Daal bhat power

Namaste,
In Kathmandu you can buy a t-shirt emblazon with the slogan

"Daal Bhat power, twenty four hour!"

So what is it?  The translation says it is "lentils and rice". 

In fact daal bhat is the staple food of the Nepali people; most eat it twice a day.  Many Nepalis do not feel they have eaten unless they have had daal bhat. The first meal is in the morning before going to the office or to school, the second in the evening.

Daal bhat can be a variety of different concoctions all served together with rice and lentils or, in many households, simply rice and lentils.  The rice is just plain boiled rice. The lentils are cooked with spices in a watery sauce which is poured over the rice.  Often green, brown or black lentils are used, rather than the orange ones we generally use at home.  Rice and lentils are grown on terraces all over the country, and many people grow most of their own food near their home if possible.

In addition, daal bhat will usually be served with a portion of 'tarkari', vegetable curry made with whatever vegetables are in season.  A side dish of meat cooked in a spicy sauce may be added too, or a fried egg or bowl of yogurt for vegetarians.  Green vegetables such as spinach are cooked until soft, and often mustard oil or small seeds are mixed in. This 'saag' is served as a small portion on the side of the plate. 

A spoonful of 'Achaar', pickle, may also added to the plate.  Be careful, this can be very chili hot! (piro in Nepali) but can sometimes be like the lime or mango pickle we can buy in Indian shops in UK.

In restaurants and hotels other extras may be added to the plate; some tiny fried chips, a chapati, some sliced raw carrot and mouli radish or even a poppadom or prawn crackers on top.
A metal plate is often used, as in the photo, and the daal, meat and yogurt will be provided in small bowls for pouring over the rice as you wish.

When travelling long distances by bus there will normally be a stop at a roadside cafe/restaurant for daal bhat. A sort of Nepali motorway services, the food is all ready to serve in vast cauldrons and you move along the table adding portions of whichever dish you want.

Colour and decoration

Namaste.
When I first arrived in Nepal I was struck by the bright colours and decorations on so many things and wrote an early blog about it. I still love the way that Nepalis use colour and find myself taking many photographs showing this.  These do not fit into any particular topic, so this post is a selection of the photos that I like, each with a short explanation of its context.

The dish contains flowers and a rice mixture. We were given a rice tikka on the forehead, a flower in our hair and a glass of rackshi at a special Gurund evening of singing and dancing at which we were guests.

Colour is such an important part of the Hindu religion. The coloured powders, for sale in the centre of the main street in Besisahar before Tihir, are for people to create mandalas outside their homes, to attract the Goddess Laxmi to enter. Some mandalas are intricate and very beautiful.

The marigold garlands are given for welcome and at many important times. These were being sold for honouring animals and people at the festival of Tihir. The purple ones are made of everlasting flowers and are given by girls to their brothers to signify their love for them.

This statue/picture of a Hindu God looks very fierce to me.  He can be found on the wall at Kathmandu Durbar Square.

These wonderful face masks depicting the Hindu Gods are used at Dashain in an ancient village play at Kholcana near Kathmandu.  The play tells the story of one of the Hindu epics, and the masks and parts in the play are passed from one generation of men to the next.








This highly decorated door hides a huge prayer wheel, just visible, at Bouddha, the enormous stupa and Buddhist complex.

  For special occasions Nepali women wear beautifully decorated saris and kurtas. These photos are close-ups of the intricate embroidery in silver and gold thread on two. 

Recently dyed wool hung to dry beside one of the ponds at Bhaktapur, in the Kathmandu Valley.

Colourful rickshaws parked, waiting for passengers in Thamel, Kathmandu.

The kingfisher, who perches on a tree behind my flat, looking for food in the little stream which tumbles down the rice terraces.

And finally, VSO volunteers painting a mural on the wall of the office garden, as part of the official 50th Anniversary celebrations in April 2014.

Winter vegetables

Namaste.

January. Now that the rice has all been harvested, the terraces are bare and brown.  However, most will not be left for long in this state.  Already many terraces, near houses and settlements, have been planted out with vegetables which will grow during the winter months, the cold months; cabbage, cauliflower, onions and spinach/greens can be seen growing in any spare patch of land around the town and in quantity in the terraces outside the town.

