The clouds suddenly cleared, showing the towering Himalayas over the Kathmandu skyline.
When I arrived in Kathmandu in mid-September, I was surprised to find that it was still the monsoon season. (Truthfully, up until a few years ago, I would never have guessed that this landlocked, mountainous country even HAD a rainy season.) In Kathmandu, the hot and wet monsoon season is in the summer – usually between June and August. This year, however, it lingered into the third week of September. I asked numerous Nepalis if this extended monsoon season was a common occurrence and I always got the same response. “No, it is not common. This is the result of global warming.”
After several days of slogging about in the steady rain, I resigned myself to the fact that monsoon season might outlast my visit to Nepal. But unlike my previous visits, which had been during the dry season in winter, I marveled that everything was so beautifully and luxuriantly verdant. Much of the green could be attributed to the rice paddies that were everywhere, even tucked into vacant lots in the suburbs of Kathmandu. It was time for the rice to be harvested, but it was impossible to do so in the rain.
Suddenly one evening, near sunset, there was a change. The dense clouds, which had hung low and heavy over the city, suddenly began to lift and separate, like cotton candy being pulled apart by unseen hands. Watching the Kathmandu skyline, I realized that what I had thought was just another cloudbank was in reality the snow-covered Himalayas that ring the city! “Ah,” said a Nepali at the TEWA Centre where I was staying in Lalitpur, “the seasons are finally changing.”
The seasons are changing for the city of Kathmandu, as well. In the photo above , you can see the many housing construction projects being built in this area on the outskirts of the city. The Kathmandu population grew during the conflict as internally displaced persons fled the Maoist rebels in the countryside. The population has continued to grow due to the country’s high unemployment. People come to the capital looking for work. There are now 3 million people living in the Kathmandu valley, driving too many cars and motorcycles on streets that were designed for oxcarts. Traffic is a huge problem, making it difficult to get anywhere. The air is polluted and many people wear masks over their lower faces. Traffic accidents are common. Many Nepalis ride motorcycles as they are cheaper than cars and easier to maneuver in traffic. From goats to refrigerators, you never know what you might see people carrying on one!
Nepal is peaceful now. The violence has ended and the Maoists have been in a power-sharing coalition government since 2008. But the coalition government is gridlocked. In May 2012, Nepal’s political parties failed to reach an agreement on a new constitution before the deadline. (Nepalis have been waiting more than four years for a new constitution. When the committee drafting the constitution gets paid by the month, where is the incentive to finish the job?) The Constituent Assembly, the members of which had been serving under extensions after their terms expired in 2010, was dissolved, creating a political crisis. Most of the basic civic and municipal functions have now essentially ground to a halt.
President Ram Baran Yadav of Nepal gave the parties a deadline of November 29, 2012 to come up with an agreement on how the (long overdue) elections should be conducted. When they failed to meet that deadline, he extended it for one more week.
Nepalis are still waiting for the political season to change. In the meantime, much of daily life goes on as it has for centuries.
A woman looks out her window near Sankhu, in the Kathmandu ValleyPreparations for a cremation ceremony at Pashupatinath
SwayambhunathGoats abound in Nepal, even in the city (and particularly before festivals like Dashian)
Here’s hoping that the sun comes out soon for Nepal’s political situation.
Rice fields ready for harvest in the Kathmandu Valley
1. Make a one minute video showing what “It’s About Ability!” means to you, whether in the world at large or to you personally. The deadline for the It’s About Ability youth video conteston children with disabilities is December 15, 2012. But even if you don’t enter the contest or make a video, you and your kids can learn about and discuss the rights of children with disabilities by reading the “Thoughts for inspiration” in the contest guidelines and this simple explanation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (which also includes more ideas for things you can do to change attitudes and rules so that children who have disabilities can go to school, play and take part in activities that every child wants to do.) The Learning Guide to the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, designed to empower kids ages 12-18 to advocate for the rights of persons with disabilities, can be found here.
2. Make a World Wishes Dove with your family. Cut feathers from white paper or colored construction paper. Have everyone in the family decorate and write their wish for the world on a feather. Cut out the body of a dove or other bird and glue all the feathers on it. Once decorated, your bird will be a beautiful and hopeful expression of your family’s hopes for our world.
(Note: this project was inspired by the Thankful Turkey at my daughter’s school. You can read more about that here.)
