Tradewinds a-blowing

I'm back from Dhulikhel, a moderate-sized old Newar (and new tourist) town just outside the hustle and bustle of the Valley. I returned with spoils: a glass Horlicks jar filled with waterbuffalo ghyu (clarified butter) and a one liter soda bottle filled with mahi (buttermilk, the side-product of freshly-churned butter). To find good quality dairy products, you have to look outside domain of the monetary economy, which means you have to go to the villages which still make up the most typical kind of community in hill Nepal. In the city, ghyu is adulterated with hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and milk comes from (I have reason to suspect) from grain-fed, antibiotic-laden cows in crowded dairies without a shred of greenery in sight. Then it's watered down, and probably reconstituted with added powdered milk before being sealed in plastic baggies and distributed for Kathmandu's morning chiyaa.
As a westerner in Nepal, it's hard not think about issues of "development," bikaash, a word on everyone's lips. It's impossible to argue that Nepal is just fine as it is, what with the glaring social and health issues that plague these hills, from appalling infant mortality rates to young women being sold into the Indian sex trade . . . it's a long list. But the supposed solution of development is rife with problems of its own. This is an enormous debate that I've hardly dipped my feet into, but even a casual glance into its murky depths is startling enough to provoke a double take.
In Panauti, a two hour walk from Dhulikhel that Alden and I stretched into a 6 hour walk by stopping to share an avocado (a novelty--is it a fruit? a vegetable? with salt and chili peppers, an achar? not many converts to this strange fleshy bulb) with some tea house locals, to discuss rice varieties and crop rotations with a peasant farmer who then asked for 1000 rupees for his trouble (we gave him 55, too much for 15 minutes of work; he said, 'we're poor people, what can we do?'), and to investigate an egg-production facility that employed 10 workers and housed 15,000 hens--in Panauti, after walking and talking all day, we settled down for some momos at a hole-in-the-wall and found ourselves in another in-depth conversation with some young men. These guys were under 30, and like most of their demographic group, they were consumed with scheming their way to America. All their friends had already left: how, they asked, could they get by here, working their fathers' terraced rice paddy fields, when the snack (fried buffalo meat) and drink (whisky and coke) they were enjoying cost 300 rupees? The issue at the heart of these guys' rhetorical question, of course, is that of modernization: the lead of advertizements and peers demands consumption levels well above what a simple subsistence-based economy can support. The question wouldn't arise if these men had contented themselves with chiura (dry, flattened rice) and yogurt washed down with locally-distilled raksi. One foot in the fast-flowing current of the global economy immediately pulls the other one in too.
In situations like this one, I always feel obliged to speak of America's problems. Lousy food, I say; bigrieko (broken) families. Lifelong debt, too much work, not enough satisfaction. I'm not the only one to notice the irony: Nepalis flock to America while Americans like me aim for "third-world" Nepal. Yet as I write America's unsustainable, growth-based economy is in shambles, toppling in on itself. Meanwhile, the local traditions I place so much value in, from Ayurvedic medicine to traditional agriculture and cooking, are losing their integrity due to pressures emanating from the West. The middle-aged Baidya I met in Dhulikhel no longer follows the family tradition of making his own medicines from herbs he has gathered--the mass-produced Ayurvedic products from India are fine, and there's more money in them. He still knows the theory, reads pulses, but his son is training to be an Allopathic doctor.
That's my spiel for today, except that I don't want to end on a sour note. Who was who said 'expect the worst, hope for the best?' Wallowing in the mud makes the starlight look awful bright. There are rays of hope here, and in America too. Or call them flowers growing out of toxic ground--now we need them to cross-pollinate. For the fate of globe is all bound up with itself, every seemingly loose end connected to the rat's nest tangle of the whole. This has always been true in an abstract sense, only now it's painfully concrete. Nepal needs America, and America needs Nepal.