London to Freetown

After a whirlwind trip to London, just enough time to see the family, eat some junk food, be amazed by the pursuit of shopping in oxford street (so much shopping going on- what did people do before shops?) and of course to catch some of live earth on tv  ( I am going to have to kill a few cows to make up for the carbon or something)  I’m back Nepal side.

I know I’m back.  The toilet smells like a toilet, I’m sharing my room with a geko , complete strangers have enquired as to my marital status and my stomach doesn’t feel quite right.  But these things are dwarfed by the friendly, welcoming, generous people and the breathtaking beauty of nepal.

I decided to do some pre-travel revising on Nepal on the plane trip with my newly acquired lonely planet guide.  Maybe it could tell me some things I didn’t already know.  It did and here are two of many illuminating facts under the ‘women travellers’ section;

 ‘ in 2005 landmark rulings gave women under the age of 35 the right for the first time to apply for a passport without their parents or husbands permission and safeguarded their right to inherited property.’

‘ the rural custom of exiling women to cowsheds for four days during their period was  made illegal in 2005’. 

So my training in a big organisation starts on the 12^th July.  And I have decided to grab a flying visit to London. Only five days but I need to stock up on nutella.  The nutella can’t come here, I have to do the food miles for it.

It’s funny what you miss when you leave somewhere.  What would you miss most?  I think it’s the things we take for granted and don’t really think of. 

Apart from the obvious and most compelling miss of friends and family: I miss;

London traffic.  It is at least organised in its misery.  The road fatality rate is high here, apparently too high to bother counting .  For those drivers out there who want to drive in Nepal here  are the  simple road rules:  go where you can, when you can, whether you be, car, truck, cow, person or street hawker.  Beep your horn endlessly.  Never wear a motorcycle helmet as a passenger, whether you are 2 or 80. Make sure your vehicle constantly emits black acrid smoke.  Drive fast, drive like a lunatic. 

Newspapers.   Sometimes there is an information overload in our daily lives.  But it is the other extreme here.   Although not so extreme that the news of an overprivileged blonde doing a bit of time isn’t in the news here.  I crave a big juicy daily newspaper.

Getting what I ordered.  I can’t wait to go to a restaurant and have what I actually ordered turn up on my plate. And not having to worry too much about food poisoning when it arrives.  There have  been deaths from cholera in kathmandu recently.  All the rain, the flooding: polluting the water with excrement.  Nice detail , i know. 

Trains, the underground.  The Himalayas are obviously not suited to trains of any description.   This is unfortunate, trains could be a safe and efficient way for people to travel here avoiding the inherent dangers of traffic here (see road rules above).

Not being completely ignored if I am with a man.  Nepal ranks 111 out of 115 countries in terms of the level of discrimination faced by women.  The ranking measures things like health care, education, political and economic engagement: women in Nepal face almost  the worst levels of  discrimination in all of those areas.   For me this means not being spoken to if I am with a man in restaurants, having my credit card I’ve just paid with in a restaurant returned to the nearest sir to me- even when they’ve just seen me take it out of my wallet. It means meeting women and wanting to talk to them and the nearest man explaining that as an unmarried woman she is shy and doesn’t want to speak. It means a number of situations that make me want to scream, where I feel almost invisible as a person.  But that’s ok for me because I grew up with boundless opportunity and one day I can leave Nepal. 

But for women here it means; facing the highest rate of fatality in child birth, living in one of only three countries in the world where the life expectancy is lower  for women than men, where the life expectancy of  only 55 is  attributable purely to the high levels of death rates for women, where prolapsed wombs will be left untreated, where girls are more likely to be illiterate ( why bother paying for a girl to go to school who will one day only be an ‘asset’ for her husbands family), all of the well paid jobs going to men, doing all of the hard work in the villages whilst men play cards, and maybe being  traded in for a younger model when they look older than their husbands from the back breaking work they have done.  The list is endless.

 I miss London