3. Learn about the challenges that children living in poverty face have overcome to succeed in school. Play the United Way‘s PASS THE GRADE game. In honor of the first Giving Tuesdayon November 27th, The Greater Twin Cities United Way launched a fun, educational online game called PASS THE GRADE. (My friend ThirdEyeMom wrote about PASS THE GRADE; read her post here.)
4. Watch some UNICEF Cartoons for Child’s Rights together. Cartoons for Children’s Rights is a UNICEF broadcast initiative that aims to inform people around the world about children’s rights. The effort has forged partnerships with many well-known animation studios that have developed more than 80 half-minute public service announcements based on the articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Each PSA illustrates a right described in the global rights treaty, such as ‘Freedom from Child Labour’ or ‘Protection from Neglect’. All the spots are non-verbal, in order to get the rights message across to everyone, regardless of language. The spots have aired on more than 2,000 television stations globally. Links to the top 10 can be found here.
5. Do an anti-bullying activity together like Sticks and Stones from Teach Peace Now. Ask your child what think about the saying “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can really hurt me.” Have they heard another version of this saying? Which is truer? Have they ever had someone say something to them that hurt their feelings. Has someone ever hurt them physically or tried to scare them or one of their friends? Have they ever hurt someone by something they said or did? You can give a personal example of a time you were a victim or a witness to bullying or hurt someone’s feelings. You can also read a book about bullying like This is Our House, Hey, Little Ant, Mr. Lincoln’s Way, Say Something, or Simon’s Hook.
Give each child some light gray paper “stones.” Have your kids write a behavior that could hurt someone or make them feel bad such as calling someone a name, or tripping someone. Younger children can draw a picture. Have them wrinkle up the “stone” and then try to smooth it out. Explain that once someone has been hurt, it is never forgotten. You cannot remove the hurt. The wrinkles will always be there.
Hang stones on wall to create a wall of intolerance or sit in a circle and pile the rocks up in the middle. Ask the kids to think about ways to prevent these bad things from happening. You can make a list together of ideas.
6. Go on a hunt for the human rights words around you. Human rights is not about complicated concepts; human rights is about the core values that everyone needs to live fully in this world. In talking about human rights with my own kids, I realized that I needed to start with the basic building blocks of language: words. Read more about how, once I realized that, I started to see human rights words all around me in HUMAN RIGHTS: Speaking The Language.
7. Start a tradition of doing a family service project on Human Rights Day. There are many opportunities to volunteer, such as preparing and serving meals at a local homeless shelter. The Lappin family has done this for two years in a row now in their community in Washington state.
Dad Nathan describes it as “Such a humbling and at the same time rewarding experience. Feels really good to concretely help others and appreciate what we have as well. Our kids did a great job helping and participating, and interacting with the kids we were hosting.”
Even if your family isn’t able to volunteer in an established project, you can still do something as a family to address the economic and social rights in your community. For example, put together care packages with warm socks or mittens, a water bottle, individually wrapped snacks (and maybe even decorate a card to stick inside) and offer them to homeless men and women who you may encounter during the day. Or have your kids decorate a few grocery bags and fill them with non-perishable food items, then bring your kids with you when you drop them off at the food shelf.
Most importantly, spend some time talking with your kids about your family’s service experience. Talk about what you did and why you did it. Ask your kids, “How did it feel?” and “What did you learn from doing this project.”
8. Play a game that helps kids understand human rights. Blind Trust (from ABC – Teaching Human Rights): In pairs, have one child blindfold the other and have the sighted member of the pair lead the “blind” one about for a few minutes. Make sure the leading child is not abusing the power to lead, since the idea is to nurture trust, not to destroy it. The “leader” of the pair should try to provide as wide a variety of experiences as possible, such as hav- ing the “blind” partner feel things with his or her feet or fingers, leading with vocal directions or even playing a game. After a few minutes have the children reverse the roles and repeat the process so that the “leader” is now the led, and the “blind” partner is now the sighted one.
