Through the Looking Glass: a Foreigner looks at Dasain (and life) in Nepal

[Guest guest]

It Is Difficult. Life Is Difficult

 

Through the Looking Glass

Liz Lance

http://www.telluridewatch.com/101006/liz.htm

The Telluride Watch

Published:10/10/06

 

Nepal's Dasain festival ended Saturday with the purnima

(full moon) of the Nepali month Asoj. The five days leading

up the purnima play host to a countrywide massacre of

water buffalo, goats and chickens, offerings to the goddess

Durga, who is celebrated during Dasain. Any Nepali will

tell you that Dasain means meat, meat and more meat, and

many did tell me that throughout the week. I was invited to

many gatherings throughout Dasain, all featuring absurd

quantities of meat - barbecued meat, fried meat, grilled

meat, roasted meat, steamed meat and the Newari specialty

of choyella, boiled water buffalo that is heavily spiced. It's

tough to be a vegetarian during Dasain, but even tougher to

be a goat, I figure, so I indulge.

 

At the Dakshin Kali temple south of Kathmandu, devotees

begin lining up Saturday morning at 4 a.m. to worship the

wrathful goddess Kali, an incarnation of Durga. I arrive a bit

later than that, but the queue still wraps around the temple

three times and over the bridge and then some, many

devotees pulling resistant goats or carrying frightened

chickens along with them.

 

The smells of Nepali temples are at once inviting and

revolting. The scent of sandalwood and jasmine incense

wafts out the temple's perimeter, while the smell of singed

goat hair rushes out of the butcher's shed, where bodies of

goats are lined up outside, severed heads stacked on top. An

old woman tries to cut the queue with her dead goat by

dropping the sack containing the goat corpse through the

open wall. The butchers tell her to go to the end of the line,

while she tries to use her age to her advantage. "I am an old

woman. Respect someone older than you and clean this goat

for me. I cannot wait." The butchers will not relent, and one

of them hefts the sack up again, and the woman drags it to

the end of the line.

 

Around the temple courtyard, priests sit cross-legged in the

shade of their umbrellas putting tikka on devotees'

foreheads. One old woman offers tikka from the base of a

tree. She first applies a sticky red and then yellow paste to

my forehead while reciting a Sanskrit blessing. She then

affixes the tikka (uncooked rice mixed with yogurt and red

powder) to my forehead, and uses a U-shaped stamp to

place a yellow marking below the tikka. It is customary to

offer money to a pandit for the blessing and I give her 10

rupees (about 14 cents). She balks and insists on the 50

rupees (70 cents) other foreigners have given her. I've never

bargained for a blessing before, and am a bit taken aback.

Showing me a hundred-rupee note, she says, "This was for

two." I hand her a 20-rupee note, a completely sufficient

price for the blessing. "Fine, if that is what you are giving

me, then I must take it," she says. Commercialism has

reached the temples.

 

While most Nepalis are worshipping the goddess Durga, I

pay my respects to the human Durga, a dear friend and

social worker Durga Mainali. I came to know Durga in 2002

when, along with a group of friends, I began visiting an

orphanage that she ran. At that time there were about 15

children, from infancy to 12 years old. They all lived in

three rooms in a flat on the busy road outside Bouddhanath

Stupa. There was not enough funding to send the children to

school, and Durga relied on outside help from friends to

play with the kids and teach them simple things.

 

Durga is a remarkably resourceful woman, and over time

she secured the funding to send the children to school,

although she and her small staff still struggle to feed the

children and provide them with meat and milk, expensive

commodities for an organization with a tiny budget. The

kids still need an outlet from their cramped living quarters

so we took them on field trips to the zoo, the botanical

gardens and other places where they could run around.

 

The Buddhist Child Home has since moved to a new

location in a compound with a courtyard and a decent-sized

plot of land for vegetables. The population has more than

doubled, and there are now 41 children living here. As I

walk through the gate and up the steep driveway, three

children run out and grab my hands to pull me inside,

screaming, "Liz Miss! Liz Miss!" in their high-octave

voices.

 

I sit down with Durga to discuss the Buddhist Child Home's

current situation. Thanks to friends of friends and a

volunteer placement service, more foreigners have come to

help Durga and the Buddhist Child Home, and one

American, Nina Henning, has completed some fundraising

stateside to support the home. Locally, there is a group of

Nepalis who give a fixed amount every month to support the

food budget, and many people have donated books, school

supplies and office equipment. The foreign involvement has

effected an unexpected but not unsurprising consequence:

The principal of the school that the children attend is now

refusing to provide the scholarships she once did. If there

are foreigners involved, she has reasoned, the home must

have enough money to pay the full school fees.

 

Three of the older boys come in wheeling a 30-kg sack of

rice over the cross-bar of a child's bicycle. One house

staffer follows, with another 30-kg sack of rice over his

shoulder. The total of about 130 pounds of rice will only

feed the children and the house staff two meals - tonight's

dinner and tomorrow's lunch.

 

Even with the extra help, both of money and extra hands,

each day is a struggle for the Buddhist Child Home. Durga

is an optimist, though, always smiling and laughing, despite

circumstances to the contrary. But every so often her fears

show through her smiling facade, and now is one of those

times. With tears welling in her eyes, she says the words

heard in similar conversations all over Nepal, "Garho chha.

Jiban garho chha." (It is difficult. Life is difficult.)