Volunteering In Nepal – Bringing Down The House

Don’t shit where you live.

One imagined this to be a universal tenet. One shared by all. Or so I thought.

I’m swinging a pickaxe on the third storey of a crumbling mud-brick house on the outskirts of the Kathmandu valley, and I’m up to my ankles in human waste. As the smell of a years worth of droppings mixes with the dust, hay and soot of a formerly well lived-in home, I wonder why this universality is not the case.

The circumstances must be substantial in order to fight the natural urge not to live in ones own filth. Considering the circumstances of this particularly hard hit region of Nepal, it may be understandable if at all forgivable. Simply put, there are no toilets here.

One in ten of the remaining homes may have a tiny shack, just small enough to squat in, but the refuse simply trickles out a small pipe onto the farm one terrace below them. They in turn pay it forward, on down the hill, resulting in a cascading effect which benefits their crops but opens the door to disease and sickness.

In my short time volunteering to demolish homes fractured in the previous year’s earthquake I have stepped in poo on average of probably twice a day. Often animal, but more than likely, human. It’s always met with frustration (and a stick) but the reality is there, stuck to the bottom of my shoe, this is how it is. Any shaded or secluded spot withing running distance to homes will have been designated a dumping ground long ago.

On occasion our team would have to send some people out into the farms to cut bamboo. This was to reinforce questionable buildings before climbing on top of them. Squeezing into the small bamboo thickets that dotted the hillsides showed that they had long ago been chosen as the most private and pleasant outhouses.

Privacy in villages like this is tricky. Life is lived out doors, in view of all. Elderly women wash topless at communal fountains while schoolchildren fill their dusty Mountains Dew and Pepsi bottles for the hot day ahead. Young men in metal-shirts primp and preen their mini-moustaches and proto-beards in earshot of groups of giggling girls. Everyone passing stops to wet themselves against the dirt and the heat.

The Newari people of the Kathmandu valley live in a decidedly different time. Scarce bouts of electricity mean refrigeration is dicey. As such the public slaughter of chickens and goats is a regular occurrence, and several shrines to this end dot the area. The small farms are tilled with thick wooden yokes pulled by cows and buffalos, or even by hand. The meager crops, corn, lentils, rice, are then either sold locally for pennies or transported at great cost to the markets of Kathmandu.

The hardiness of the land and It’s effect on It’s inhabitants is noticable. Very few of the men seem overweight. The more matronly women, though decidedly Rubenesque, still perform the most amazing feats of strength, ferrying babies and bushells up nearly sheer embankments using only wrapped saris and head straps. The young men sprint up and down the mountains with an unnatural ease. Wearing only flimsy sandals they hop lightly over sharp rocks and weave effortlessly through the devasted community.

We are not so graceful.

Every morning at 6am our crew wakes to the sounds of crowing chickens, barking dogs, and every few days, the bleating of a soon to be slaughtered goat.

After a simple breakfast of camp-cooked eggs or porrige we pack our tools and hit the trail by 7am.

The tools are simple. Crowbars, a pickaxe, some rope, and a rockbar. By far the most unwieldy thing to carry is the water jug. Awkward yet indispensable, the 40lbs must be carried uphill to each jobsite almost daily. With the summer heat coming on quickly the sun at midday is scorching and many sites offer little shade once the roof is off.

The morning walk, before the sun fully crests the mountains, is the most pleasant. The crispness of daybreak contrasts sharply with the lunchtime walks back, always arriving a sweaty, dirty heap. But in the cool clear start of the day one gets to see the village waking fully. Children are brushed and polished in clothes so white and starched as to belie their mud-hut origins, then pushed out the door to join the stream of white and blue uniforms heading to the schoolhouse.

Backpacks and lunchboxes are a strange mixture of Angry-Birds and Chinese cartoons. Both girls and boys often walk arm in arm, or hand in hand, singing and laughing down the tiny alleys.

We cut an odd sight to these kids. Possibly the first foreigners they have ever seen. Marching through their shattered homes, we trudge by, tools on our shoulders. Once the initial shock of these pale, sweaty, bodies wears off they take up a repeated chant of ‘namaste‘. Hundreds of raised hands greet us as we pass, parting a tiny sea of children we chant back.

The homes most of these children live in would be deplorable by Western standards. Many families were simply unable to move after the quake and live in rooms split by massive cracks from floor to ceiling. The cost of repair is meager, but so are most incomes.  Some have moved into temporary huts built of corrugated iron. These emergency shelters, a fraction of the size of the fractured brick homes they face, now must hold the entire families belongings, themselves, and their livestock.

The promised $2000 from the Nepali government has not yet been granted, even one year on, and with the monsoon coming many of those looking to use this aid to repair their damaged houses, the delay could see them simply disintegrate in the coming rains.

To look from the outside in, one would think it almost over – rebuild and be done with it.  But the truth is more complicated, and those in these regions realize that the earthquake robbed them of more than just their homes. The great shifting of millions of tons of rock had done just as damage below ground as above – drying up aquifers and rerouting vital springs.

Village wells, the beating heart of a community, some that had existed for hundreds of years, dried up overnight. For many it simply meant many more miles to walk each day, for some it was simply easier to pack up and move on entirely.

In the absence of assistance from the strained and inefficient government, international aid organizations like All Hands International stepped in to fill the gaps. Water projects, sanitation projects, and in our case demolition and rubble removal – the grand chain of events that had brought me to this moment of sitting on a broken television scraping goat droppings off my shoe with a crowbar.