Once the activity is over, allow the children to talk about what happened. Discuss how they felt – not just as “blind” partners but their feelings of responsibility as “leaders” too. This can lead not only to a greater awareness of what life is like for people with sight (or hearing) disabilities, but to a discussion of the importance of trust in the whole community. This can lead in turn to a discussion of world society, how it works and how it can fail to work too. (teaches about Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 28; Convention on the Rights of the Child articles 3, 23)
9. Ask the question “What Does a Child Need?”Have your child lie down on a large piece of paper and trace their outline on the paper.Ask your child(ren) to name this paper child. Discuss and decide on the mental, physical, spiritual and character qualities they want this ideal child to have as an adult (e.g. good health, sense of humour, kindness) and write these qualities inside the outline. They might also make symbols on or around the child to represent these ideal qualities (e.g. books to represent education). Talk about what human and material resources the child will need to achieve these qualities (e.g. if the child is to be healthy, it will need food and health care); write them down on the paper outside of the outline. You can also read a simplified version of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. When children hear an article that guarantees a child each of the needs they have listed, they can write the number of the articles next to that item. Circle any needs identified but not covered by the Convention.
10. Check out the Amnesty International You Tube channel. Amnesty has uploaded more than 500 short videos on a wide variety of global human rights issues. Many videos are in multiple languages, including Spanish and Arabic. (Given the subject matter, many are more suitable for older kids and teenagers than younger kids. Be sure to preview for anything that might be upsetting to your own children.)
The Price of Silence – A music video that brings together 16 of the worlds top musicians—some of whom have fled oppressive regimes—in a rousing musical plea to guarantee human rights for all.
Wyclef Jean sings One Love in this slideshow about Children’s Rights
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: You’re on your way to a great Human Rights Day! If you are a classroom teacher or homeschooling your kids (or if you just want to dig deeper), you can find tons more ideas through the following resources:
My daughter and son in Oslo’s Frogner Park, at the end of a rain storm.
April Rain Song
Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.
Langston Hughes
Some mornings, I wake up with an image or a poem in my head. Sometimes, a song. The other day, it was this picture; today it was this poem. As winter arrives, the world around me is beginning to slowly freeze. Liquids are becoming solids, their molecules sluggish in the cold. Soon everything will be still, sleeping until the April Rain Song returns. Run with joy while you may, and let the rain kiss you!
As a new (and irregular) feature, I plan to start posting some of these morning musings here.
The photo also fits this week’s Travel Theme: Liquid on Where’s My Backpack. To see more responses, click here.
It is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. This uniquely American holiday is supposed to remind us of all that we have to be thankful for, both as individuals and as a nation, but I fear that this sometimes gets lost in our collective national appetite for overindulgence (we don’t stop eating until we feel remorse) and entertainment (Macy’s Parade, football, holiday TV specials). That we carry out these traditions in the company of our closest friends and family members is important and perhaps even the saving grace of the day, but have we lost the true spirit of Thanksgiving?
I was at my daughter’s school last week for Turkey Bingo. At this event, 25 lucky families won a turkey. We did not, although we came within a B11 of winning. As we were leaving, she grabbed my hand and said, “I want to show you something.” She led me out into the hall to a giant, colorful turkey on the wall. She explained that each of the students had written what they were thankful for on a feather.
The thoughts expressed on the feathers give a picture of the typical things for which the average American kid is thankful. I saw feathers that said things like:
“I am thankful for friends and family.” “I am thankful for my mom.” “I am thankful for my sisters.”
“I am thankful for my grandma and grandpa.” “I’m thankful for my daddy.”
Other feathers said things like:
“I’m thankful for my cat” and “I am thankful for my xBox.”
I noticed a couple of feathers, though, that said things like:
“I’m thankful to be here” and “I am thankful for America.”
“I am thankful to live in a place with no war.”
My daughter goes to a school that has a large number of English Language Learner students. Many came to this country as refugees from Somalia or other countries in East Africa, but she also has friends who came to this country as refugees from Tibet or were adopted from orphanages in China. There are also kids at her school from Central and South America.
Sometimes we forget that the Pilgrims were refugees. In England, they were persecuted on account of their religious beliefs. They took the tremendous risk of coming to this new land in order to be free to practice their own religion. And giving thanks for their freedom was a big part of the first Thanksgiving.
As I looked at that turkey on the wall of my daughter’s school, I had a moment of inspiration. When all of those individual feathers, childishly and colorfully decorated, are put together, you get a lovely image. But you also get much more. When all of those truthful and thankful thoughts are put together, you feel the true spirit of Thanksgiving.
And that is the inspiration and the spirit in which I hope to celebrate this holiday.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, from me and (one of) mine!
