Through the Looking-Glass #2

Published October 10, 2006

Nepal's Dasain festival ended Saturday with the purnima (full moon) of the Nepali month Asoj. The five days leading up the purnima are a host to a countrywide massacre of water buffalo, goats and chickens, offerings to the goddess Durga who is celebrated during Dasain. Any Nepali will tell you that Dasain means meat, meat and more meat, and many did tell me that throughout the week. I was invited to many gatherings throughout Dasain, all featuring absurd quantities of meat -- barbecued meat, fried meat, grilled meat, roasted meat, steamed meat, and the Newari specialty of choyella, boiled water buffalo that is heavily spiced. It's tough to be a vegetarian during Dasain, but even tougher to be a goat, I figure, so I indulge.

At the Dakshin Kali temple south of Kathmandu, devotees began lining up Saturday morning at 4 am to worship the wrathful goddess Kali, an incarnation of Durga. I arrived a bit later than that, but the queue still wrapped around the temple three times and over the bridge and then some, many devotees pulling resistant goats or carrying frightened chickens along with them.

The smells of Nepali temples are at once inviting and revolting. The scent of sandalwood and jasmine incense wafts around the perimeter of the temple, while the smell of singed goat hair rushes out of the butcher's shed, where bodies of goats are lined up outside, severed heads stacked on top. An old woman tries to cut the queue with her dead goat by dropping the sack containing the goat corpse through the open wall. The butchers tell her to go to the end of the line, while she tries to use her age to her advantage. "I am an old woman. Respect someone older than you and clean this goat for me. I cannot wait." The butchers will not relent, and one of them hefts the sack up again, and the woman drags it to the end of the line.

Around the temple courtyard, priests sit cross legged in the shade of their umbrellas putting tikka on devotees' foreheads. One old woman offers tikka from the base of a tree. She first applies a sticky red and then yellow paste to my forehead while reciting a Sanskrit blessing. She then affixes the tikka (uncooked rice mixed with yogurt and red powder) to my forehead, and uses a u-shaped stamp to place a yellow marking below the tikka. It is customary to offer money to a pandit for the blessing and I give her 10 rupees (about 14 cents). She balks and insists on the 50 rupees (70 cents) other foreigners have given her. I've never bargained for a blessing before, and am a bit taken aback. Showing me a hundred-rupee note, she says, "This was for two." I hand her a 20-rupee note, a completely sufficient price for the blessing. "Fine, if that is what you are giving me, then I must take it," she says. Commercialism has reached the temples.

While most Nepalis were worshipping the goddess Durga, I paid my respects to the human Durga, a dear friend and social worker Durga Mainali. I came to know Durga in 2002 when along with a group of friends, I began visiting an orphanage that Durga ran. At that time there were about 15 children, from infancy to about 12 years old. They all lived in three rooms in a flat on the busy road outside Bouddhanath Stupa. There was not enough funding to send the children to school, and Durga relied on outside help from friends to play with the kids and teach them simple things.

Durga is a remarkably resourceful woman, and over time she secured the funding to send the children to school, although she and her small staff still struggled to feed the children and provide them with meat and milk, expensive commodities for an organization with a tiny budget. The kids still needed an outlet from their cramped living quarters so we took them on field trips to the zoo, the botanical gardens and other places where they could run around.

The Buddhist Child Home has since moved to a new location in a compound with a courtyard and a decent-sized plot of land for vegetables. The population has more than doubled, and there are now 41 children living there. As I walk through the gate and up the steep driveway, three children run out and grab my hands to pull me inside, screaming, "Liz Miss! Liz Miss!" in their high-octave voices.

I sit down with Durga to discuss the Buddhist Child Home's current situation. Through friends of friends and a volunteer placement service, more foreigners have come to help Durga and the Buddhist Child Home, and one American, Nina Henning, has completed some fundraising stateside to support the home. Locally, there is a group of Nepalis that gives a fixed amount every month to support the food budget, and many people have donated books, school supplies and office equipment. The foreign involvement has effected an unexpected, but not unsurprising consequence: the principal of the school that the children attend is now refusing to provide the scholarships she once did. If there are foreigners involved, she reasoned, the home must have enough money to pay the full school fees.

Three of the older boys come in wheeling a 30-kg sack of rice over the cross-bar of a children's bicycle. One of the house staff follows with another 30-kg sack of rice over his shoulder. The total of about 130 pounds of rice will only feed the children and the house staff two meals -- that night's dinner and the next day's lunch.

Even with the extra help, both of money and extra hands, each day is a struggle for the Buddhist Child Home. Durga is an optimist, though, always smiling and laughing, despite circumstances to the contrary. But every so often her fears show through her smiling facade, and now is one of those times. With tears welling in her eyes, she says the words heard in similar conversations all over Nepal, "Garho chha. Jiban garho chha." (It is difficult. Life is difficult.)