Final Blog from Nepal, July 2014
Despite being forced to become almost vegetarian, having to deal with the heat and humidity, the frustrations of load shedding, worrying over the cleanliness off the food and water, internet connection speed that serves as a warm reminder of dial up on Windows 3.0 and the headache of the constant horns of the traffic, I’ve grown accustomed to this place.
As I come towards the end of my work placement and time here, I can’t hide the frustration that I feel over the elusive Himalayas. They are there on the horizon, the other side of the city. Massive things 7 and 8 kilometres high covered in snow. Just beyond the hills at the end of the valley. But I have NEVER seen them. Well that’s not entirely true, I did catch a hazy glimpse one day through a cloud. The mist and clouds and dust that hangs over the valley means that they have been hidden in plain sight for three months. This photo shows the impressive backdrop that few have been lucky to see in recent years.
The dust and smog of the valley is quickly forgotten as you get out of the valley. The lush greens of rice paddys and jungle type forests provide stark contrast to the browns and greys of the city. I spent a weekend kayaking with some friends just a few hours from the city. It felt like another world. As the mist came down over the river at dusk, the scene reminded me of something from Jurassic Park.
The fun thing about doing activities like this in Nepal is that the guide companys don’t wrap you in cotton wool the same way you would at home. While still being safe and receiving good instruction, the rate of progression from basic skills to testing them out in real scenarios is very fast. On day 2 we took our new skills down the river for a few kilomters battling through grade 2 and 3 rapids. We had a few spills and swims in the group, which depending on the speed of the river at that point meant quite some time in the water before able to get into a boat again, but the guides were excellent. One of them was a kayaking national champion in Nepal – though not much of that rubbed off.
Weather wise, when coming here I was expecting half of my time to be basking in intolerable sunshine and roughly the other half swimming to work through the monsoon. I’ve been really lucky with the weather for the second half. The first half was etsting enough humidity and temperature wise coming from a chilly spring in Ireland. While it has been raining recently there is no where near the amount that Kathmandu normally recieves this time of the year. The monsoon rainfall is at 25% of what it normally amounts to by this time of year. This is great for getting out onto the hills for hiking and biking at the weekends and I’ve made the most of that. Heres me at the top of Shiavpuri peak at 2,700m, which we spent a few hours climbing through a national park to get to. 2,700m sounds more impressive when you don’t know that Kathmandu itslef sits at 1,300 m above sea level. Shivapuri is known as a hill here. And all of these hills around the valley range from 2,000 to 3,000m. Nepalis wait until 5,000m before a distinction is made between hills and mountains. It puts all the mountain climbing I’ve done in Ireland into perspective.
While this (the unusually good weather) has been great for me, it does present large problems for the rest of the country. As much as 80% of employment in Nepal is in the agricultural sector. So the lack of rain this year (some have mentioned global warming as a reason for changing trends in monsoon patterns) has a big impact on livlihoods and drastically affects the prodcution of rice from the paddys around the country. Rice is a staple food of the Nepali diet and is typically eaten twice or three times a day, normally as part of dal bhat. Dal is a lentil soup and bhat is the Nepali word for rice. Traditionally field workers would have a large feed of dal bhat in the morning and again when they returned in the evening. It’s not a very balanced or nutritous meal when you are given the Nepali portions- about 90% rice and 10% veg, dal and pickle. Rice needs a lot of water and is grown in flooded paddys throughout the country during monsoon season. It needs about 2 inches of water above the ground level to grow. Often the fields are terraced in clever ways so if they require pumped water, the top one is filled which in turn gravity feeds the lower ones as more water is added. Its pretty impressive to stand and see how this works. The same system offers effective drainage when there is too much water. Pumping water is expensive and restricts the amount of rice that can be grown and increases the cost of production which impacts both the producers and consumers. I was lucky to have the chance to attend a rice planting festival where we learned how to plant the rice and helped the local villagers.
They seedlings should be planted in straight rows starting at one side of the paddy and working backwards towards the other side. Two are planted together at three inch spacing deep enough into the mud that they remain upright. The rice planting was shortly followed by a mud/water fight where anyone with clean clothes was a target. Thinking back on it, I’m not sure how much help to villagers we were at all...
Another very common food eaten as a snack in Nepal is the Momo. Very similar to the Chinese dumpling, it’s (most often) steamed and filled with vegetarian or meat fillings. You can buy them almost everywhere and they vary in quality from place to place, leaving customers commenting on how “the Momos are not as good here as in” or “if you want a really good Momo, you need to go to”, much like Guinness drinkers back home (myself included). I took a class to learn how to make the Momos and could not understand how something that takes that much work could be sold so cheap. We spent hours at it, with hideous results in comparison to the pretty one you buy in restaurants.
Renewable World take a different approach to a lot of charitable organisations working in the same field due to the amount of work they do alongside the installation of a technology, such as monitoring and evaluation, community mobilisation and training and education for the beneficiaries to maximise the benefits. While the work I got to do in Kathmandu wasn’t as sexy as the last travel scholars -- Fintan worked on the installation of solar panels and attended ceremonies where the villagers covered them in red Tikka. His work involved a lot more site visits than mine did -- I did learn a lot about aid and development in the developing world. One of the projects that I worked on was the sustainability of technology installations in rural communities. I was tasked with working on this for the same solar panels that Fintan had worked on a year earlier.
The installation I quickly found out is the easy part. The part that most people don’t see and people don’t understand is the integration of the technologies into the communities and into the environment. The amount of problems that the Solar MUS installations had experienced within a year is eye opening. Some are due to the fact that it is a foreign technology installed in a region where they were not fully tested. Some due to design flaws that were overlooked at concept and design stage and some to do with the oversights while designing for the natural resources. In another organisation the community would have nowhere to turn to. Renewable world have been putting pressure on the partners, visiting and listening to local concerns, helping to set up committees and bank accounts and facilitating repair and maintenance and financial training for the communities. The end goal of these processes is to hand over an effective technology which the community are able to manage, repair and replace by themselves. A sustainable solution to their problem (be it lack of water or energy) which is integrated into the community who have been provided all the skills so that they will not have to turn back to the aid organisations.
It is surprising how affordable the technologies become with effective management. By supplementing income alongside service provision through micro irrigation schemes the community can afford to pay tariffs for the service. Financial training provided to the legally registered committee allows them to forsee costs such as repair and maintenance salaries, service contracts and replacement parts at the end of warranty periods or design life. Designing cash flows for these scenarios, I have seen that the cost of management and sustaining the service per household is considerably less than their earning potential from cash crops grown out of season. With this in mind Renewable Worlds goal of removing aid organisations from developing world service provision is possible I theory. By showing that communities can raise the necessary finances to cover all costs and replace the system entirely before the end of its life, will encourage financial institutions to lend and that clean energy loans can work in these environments. It’s probably still some years before this product becomes a reality and that marginalised communities are applying for finance to purchase these technologies and take ownership of their own development, but the signs are encouraging.
In the three short months I have spent in Nepal I have had an opportunity to experience what it is like to have sense of ownership of a project, to build a rapport with the staff and the implementing partners and to get used to cultural differences in the work place. I suppose a sense of the complexity in delivering projects but also the huge difference that this hard work has when implemented with community engagement. As much as I wish I could have stayed longer, I’ll also miss all the friends I’ve made and all of the experiences Kathmandu has to offer.
My DIT sponsored time in Nepal has come to an end but my own has not. After enjoying the small percentage of the country that I’ve been fortunate enough to spend time in, I’ve changed my flights and I’m off to see more of the remote regions of Nepal and the other sights and sounds which make the rest of country so different from Kathmandu.