Sometimes I have trouble finding the words to talk to my kids about the violence that hear about in the news, the injustices that they see in our own community. As a human rights lawyer, it is my job is to document and expose human rights abuses. But I have always struggled with how to communicate to my kids what human rights are and why they should care about them.
Recently, however, I was preparing for a project that involved interviewing children about their experiences. Experts advise that interviewers use simple language when speaking with children about difficult topics. “Simple language” means avoiding big words, of course, but it also means using simple, direct sentences. Straight-forward grammar – subject and predicate in sentences; basic speech parts – nouns and verbs and adjectives. I suddenly realized what I was doing wrong in talking about human rights with my kids. Rather than explaining complicated concepts, what I needed to do was break it down to the core values that everyone needs to live fully in this world. I needed to start with the basic building blocks of language: words.
Once I realized this, I started to see human rights words all around me! Words like:
and
and
Verbs like
and
and
and
Nouns were all around me!
and
and
and
I saw adjectives, too!
and
I started pointing out these words to my daughter, who is seven. Just last week, she was running past the table in the entryway where we put our mail. Suddenly, she came to a screeching halt in front of the stamps.
“Look, mommy,” she said. “The stamps are speaking the language of human rights!”
My daughter was exactly right. The stamps said: equality, justice, freedom, liberty. Powerful words that convey basic human rights concepts.
I practiced asylum law for the first seven years of my career, representing refugees who were fleeing persecution and human rights abuses in their home countries and seeking safety in the U.S. These are people who are not easy to forget and whose stories shouldn’t be forgotten. Many of their stories – the details of their lives, their losses, their dreams – have stayed with me over the years. The remarkable thing about the refugees I have known is not only their ability to survive incomprehensible losses, but also the strength and hope and determination they have to remake their lives in an entirely new country. To learn new skills, speak new languages, adapt to new cultures. To me, the refugee experience symbolizes this week’s Photo Challenge theme: Renewal
The picture above was taken in Buduburam Refugee Settlement in Ghana, which I visited three times between 2007 and 2010. Buduburam was home for 20 years to more than 30,000 Liberians who fled the bloody conflict in their West African country. Officially closed this year, Buduburam was a small, bustling Liberian city in the countryside outside of Accra. Life was hard on the camp, where refugees even had to pay for water to drink and for access to the latrines. To improve their opportunities, many of the refugees at Buduburam enrolled in skills training courses; the photo shows some of classes offered by the New Liberian Women Organization (macrame being one of them, as you can also tell by the colorful plant hangers). Even in a time of limbo, the refugees at Buduburam were striving for renewal. Those refugees who could afford it sent their children to school as education offers a chance for a new life.
I still hold many former asylum clients in my heart. I’d like to share the story of one refugee family I represented. For me, it is a parable of renewal.
James and Julia (not their real names) had been politically active in their native Kenya. Julia, in particular, had been very active in speaking out against an oppressive government. They had a young son, who I’ll call William, who had huge, solemn eyes. When the police came to their house to arrest Julia, a police dog bit William on the head. You could still see the jagged scar on his scalp more than a year later when, having left everything they owned behind to escape Kenya, they were seeking legal assistance with their asylum claim in the U.S.
In police custody, Julia had been brutally beaten. She was also repeatedly raped in custody, including with objects such as the muzzle of a rifle and a Coke bottle. This testimony was critical to the success of their asylum case, so we had worked with Julia to prepare her to tell her full story, with as much accuracy as possible and as many details as she could remember. “Just tell the truth about as much as you can remember of those weeks,” I urged. We all knew it would be painful.
Julia testified about her experiences in a straightforward manner and in excruciating detail, but with such poise and dignity that both the asylum officer and I were in tears. Asylum officers are specially trained federal officials who make decisions about asylum cases based on a written application and an in-person interview. During my time practicing asylum law, I rarely saw an asylum officer actually cry during an asylum interview.
I remember well how James sat next to her, utterly still. Not touching her, not looking at her, but supporting her as she spoke. Anguish is the only word that could possibly describe the look on his face as he listened to her testimony. I had to look away. Even in my role as their attorney, a role which requires a special intimacy, I felt the need to give their family some small space of privacy as they recalled those terrible days.
Years later, after they got their citizenship, James and Julia had a party to say thank you to all of the people who had helped them. In addition to their attorneys, there were people from their church and other members of the Kenyan community. They now lived in a big, new house out in the suburbs. Julia was close to graduation from nursing school. William, who I hadn’t seen since he was three, was now in middle school. He was a straight-A student and talented musician who had just gotten braces. They had another child, too – a daughter born here in America. She was wearing a pink tutu.
