed also kept babbling and hitting my picture in the paper. Hearing that made my day.

And now for things I saw today that could only happen in Kathmandu:

1. 3 men open up the luggage door underneath the bus and pull out a 3 foot tall, very disoriented goat.
2. A woman that could not have weighed more than 90 pound carrying a 6 ft tall dresser with her head and a sheet. I wish I could explain this better.
3. A large cow asleep in the middle of 4 lanes of 40mph traffic. It was like a cow asleep in the middle of Cantrell in Little Rock.

I try to take pictures of all these things, but it happens so fast I end up staring sheepishly. Also one of the girls at work told me I would look really pretty if I lost some weight. Ha

Disclaimer: Don’t read this if you’re feeling a little emotional today. I got to go to the Drop in centers today and watch a program on child rights. There were some really little kids there, like maybe 4 or 5 years old, and I got a little teared up seeing them. All the kids at the drop in centers are workers. The facilitator was asking questions like “What is a child?”, “What is Child Labor?”, and “What are your rights as a child worker?” Some of the kids said they had the right to not be beaten and the right to eat the same food as their employers, not the dog. They also mentioned that they had the right to medical treatment and to be allowed to leave the house. It was good to hear them standing up for themselves, but when I think about what must have happened before they could…

I started thinking about this whole individual right thing. In the States, from the time you’re little you have a fundamental understanding of the concepts of freedom, of property and of rights. In fact, our rights are our most precious possessions and this is engrained in everything we do. Some of these kids are 15 and are just hearing that they have a right to sleep in a bed and not on the floor; they have a right to see their family again. If anything like this happened in the United States it would be all over the front page of every paper, and it happens here and a lot of other places in the world every single day.

Imagine being 9 years old and sold to a family to do all their housework and never seeing your family ever again. This happened to one of the kids I interviewed yesterday. He’s 15; he doesn’t know what happened to his parents or his little brothers and sisters. Now he’s been in school for a year and he is happier. He wants to be a chef.

I talked to a 16 year old girl yesterday. She had to begin working when she was 10 because her little brother had a heart condition and her family couldn’t afford the operation. Her employers said they would pay for it, but they contacted World Vision and he’s still sick. A CWISH facilitator came to her employer’s house on many occasions asking them to let her go to classes at a DIC. They said they wouldn’t and the facilitator told them they had to, so she’s been in school now for 9 months. She says she is much more positive now. She can read and write and she isn’t afraid to go shopping anymore. Before she couldn’t add up the prices and she never knew if she had enough money or if the shopkeeper had given her enough back. Now she is confident and talks to more people. She says she also tells her employers when they are violating her rights and now they stop.

I am continuously inspired by these kids. They have a resilience I don’t see in myself. I used to wish I had been alive during the 60s so I would have something to fight for; there are still things to fight for.

I went to a dinner last night with Shanti. A man from the International Labour Organization was throwing a party to kick off the south-Asia child fund. There were a lot of prominent Nepalese activist there and I got to talk to some of them. One young woman is a Sherpa and she has been a leader in the fight for child porter rights, especially girls. These kids are carrying 5 times their weight up mountains for pennies. Another man was fighting for the rights of Bhutanese refugees who have been stuck in Nepal for years. Some of them tried to leave last week and one man was shot and killed by police. There was also a young guy who brought satellite internet to a remote village so everyone could have access to education and news. These people were amazing and I was really honored to be with them.

On another note, I’m not sure if the government is really falling apart or if this is just par for the course. Yesterday I walked home b/c there was a taxi driver, bus strike. A taxi driver was stabbed and killed and the police didn’t arrest the man b/c they were friends with him, so the roads were blocked off everywhere by taxis and buses. Also yesterday, the Maoist arrested a prominent banker for embezzlement. Let me explain something really quick, the Maoist were taken into the government last year as an equal party to the rest of the government, many of the soldiers joined the police force. Well this banker has had a warrant out for his arrest for a long time and he’s just been going about freely w/o any threat of being arrested b/c he is friends with the Prime Minister. Well the Maoist wouldn’t have it anymore so they arrested him and took him to the square and said “Hey, this is the guy that stole all that money.” The Prime Minister let the guy go and punished the Maoist. The Maoist in turn say if this is the government they are in, they don’t want to be a part of it anymore, and then the country is back to rebels running it. At about 8pm I hear this really loud chanting coming from outside. I go out on the balcony to see hundreds of angry people carrying torches. The street was glowing this smoky orange and the people kept raising the torches in the air and shouting. I asked Prakash what they were saying, and all he said was “The Prime Minister has made a very big mistake.” Do you ever have those moments in your life were you’re almost positive you’re either in a movie or watching one? Well that’s the moment I had, so let’s just wait and see how real it gets.