I stopped in at one of my favorite Pokhara restaurants, the Newari Kitchen, and was chatting with Laxmi when the sky opened up and let us all know who’s boss. By all accounts, the monsoon should have ended by now. But the accounts were all wrong, because there I was stuck at the Newari Kitchen for the foreseeable future. Having not yet fully comprehended the good umbrella-carrying advice, you see, I was destined to get soaked to the bone in the five minute walk between the Newari Kitchen and my hotel.

The rain turned to hail, drumming on the tin roof with machine gun rapid fire. “Ah, all of the rice ready for harvesting will be ruined now,” we lamented between us as we were plunged into darkness by an electricity cut. These random cuts happen often, so candles were at hand.

I enjoyed hanging out with Laxmi and the other bhais there at the restaurant, but after about an hour I had to figure out what move to make. Laxmi kept insisting that I take their umbrella, but I could see that her generosity would leave them to get soaked themselves. If there were an end in sight, I might have waited it out, but the torrents were not letting up. The thunder was raging and lightning cracking through the sky.

“I’ll bring you there didi ,” the cook bhai insisted yet again and it seemed the best alternative all around. So we each took an umbrella, rolled up the bottoms of our pant legs and set out to weather the storm. It was just a short walk, through the now river-esque main throughfare of Lakeside, but the bhai’s offer to come out in the rain to my hotel so that he could just walk the umbrella back to Laxmi at the restaurant was a random act of kindness that touched me. I am fortunate to experience them fairly often here and hope that there are times when others feel as though they have experienced a random act of kindness from me as well. A small sort of pay it forward movement afoot.

It was a pitch black quiet night in Bishalnagar when I first felt something seriously amiss. I had had odd stomach pains earlier in the day, so it would have been reasonable to suspect ghiardia, worms or amoebic dyssentery. These are generally my first suspects, having lived in Nepal for some time now and having encountered each of these ailments too many times to want to remember. But it started to feel as though someone was drilling a wooden post directly all the way through my body from the right side of my back. Hmmm, appendicitis then came to mind as I writhed on the tiles of the bathroom floor seeking some relief from the pain and the uncontrollable waves of sweats.

Somewhere around 2:30 AM or so, I needed someone else in on this thing, so I gave Amanda a call. I was reluctant to, knowing that she was supposed to head off to Chitwan in the morning and could really use a good night’s sleep, but I needed someone else to start thinking for me, as standing up was becoming increasingly impossible. Unfortunately, Amanda had never been to Frances’ place where I was staying, so I had to figure out a way to get some form of transportation to me so that I could get to the hospital. The nightwatchman, Chandra, was asleep downstairs and the 20 minutes it took me to get myself down the stairs to wake him were interminable. How the next steps happened is a bit fuzzy to me, but I do remember a taxi showing up at the gate, the back seat of which I eased myself into. Splayed out across the seat, bracing myself with my feet against the window and gripping the back of the front seat, each bump along the unpaved road out to the Bishalnagar chowk was excruciating.

Then thankfully there was Amanda’s voice. The B&B hospital, I said, knowing that both Chip and Frances had had succesful appendectomies there in the past. The race through the abandoned Kathmandu streets was intolerable, made all the worse for everyone involved given the rancid vomit that I spewed all over the back of the taxi. That poor taxi driver, having been abruptly wakened from his sleep in the taxi, and being pressed into the service of transporting a wailing foreigner through the deep dark night… really no amount of rupees could compensate for then also having the disgusting task of cleaning that vomit up.

There was the hospital then, but a single shot of whatever pain killer they gave was clearly nowhere near enough. It seemed to me years later when another shot then immersed me in a beautiful vision - the black world inside my brain slowly being filled with an exquisitely beautiful bubbling image of intense color. I learned later that was the effect of the opiate that they gave me. Quite a trip.

A kidney stone, it turned out to be. Clearly, from the x-ray and ultrasound. And Dr. David at the CIWEC clinic prescribed a “six pack and a strainer” that would help facilitate the stone’s self-propelled journey through my endocrine system and my capture of it as it made its entrance into the outside world. That prescription was a bit easier to take than the five different medications that the doctor at B & B prescribed and a mere 9 days later the jagged little thing painlessly exited and allowed me to get on with my life.

I wish this little drama had been the only ensuing incident from that evening at the Aroma Restaurant. But I was to come to know when I checked emailed three days later that Bela had also ended up in the hospital after our momos & beer. It’s nearly three weeks later now and she still lies in a coma in the Medicare Hospital in Chahabil, Kathmandu. The doctors suspect that it’s encephalitis, which is endemic to some of the southern areas of Nepal. Although Bela hadn’t traveled to the south of Nepal, there are also incidences of encephalitis in India, which is her homeland and perhaps where she could have been bitten by a mosquito that could be carrying the disease.

Bela is such an energetic, strong and articulate person, so filled with intensity of life and deeply attuned to human connections across difference. She’s an activist, a writer and a passionate lover of life. She seems to be coming closer to consciousness and I hope that the love and care that she’s getting will see her through.

At least that one was straightforward enough, Suresh Bahadur Rana. It’s the other ones, the more ambiguously spelled names, the ones that are less familiar to me that I can only guess whether they’re right or not. I have no mechanism at my disposal to know, except checking with Niru about what she thinks is most likely. This is just one of the many tasks that fill our workdays, spellchecking the names and VDCs of those who are reportedly missing, who are in detention or who have alleged that they suffered torture.