It had taken a lot of hard work for James and Julia to get to where they were. They had experienced many challenges and frustrations with adapting to life in this strange, new country. But they persisted and, through sheer effort and determination and a bit of creativity, slowly but steadily they moved forward, finding healing for themselves and building a new life for their family. It wasn’t easy, but James and Julia had managed to make something new out of nothing.
And now for something completely different. While I’ve never participated in The Weekly Photo Challenge before, the theme “Geometry” this week spoke to me. This week’s challenge “is about the shapes and rhythms that make up the geometry of our world.” This week, I have found the normal shapes and rhythms of my world disrupted. In the midst of a major storm in the East and a bitter, divisive election, we buried my grandmother this week. She was 98, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it kind of was.
This week I have found myself almost longing for a bit of predictability, a return to normal patterns and rhythms. A rational ordered life; a practical science made up of points, lines and planes. I find myself searching for theorems that explain life and loss the way geometric formulas allow you to compute volume, surface and area.
Of course, contemporary geometry goes well beyond Euclidean principles, taking us into contemplation of multiple dimensions and space. This also fits with thoughts of life and death. Maybe I’ll think on that later. But in this week of turmoil and endings, I find comfort in what the early Greek mathematiciansEuclid and Archimedes called γεωμετρία. Geometry.
I took this picture recently on the Greek island of Hydra. When I look at it, I can’t help feeling that the early Greek geometers were right: there is some order in the world and we can figure it out. And it is all going to turn out just fine.
For more entries to this week’s challenge: Geometry click here.
The current Weekly Writing Challenge got me thinking about children in one of the most adult-oriented of all places – the workplace. Yes, I admit that I have brought each of my three children to work with me at various times, usually because of an unlucky confluence of sickness and pressing work deadlines. It certainly isn’t my first choice, but in my experience it has worked out fine for short periods of time. (Unless you count the unfortunate incident when my co-worker Peder accidentally got his finger chomped by my oldest son, who was teething. New baby teeth are razor sharp. Peder claims that he saw stars, just like in the cartoons.)
But whether or not to bring children to work is an issue that many working mothers have grappled with at one time or other. It is, in fact, the issue that has made European Parliament Member Licia Ronzulli so popular with moms like me. The photo above, taken in September 2010, of Ms. Ronzulli at work with her baby has made her a cause célèbre for working mothers around the world.
Although she doesn’t bring her daughter to the European Parliament regularly, there are other photos of Ms. Ronzulli and her daughter Vittoria. During a vote on the Eurozone debt crisis on February 15, 2012, reporters snapped several photos of Vittoria with her mom at the European Parliament.
Now two years old, Vittoria was back in Strausborg – and the European media – just this week. I think that the reasons that these photos resonate so much with moms here in America is that they symbolize so perfectly the work-family balance that all of us working moms struggle with every day. Ms. Ronzulli’s employer, the European Parliament, has rules that allow women to take their baby with them to work. Unfortunately, this is just not an option for most working moms. So we share the photos on Facebook and hope for a day when working mothers have better support.
Support such as adequate parenting leave, for example, is important. But Ms. Ronzulli herself was entitled to a parenting leave, but chose to take only 1 month of it. She makes the point that it is about personal choice. In 2010, she told The Guardian “It’s a very personal choice. A woman should be free to choose to come back after 48 hours. But if she wants to stay at home for six months, or a year, we should create the conditions to make that possible,” she said.
I think that Ms. Ronzulli is right. I think that we should create the conditions to make it possible for a woman to choose the best thing for both her family and her career. Sometimes, that might mean bringing the kids to work with her. (And yes, I think this goes for dads as well.)
This is a letter I wrote home from Kathmandu in January. It gives an interesting perspective on life in Nepal – a splash of local color – so I thought I would share it on the Human Rights Warrior.
Usually, when I travel for work, I stay in a hotel. It’s different when I travel to Nepal. Here, I stay with a family at their home in Kathmandu. I could never give you directions to their house on the unnamed street in the warren of hundreds of small streets and alleys in the Battisputali neighborhood. But I could show you how to get there.
