Lesson 4:  Crime and Punishment

Last weekend I visited the Agroforestry project that I worked on a few years ago.  I was a little upset to see the state of the project offices and model farm had improved little over the few years, however there have been some developments, for example a fish farm has been established in one of the members farms.

However, what was more upsetting was to hear that whilst I was there, a group of youths had broken into the government school and broken 'equipment'.  (This was the school that I had hoped to raise funds for).  I am not sure what was most surprising; to hear vandals had attacked this impoverished school (when there is a wealthy private school just several hundred metres away), or that this school had anything it could term 'equipment'.






It turned out that this equipment was simply the desks and chairs (which is just about all the school owns), the vandals had been caught during the act and had been held at the police station.  This was actually how I heard about it, whilst passing the station / jail, the teenagers' parents were there; begging for their childrens' release.  I do not know if the parents, or teenagers were made to pay for the damage caused, (but have heard since that the 'equipment' has been repaired) however later that day the Police had obviously gotten bored of holding the youths and deccided to punish and then release them.

If you can not make it out, the offenders were made to hold onto each others ears, whilst doing squats.  This went on for about 40 minutes and must of been very painfull for whoever was the slowest.


Aside from this I was recently speaking to an English friend here, once someone had tried to pick his pocket but the crowd around him had noticed this and starting shouting 'CHOR' (theif).  Then  they turned on the theif, apparently about a dozen people punching and kicking this guy on the ground.  Eventually the police turned up and broke up the fight, seeing that the theif was so badly beaten, the police decided not to press any charges and let everyone go.  I am sure Amnesty would be up in arms if they saw such things, but personally I think this works very well.  After all, petty crime is rare here and even peacefull burgulries can make the national press.



Observation:  Buddhist monks seem to be the equivalent to students in Nepal, I spent an hour eating at a bar / restuarant last night and throughout that time there were 5 monks sat at the table beside mine; all huddled around a single cup of tea.

Lesson 3:   On Contradiction

 

Well I have arrived in Kathmandu and met with many good people.  After spending New Years Eve drinking and dancing stupidly with a local hotel owner and his friends, I have stayed with my friend Badri and his family and met with some new friends, all of which 'may' have contacts to arrange teaching work for me, although offering what you don't have is fairly common here.

New years eve here is much like it is in the UK, a time for families to get together and for those rich enough to afford it; to go drinking and listen to live music in bars.

I have met with NELTA but they do not have as many options for me as they had made out, also I feel that like many organisations here; they are not as big, or organised as they make out.  They can place me in a village school, in return for food and boarding, but they do not seem to have relations with schools inside Kathmandu.  It is a common thing in Nepal for people to make out they are much better than they are, especially with supposed NGO's.  Well at least it is good to see where all the UN international aid money goes to.  The guy who I met with was not even able to talk to me over the phone as he could not understand native english speakers, however he runs the International TEFL School in Kathmandu.  It shows how desperate this nation is for decent education.

Before I met with NELTA, I had gone to a cafe for a coffee, the waiter there has a friend who, has a friend that works at a Language Institute.  Apparently they were looking for an English teacher and if they have not found one he will be contacting me about that sometime. Also his girlfriend is trying to learn English to get into an Australian Uni, so I have said if she can find a few friends who wish to study, then I will give them all private lessons and they can split the hourly rate between them to make it affordable for them.  So no thanks too the language professional, but thanks to a waiter, this was not a complete waste.  I guess the English proverb 'its not what you know, but who you know', works very well here too, although in this case the richer man was not the one to know.

Hopefully I will also be meeting a friend from Rolpa shortly, she is now a central committee member of the Maoist Party and I hope to write an article on her involvement and the current situation here.  Whilst all the papers are taking of Nepal finally being on the brink of peace, it is quite possible that the opposite is true.  For example as part of this peace transition; Nepal now has direct military censorship over its newspapers, just yesterday I saw one of their major newspaper offices closed off by armed police, whilst Military officials inspected what was to be printed today. Similarly a radio station that a friend of mine has worked with, was raided and had equipment 'seized' by supporters of a politician that has set up a rival station, aptly named 'nice radio'.  Ban Ki Moon keeps claiming things here are good in the eyes of the UN, whilst they claim to support freedom of press (lets just hope he's not on my blog... else he may practise his idea of freedom on me).