How I want to just get it right, to ensure that at least the names and places are right, that in their deaths, in their sufferings, that there’s enough care about those persons as individuals that they don’t suffer the disrespect of having their names wantonly misspelled. I feel so often confronted with my own powerlessness in the face of deep human suffering, that it seems perhaps disproportionately important to me to get at least these details right. Whether it’s concerns about human rights violations by the CPN(M) or excessive use of force by the security forces in the April protests, or investigations into arbitrary detention, torture and disappearance by the Nepali Army, the reports of the UN OHCHR in Nepal are filled with the stories of individuals who have suffered in this conflict. These individuals lives will never be the same. The lives of their families will never be the same. This nation will never be the same. But I wonder what is it that will help Nepal and Nepali people to confront the past and present horrors of this conflict and to heal as much as is possible from all of this suffering? It seems to me fundamentally important that the victims be known. Who are they? What have they suffered? Who is culpable for that suffering? And most importantly, how can that suffering be redressed?

I’ve accepted a position through the UN Volunteer program to work as an International Interpreter/Translator at the UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Nepal and am excited to be contributing to the work of this office that has built such a positive reputation through the time that it’s been at work in Nepal. The office has been headed by Ian Martin, who has a long history of dynamic leadership in the field of human rights and has developed very positive relations with all of the parties to Nepal’s current conflict.

But of course, a dissertation is a “public” document and in reality can be read by anyone who has access to the particular library upon whose shelf it sits. For me, thinking that my audience as “only three people” is a temporary means through which I have moved through overwhelmed feelings and a means by which I can more easily direct my writing when it all seems so diffuse. It helps me to think about what it is I need to tell Scott Peters, Davydd Greenwood, and Kath March. They have such different levels of knowledge about and interest in the particular topic that I’ve researched.

But, this blog post is about other people’s dissertations.

I happen to be one of those people who reads other people’s dissertations. It’s perhaps a perversion of being an academic or perhaps simply one of those quirky things about me, but there’s something I like about the genre.

I’ve been reading Elizabeth Enslin’s 1990 dissertation from the Anthropology Department at Stanford University, titled, “The dynamics of gender, caste and class in a women’s movement in rural Nepal.”

Well, to start with, it’s a beautifully written document. There is so much about her writing style that I enjoy, most of it having to do with her ability to evoke a sense of “being there” in a remarkably full way. It can’t be all that many dissertations that begin with an account of meeting one’s in-laws for the first time! It seems to me as though she doesn’t hide in her dissertation. It’s clear that she’s the researcher and she’s viewing the work and engaging in the work from particular positions that she well defines for the readers. She both talks about and embodies Donna Harraway’s “situated knowledges.”

Something that I found tremendously compelling was in fact, the very first line in the dissertation! It states that:

“The dynamics of social inequality remain relatively unexplored in Nepal because of analytical approaches which divorce power from culture.” [iv]

15 years later, can we still say that “the dynamics of social inequality remain relatively unexplored in Nepal??”

Well, yes and no.

There has certainly been a lot of talk about the effects of sanskritization, hinduization on Nepal’s multiplicity of ethnic groups. The claim here being that the high-caste Hindu leaders in Nepal have suppressed, repressed and exploited janajati - or ethnic - populations in Nepal. There are terrible injustices there that cannot and should not be denied. Discussions about the janajatis were important to have and are important to continue.

But what about the Nepali Dalits? What about the dynamics of social inequality that keep them impoverished, uneducated and excluded?

Enslin’s comment makes me think seriously about the role of researchers (both western and Nepali) in Nepal. It makes me think about those with privilege who research in places where there is such widespread poverty and human suffering. There is of course wealth and human joy in Nepal as well, but the questions Enslin’s comment raise for me have to do with what academics should do in the “public sphere.”

On her alterity blog, Danah Boyd discusses an article by Nancy Fraser which critiques Habermas‘ conceptualization of the public sphere. How useful to me that Danah summarized the article on her blog and what powerful ideas!

Although I’m still plagued with accountability questions…. questions about what researchers should and can do, stumbling upon this new resource has given me some hope that I can figure out at least something about why the Nepali public sphere has so powerfully and for so long excluded Nepali Dalit people.

It was particularly inspiring to me right now, given that there are such restrictions on Nepali press freedom currently being imposed by King Gyanendra. Organizations like the Federation of Nepalese Journalists and Human Rights Watch, have condemned a recently promulgated media ordinance, that, according to Newswatch India:

endorses restrictions on accreditation for reporters and increases fines for breaking restrictions that include a ban on private radio stations. The ordinance banned news programmes on FM stations, restricted media licences, forbid any news that was damaging to the king or any member of his family, and increased penalties for defamation ten-fold. Officials, however, insisted that the law had been introduced to make Nepali media dignified and responsible.

The government controlled Rising Nepal newspaper continues to report about journalists and politicians who support these restrictions.

May those who fight for freedom of expression in Nepal be inspired by the struggles and sacrifices made by Jean Dominique, who suffered severe persecution and exile in his lifetime and a death brought on by cold blooded assasination. That the perpetrators of that crime have not been brought to justice is an abomination.

What I’m left with after watching this film and thinking about the state of affairs in Nepal are questions about where “the road to hell” begins, questions about how many would recognize it as such and questions about who would listen to them.