Morning noises. I lie in my bed on the third floor and listen as the house wakes up. Doors of wood and metal creak and slam. Outside, I hear the sounds of chickens, dogs, some kind of hoarse-cawing bird. Women speaking in Nepali in the kitchen building below my window at the back of the house. A man sings off-key at the top of his lungs as water sluices into his bucket from the water tap next door. Someone is whistling loudly, someone else is hawking and spitting. No need to modulate your voice – everyone here rises at dawn. All this before the rooster crows. Tinny Nepali music is playing on a transistor radio. There’s a knock on my door, followed by a cheerful “Namaste!” The tea tray is set on my bedside table. I have the first of many, many cups of tea in bed. This is how the day begins in this home in Kathmandu.
Can you see my alarm clock in this picture?
Some things have changed since I was last here in March. There is a new security gate with a buzzer, as well as a flat screen TV. Crime is a growing concern in some neighborhoods in Kathmandu.
The biggest news is the daughter has married. Like most marriages in Nepal (but unlike her parents, who made a love match), this one was arranged. Her new husband is in the Army, so the wedding procession was especially grand with a military band and an antique Nepali horse-drawn carriage. Someone told me that the only horses in Nepal are in the Army cavalry, so the only people who know how to ride are in the Army. The polo grounds in the park in central Kathmandu are, therefore, de facto used only by the cavalry. The daughter is 23 and has just finished university. Her mother thought maybe she should go to graduate school first, but she was ready to get married. Her green wedding garland, stitched in red and covered with spangles, is on the wall on the stairway to my room. It has been framed, with a wedding picture in the middle. The wedding couple wore their garlands during the three days of ceremonies. She first met her future husband about two months before the wedding. They come over for dinner and I meet her new husband. She seems happy.
The daughter has now gone to live with her husband’s family. The family I stay with also has two adult sons who are close to my own age. They live here with their parents and their own families. The oldest son just finished building a big, new house in front of the family home. The younger son and his family live in the parents’ house, which he will inherit. Property in Kathmandu is expensive, so it is better to divide what is already in the family. There is a driveway and small courtyard in the front. In the back is a kitchen garden, flowers and fruit trees. It is a small green oasis in a dirty, dusty city.
Niches in the courtyard wall are home to animal sculptures
Three grandchildren live here, too. In the big new house, there is a grandson who is in 12th grade. His classes in college (upper secondary school) go from 6:30 to 11 am. The granddaughter, like my middle son, is in fourth grade and “running 9” (when she turns 10, she will be “9 complete”). Unlike my son, though, she spends 2 to 4 hours a night doing homework. The Nepali is very rigorous and the examinations are taken seriously. The secondary schools post billboards with pictures of their students and their scores on the national standardized exams. Another change since my last visit – the granddaughter is starting to help her mother and grandmother with cooking and serving meals. She shows me some of her sketches – Krishna and Disney Princesses – and gifts me with a sketch of Minnie Mouse.
Her little brother goes to preschool. He speaks Nepali, but understands English and also Hindi from watching Indian cartoons. Nepalis have an interesting relationship with India. In addition to enjoying Indian serials and Bollywood movies, they take the short flight to India if they need a vacation or an operation. Yet they set their clocks 15 minutes off Indian time so they don’t have to be on the same time zone as their much larger neighbor.
Image from a compound wall in the neighborhood.
There are others who live in this household, helping with the household chores, meal preparation, laundry, washing the cars, minding the kids. There are eight people employed on this compound by my count, but there could be more or less. People come and go in a constant swirl of activity.
The water in the house is city water, but the water for drinking and cooking is delivered by tanker truck and pumped into the polytank on top of the kitchen building. It runs through a filtration system of three plastic basins – one with pebbles, one with sand and one with charcoal.
View of the kitchen garden and the water filtration system on the kitchen roof.
After a sunny day, there will be hot water because the water for showers is heated by solar panels. As your plane makes the approach to land in Kathmandu, you can see the sun winking off the solar panels on every roof. If the day has been overcast, though, you are out of luck and have to ask for someone to bring up a bucket of hot water for bathing.
The shortage of electricity in Nepal has resulted in load sharing in Kathmandu. Each district has electricity for 4-5 hours at a time, usually twice a day. The schedule changes every day, so you may have power from 4-8 am and 7-11 pm one day but 10 am- 1 pm and 1 – 4 am the next. The week’s schedule is on a government website somewhere, but I never know what it is. Twice already during my stay, a fluorescent light in my room has buzzed to light in the middle of the night. Our house has a backup battery, but that means that there are only lights in 4 rooms in the house. Supposedly, there are hydro-electric plants being built with the help of international community. Once these are completed, Kathmandu will have more regular electricity. Hopefully.
