Women's smile

by Valerie Robert (Spain)

Making a local connection Nepal

Shares

A few kilometers away from the buddhist monastery in which I was teaching English since July, I started in October to work on a new project in Jitpur (up on a hill around Kathmandu city in Nepal). The organisation I was working with is focused on women's empowerment in this small rural village (5000 people). They started three years ago to provide hygiene and health solutions as well as education to the girls. Their goal is to make volunteers come, get funds and physical help from them in order to build decent bathroom and proper toilets in every house, a local clinic and a bigger school. What the nepalese do call the "bikas" means literally "Things that help people solving their problems". The Newar-Shretstha and the Jyapu (the farmers caste) perceive foreigners as a positive change as long as they participate to recolt more vegetables from the fields or to make a better profit from the daily market by aknowledging women on how to count, read and write. In this community, as in most of the countryside regions of this very traditional country, basically, men take decisions, women execute. Therefore, they started to get involved into political decisions. They are in charge of most of the familia responsabilities : food, recycling trashes, educating kids, keep the house and the street clean. We went their together with Karoline, a very friendly german ethnologist searcher living in Canada I met a few days before. Our mission was to evaluate their needs and to get a feedback on the actions of the NGO. We were welcome like goddesses ! They offered us tea, fruits and home made very nice sweets we shared before starting the group interview. They expressed in a very grateful way how their life is slowly getting to another level as soon as someone can listen and understand what they really want. They explained how some patterns take time to get flexible and make a first step to open to a new value, to another order. We had prepared many questions related to the topic and, in the end, we just stopped interrupting them and let them speak with their own flow. They had much more to tell us than what we expected ! In a few words, we spent one of the most magic afternoon ever. The best answer we got was the smile they kept on their face the whole day. We had it on our face, then. We kept in touch with Karoline and we still do have this big smile in our mind and on our lips when we remind them.