Nepal by the Dozen
It was 1967 when our government, never more benighted, selected a group of we BA generalists to comprise the twelfth group of Peace Corps volunteers to be sent to the mountain kingdom of Nepal– Nepal 12..., as if what the agricultural future of that rice-growing land could most benefit from was an assortment of English majors where English was not spoken, grad-school drop-outs where education was nearly absent but prized beyond measure, students of the various humanities where animal husbandry and agronomy were the matter under discussion, and all of us uncertain whether rice grew in bags on trees or boxes on bushes.
One simply expects that any government program will operate with total disregard for tactile reality. After an intense three-month training program that fitted us to stammer along in Nepali and to distinguish the rice plant from wheat by the water in which it would be found standing, we were flown from central California’s chilly spring rains to bake on the open-hearth of the northern Deccan plateau in a dry season. After a few days of what was soberly called orientation– something to do with the orient– we were parceled out singly across the twenty-mile wide border of flat land which belonged to Nepal, just north of the Indian border. No one there actually spoke Nepali, the language we had struggled to learn, the bulk of the population having migrated north from the Indian state of Bihar. But a sprinkling of landowners had come down from the Nepali-speaking hills and recollected the language of their youth fondly. The rest, for their part, spoke a dozen or more languages, mostly related to Nepali, and it was vastly easier for them to cobble together a sort of Nepali creole by means of which they could speak to us, than it proved for any of us to learn the local languages. Very often one slow-speaking Volunteer would face a committee at the other end of the conversation, which would lean its heads together to decode the message being received and to toss words into the response basket. On the whole, it worked out very well, much to everyone’s surprise. The kind patience and generous poverty of the people of Nepal is a landmark more outstanding than the entire range of the Himalaya.
Had a psychologist swooped down, Rorschach cards flapping, on any of the forlorn and lonely members of Peace Corps Nepal 12, he would have found us out of our minds for most of the nearly two years of our stay there. Crazy lonely, shrunk by malnutrition, swollen with parasites, diseased with things Montezuma would have loved to give conquistadores, we sometimes went days without uttering a word we or anyone else understood. Small children and flies swarmed about our carcasses. Cattle startled out from under their yokes at the scent of us. Our every motion was circumscribed by Lilliputian lines of restraint we were very imperfectly aware of until we would trip over them...and by warnings to beware–beware the livestock, be aware of thieves, watch for cobras and the more deadly krait, stay alert for tigers, leopards, rhinoceroses and elephants (in some places), vicious but sacred rats and monkeys and, not least, mad dogs. It would be easy to forgot the yeti and ghosts, we were to be wary of them, as well..., and we were, we were.
And yet..., and yet..., it was a beautiful country, inhabited by admirable people whose kindness will never be repaid. Memory of youth spent in that land, among its folk, will be one of the possessions carried most tenderly toward the grave..., by each of us, I think.