The power situation makes cooking difficult, but the women of the house, who share the cooking duties, somehow manage. For Nepalis, a typical meal involves dal (lentil “soup”), bhat (rice) and tarkari (vegetable curry). We usually also have at least two kinds of tarkari and sag (greens), as well as aloo (potatoes, usually fried). Often, there is also chicken but served on the side. Like my own family, this family has both vegetarians and meat-lovers in residence. I have never eaten so well. For dinner, I eat a healthy dal seasoned with turmeric and ginger that is served to women after childbirth. Punctuated by bright green scallions float, it contains fried chickpea lentils that give it a surprising crunch. At breakfast, I eat papaya from the tree in the backyard. I see grapefruits the size of my head growing there, too.
Here in Nepal, people often greet each other by asking, “Bhaat khanu bhayo?” Literally, this means, “Have you eaten rice?” but in practice it means “Have you had your meal?” Babies eat rice as their first solid food during their first rice feeding ceremony at age 5 months for girls, 6 for boys. They will eat rice just about every day of their lives.
It is winter, so the days are short in the Kathmandu Valley. Offices and schools are on winter hours, opening a little later – 10:30 instead of 10 – and closing a little earlier so people can be home by dark. There is not much nightlife in Kathmandu. During the day, if there is sun, it warms up nicely but at night it is cold. I sleep under a cotton comforter as thick as a mattress. Buildings are not insulated and floors are often marble or tile. I notice that people working in offices and stores are often wearing their coats.
Traffic is a huge problem in Kathmandu. The population grew during the conflict as internally displaced persons fled the Maoists in the countryside. Now the Maoists are in a power-sharing coalition government. The violence has ended but the coalition government is gridlocked. Nepalis have been waiting three years for a new constitution. In the newspaper today, the government promises a completion of the process within the next four months but people are skeptical. When the committee drafting the constitution gets paid by the month, where is the incentive to finish the job?
The Kathmandu population has continued to grow due to the country’s high unemployment. People come to the capital looking for work. There are now 3 million people living in the Kathmandu valley, driving too many cars and motorcycles on streets that were designed for oxcarts. The air is polluted and many people wear masks over their lower faces. Many Nepalis have gone abroad to study in India, the UK or the US or work in Malaysia and the Middle East. Every Nepali I meet has a relative somewhere in the diaspora.
Right now, in January of 2012, there is a scarcity of petrol in Nepal. I see long queues for gas and hear stories of people waiting 12-14 hours a day and still not getting to the front of the line. The government recently hiked the price of petroleum, resulting in student protests. The protesters, who are members of different political parties, called a nationwide bandh for today. Bandh, the Nepali word for “closed”, is a form of protest requiring the closing of markets and schools. It was a Maoist tactic during the conflict. Now they are in the government, but the practice continues. The headline in one newspaper is “Maoists reap the bandhs they sowed.”
No driving is allowed today. The Nepali Police, as well as the Armed Forces Police, are out in full riot gear today, but the bandh is enforced by the protesters themselves. It is strange to walk in the middle of the street, with no cars and motorcycles. There is a holiday mood, more so than yesterday – an actual public holiday. People mill around, chat, play badminton in the street. Most people support the protesters and their criticism of the government for the rising prices.
When I get back to the house, my friend waves from the second floor balcony. When we arrived last week, she was the one who opened the door and said, “Welcome home!”
Every morning when I come into work, I am greeted by the smiling face of a young girl. Her hair is pulled neatly back into two braids, glossy black against her pink hairbands. Her eyes, dark and alert, shine at me – I swear I can see them twinkle.
She wears the blue uniform of her school, the Sankhu-Palubari Community School in rural Nepal. The Advocates for Human Rights supports the school to provide the right to education to the most disadvantaged kids in the area and to prevent them from becoming involved in child labor. Photographs from the school hang on the walls of our office, reminders to us of the lives that we impact with our human rights work.
Even though I see her every day, until last month I had never met this cheerful young girl, a girl whose smile – even in a photo – comes from her core, seems to light her entire being. Until last month, I did not know that her name was Kanchi. And I had never heard her incredible story.
