Saw the craziest thing the other day -
As many of you know we are in monsoon season. As I was heading to my language teacher's house with my friends and fellow classmates, Klaas and Dineke, we ran into a huge traffic jam on the main road. To start, there was a literal waterfall gushing across an intersecting road, creating a bit of lake in the middle of the main road, which severely constricted traffic. Second, a poor garbage man had been rear-ended by a car. Garbage men in Nepal have a three-wheel bike+cart system that they use to pick up garbage, and his whole cart and been knocked over against the side of another car, driven by a very irritated, wealthy woman. The whole driver's side of the car was plastered with rotting garbage, and the garbage man's cart was minus one wheel (you can imagine his horror as his entire livelihood depends on his garbage cart, and repairs are not cheap). But the sense of community in this country is wonderful: when we stumbled on this scene, there were five Nepali men helping him get his cart disentangled from the car, and clean up the garbage that had spilled out. Not only that, but one Nepali man used the water from the "lake" to clean off the garbage slime from the woman's car before she drove off.
Of course, there are layers and layers of propriety and expectation in the culture that could reveal all this "goodwill" to not be so generous after all, but for now I am still the ignorant Westerner, and I choose to be encouraged by this display kindness.
As many of you know we are in monsoon season. As I was heading to my language teacher's house with my friends and fellow classmates, Klaas and Dineke, we ran into a huge traffic jam on the main road. To start, there was a literal waterfall gushing across an intersecting road, creating a bit of lake in the middle of the main road, which severely constricted traffic. Second, a poor garbage man had been rear-ended by a car. Garbage men in Nepal have a three-wheel bike+cart system that they use to pick up garbage, and his whole cart and been knocked over against the side of another car, driven by a very irritated, wealthy woman. The whole driver's side of the car was plastered with rotting garbage, and the garbage man's cart was minus one wheel (you can imagine his horror as his entire livelihood depends on his garbage cart, and repairs are not cheap). But the sense of community in this country is wonderful: when we stumbled on this scene, there were five Nepali men helping him get his cart disentangled from the car, and clean up the garbage that had spilled out. Not only that, but one Nepali man used the water from the "lake" to clean off the garbage slime from the woman's car before she drove off.
Of course, there are layers and layers of propriety and expectation in the culture that could reveal all this "goodwill" to not be so generous after all, but for now I am still the ignorant Westerner, and I choose to be encouraged by this display kindness.
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