Timeless tea gardens and How I shock people here

Tea gardens

Next few days I spent trying meeting some smart people, who would eventually help me to find out-which villages to choose for my research objectives? I even ended up at the local NGO meeting discussing issues of Lapcha (Lapcha is an ethnic tribe), of course, in Nepali.

Ilam bazaar welcoming gate

Saturday was the most challenging. It is a public holiday and everything is closed. It was striking and scary at the same time, this nothingness which appears when you don’t have friends around (Danish girls had left), computer, any public place to go and even understanding of the geographical structure of this place.

Those Limbu ornaments!

For several hours tea gardens became my shelter. Walking between bushes, sitting on the top and reading a boring methodological book, observing people walking around I was coming back over and over to the issue of spending time like that, realizing attachment to the social-media-informational space.

There would be few Nepali, trying to talk to me, though. Mostly couples of men (women would still be doing their homework during the holiday, while men would walk around killing their time). These were the moments when I realized three key methods to knock down any Nepali:

1) By saying where I am from. Most of the rural Nepali would associate any foreigner with America or Britain, therefore country like Latvia would leave them speechless for long time.

2) By telling my age. Looking young even for European standards, for Nepal I look like a kid and people would normally think of me being 16-17. 

3) By speaking Nepali. My skills in this language are yet too primitive to claim any sort of knowledge, although I am capable of expressing my basic needs and maintain kindergarden level conversation. In most of the cases Nepali would not filter anything coming out of my mouth as Nepali, so usually I would need to say that I am actually speaking Nepali now. There would be many cases later when the length of shock would be so long, that I would seek for the help of my assistant to calm a person down by starting translating my speech. I remember me asking in the shop “biscuits chha?” (do you have biscuits?) and receiving continuous answer “chhaina” (no, they don’t have), even though I could see biscuits clearly in front of me. Only after my assistant repeated the same phrase, I was actually given what I asked. Later discussing this demotivating issue with Sunil (my assistant), he was explaining that I should morally prepare people that I would talk to them in Nepali before I actually tell what I need. In the case of the shop I would need to say firstly that “I am hungry, I would like to eat something and to buy something from your shop [then-pause and wait for a person to acclimatize]. Do you have biscuits?”

Tea gardens