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In 1999, Kanchi was six years old. She lived with her family in a village in the Kathmandu Valley. Her parents were poor farmers; they had only a little land and some cattle and they struggled to feed their family. Kanchi was the youngest of six sisters. She and her sisters (and also her brother) had to help their parents in the fields and with household chores. Kanchi’s job was also to take the cattle to the forest to graze. Kanchi did not go to school. There were many children in Nepal that did not go to school at that time, but girls, like Kanchi, were more likely than boys to work rather than go to school – particularly in rural areas like the Suntole district where she lived.
Kanchi was a very smart and determined little girl. She wanted to go to school. So when she heard that a new school was opening in the Sankhu-Palubari community – a school for kids who were not able to go to school because they couldn’t pay or were discriminated against – she was very excited. She rushed off to tell her parents. But her parents, who had never themselves been educated, were not as excited as Kanchi. Why should they let her go to school? Who would help feed the family? Why should they send her to school if she was only going to get married in a few years anyway?
Kanchi says that she cried for a month and begged her parents to let her go to school. One day, teachers from the new school came to visit Kanchi’s parents to talk to them about the school. The teachers explained that it would help THEM if Kanchi could read and write. They explained why it was important for all children to go to school, even girls. They told them that all children – even the poorest, the lowest-caste, members of indigenous groups – had a right to education.
Kanchi’s older sisters, who had never had the opportunity to go to school, took her side. Instead getting an education, they had all married young and were working in the fields. Kanchi’s sisters argued that Kanchi should go to school, take this opportunity for a life that would be different from theirs. Finally, their parents agreed to let Kanchi go to school.
Kanchi started at the Sankhu-Palubari Community School in 1999, one of 39 students in the first kindergarten class. To get to school, Kanchi had to walk one and a half hours each way. There were many other obstacles along the way, too. At various times, her parents wanted her to stop school and help them with farming. But she stayed in school and worked hard. She told her parents, “I want to do something different from the others.”
Kanchi liked her teachers and felt supported by them. She felt that the best thing about the school was the teaching environment. She stayed in school and was one of only two girls in the first class to graduate from 8th grade. She continued on to high school and completed 12th grade at Siddhartha College of Banepa in 2012. The first in her family to go to school, Kanchi is also the first girl from the Sankhu-Palubari Community School to graduate from 12th grade.
I met Kanchi for the first time in September. Almost exactly 13 years after this brave little girl started kindergarten, she is a lovely young woman who is preparing for her university entrance exams. She plans to study agriculture starting in January. Her parents are proud of her and they are happy now – she has chosen the family profession – but Kanchi is interested in learning more about organic farming so she can bring techniques back to her village. “I want to live a healthy life and give a healthy life to others,” she says.
Sitting in the principal’s office at Sankhu-Palubari Community School, I asked her what the school meant to her. Kanchi said, “I gained from this school my life. If I hadn’t learned to read and write, I would be a housewife.” When asked about her sisters, she told me that they had made sure to send their own children to school.
In her free time, Kanchi likes to sing and dance and make handicrafts to decorate her room. She likes to play with her sisters’ children. She has a smile that lights the whole world. She told me her nickname, Himshila. She smiled when she told me it means “mountain snow, strong rock”. Strong rock. That seems just about right.
*****
October 11, 2012 is the first International Day of the Girl Child. The United Nations has designated this day to promote the rights of girls, highlight gender inequalities and the challenges girls face, and address discrimination and abuse suffered by girls around the globe. In many ways, the story of Kanchi and her sisters reflects the experience of girls in many countries throughout the world. All over the world, girls are denied equal access to education, forced into child labor, married off at a young age, pressured to drop out of school because of their gender.
There are many good reasons to ensure access to education for girls like Kanchi, however. Educating girls is one of the strongest ways to improve gender equality. It is also one the best ways to reduce poverty and promote economic growth and development.
The International Day of the Girl is a day to recommit ourselves to ensuring that girls like Kanchi have the chance to live their lives to their fullest possible potential. To redouble our efforts to promote the rights of girls wherever they live in the world. This first International Day of the Girl is also a day to honor girls like Kanchi. A day to take the story of her success in one tiny corner of Nepal and shout it out, an inspiration for girls all around the world. Girls like Kanchi with the strength, the bravery, the determination to change the world, but who just need the opportunity.
The Human Rights Warrior 
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