With my time in Nepal coming to a close, my pace and style of work has been more frantic. I suddenly have a large number of projects for a large number of people and am sitting in front of my computer ten or twelve hours a day. Some NGOs suddenly want brochures, profiles and some have asked me to write them proposals. I am also developing a concept paper for COCAP in Kathmandu, trying to edit the first edition of a newsletter and producing reports for various groups on my time here in Nepal. I cannot say no, so instead I have bitten off considerably more than I can chew.
Despite all of this I have found time for another project, which quite honestly has become the most important to me. I have decided to spend my final week in Nepalgunj painting portraits. Not literally of course, but I have began using my little network of friends and acquaintances here to take me to meet the people of Nepal who the NGOs are working for. So I have spent the last week or so going out to rural villages, or running around the side streets of Nepalgunj taking pictures of and interviewing a variety of people. The one thing that binds these people together is that they are the poor, the disadvantaged and the people of Nepal who have suffered the most. Even within this selection of people there are difference levels of affluence. Some cannot sufficiently feed their families or send their children to school, while others work ten or twelve hours a day but have a house and a meal waiting for them when they finish.
Meeting and speaking with these various people has culminated into one of the most meaningful experiences of my life thus far. It has been at times difficult watching people fight tears to frankly tell a stranger about their struggles, but it has also been at times so happy seeing the children laugh when you show them a photo of themselves, or touching when a man struggling to feed his family insists on following tradition and offering his guests food and alcohol. It has been an honor and a privilege to speak with every person I was able to interview and I hope that in my life I can find a fraction of the strength and resolve they show in their lives everyday.
For you, the faithful few who are reading this blog, the result of my interview spree is going to be a series of portraits. Some profiles will be longer than others, but I want to introduce you to the people I have met. I will post somewhere between 10 and 15 short profiles in the coming week or so. I am going to try and avoid cliché, drawing vast conclusions about the situation or laying blame again and again. I think the stories stand alone and do not need me to preach on top of them.
Posted By
Posted Aug 22nd, 2007
3 Comments
Mary B.
August 23, 2007
Great idea about the portraits. I hope you can collect and preserve them somewhere. The effect people have had on you is surely as great as the impact you have made on many lives over this time. So, from one of the faithful few – keep it up!
mike
August 24, 2007
nice idea. how do you record what everybody says? do they speak english?
sounds like you are really processing the taste of the lives of the poor and disadvantaged over there. considering yuri was the one who was suppossed to be doing that primarily this summer, it’s interesting to see you spend so much time writing about the struggle and nobility of the less priviledged. look forward to reading the profiles and hearing about them from you when you get back. any chance we can get some video of the people?
mark
August 26, 2007
mary – thank you for your kind comment. i will certainly keep all of the things i right and all of the pictures i take.
mike – they do not speak english, I have always had a friend along to translate. I take some notes when I speak with each person, but usually each experience is unique enough that I can remember most of what they say.
you cannot understand nepal without understanding poverty. all of these issues about human righs, conflict and peacebuilding that i am interested are related very directly to the problem of poverty. while i did not go out with the intention of painting a picture of poverty, in fact i was mostly interested in learning about people who still do the traditional work according to their caste, i did end up focusing a lot on their living situations as opposed to their work.