In the town fresh vegetables, that have been brought down from the hills, are for sale at the vegetable stalls or from baskets besides the road.  The recognisable ones that grow well and are similar to those available in UK, include cabbage, potatoes, onions, cauliflower and broccoli, peas, green beans and tomatoes. Cauliflower in particular seems to grow very well, and there are some huge ones available - big enough to feed a football team, or play football with. There are many vegetables however that I don’t recognise and will need to get advice about what they are called and how they are cooked. 

In the photo the long white root vegetable is a type of radish, a mouli. They can be eaten raw or cooked. The vegetable that looks like a bumpy/prickly courgette is called a bitter gourd and is used in pickles and veg curries.  It is obviously an acquired taste – sour and very bitter – not to my liking but seems to be popular with Nepali people! 

One variety of green bean tastes similar to French beans – but is very long.  Each one is around 30 to 50 centimetres in length.  They are tender when boiled lightly for a short while. Other beans available at the moment have a red mottled case and only the bean inside, similar in size to a red kidney bean, but again mottled red, is used. 

Tomatoes are available here all year round.  I have seen them growing undercover in handmade shelters, not to protect from the cold, but to shade from the powerful sun and torrential rain, I think.  Green peppers and aubergines are also on sale in a few shops in town, but grow further south where it is hotter I have been told.

In the shops at the moment there are many types of potato.   Usually, mostly for sale are small ones, so fiddly to peel, they are deliciously creamy to taste, and are used often for ‘tarkari’ (vegetable curry).  However, the ‘potato’ I saw on a stall yesterday, (the stall holder told me it was potato), muddy and very large, shaped like a piece of tree root and with a raw texture rather like coconut, I will need to taste, as I’m not convinced it is from the potato family. These are used as special food for one of the festival during January. Apparently it should be grated or chopped finely before being cooked. 

A speciality of the region, ‘jimbo’, a cross between chives and spring onions, and only available in the Himalayan foothills is on sale from the baskets of street sellers at the moment.  This is another vegetable I must try – but first to find out how to cook it! 

There is no need to worry about 'food miles' here; only vegetables that grow in Nepal are available in Besisahar, and on most stalls there are only vegetables that can be carried into the town from the surrounding villages, normally in a basket on someone's back. 

Girls and Boys

Namaste.

The project I am working with has the aim of encouraging more girls to attend school and stay at school until they are 16 and to finish their education.  Although many girls start school, in rural areas they frequently drop out and leave before taking their School Leaving Certificate. If a family can afford it, boys are often sent to private schools whilst the girls go to the local government schools, which frequently do not have a good reputation for high achievement.

Women and girls washing clothes in the river

Nepal is a very patriarchal society.  A boy child is prized, honoured and cherished in many traditional families, whilst the girls are expected to work hard in the home or on the land. Near where I live I see boys playing outside; football, cricket, marbles or even riding a bike – but rarely do I see girls playing.  Many girls are given household chores like cleaning, washing, fetching water or looking after siblings, and these may often leave little time for play or for doing homework.  

In many of the classrooms I visit the girls are much less confident and less assertive than the boys.  Frequently boys and girls sit on opposite sides of the classroom, which makes it very obvious when there is a difference.  

Girls revising for an exam the next day - before going home!

The boys often dominate, loudly calling out answers to the teacher’s questions, reading aloud and taking part in lessons and even demanding that their work be marked before the girls work.  In some lessons I have seen, the teacher talks directly to the boys or asks the boys questions before or rather than the girls.  


After one lesson when I talked about this with the teacher, he told me “The girls would not want to answer anyway, so there is no need to ask them!”  How hard to change these cultural attitudes! Girls want an education and, given the right opportunities, work hard to succeed at school.

Child marriage, although officially illegal in Nepal, still sometimes takes place. The girl may have no say in this, it will have been arranged by her father or parents, sometimes to a man much older than her.  Some poor families say they just cannot afford to keep a daughter at home any longer. At marriage a girl become the possession of her husband and his family.  She must move from her own family home into his, and will be expected to work very hard there at household chores and cooking.  There will be no time to continue her education, no matter how good a student she was. 

Girls, bright and enthusiastic to be at school.

This difference shows in all aspects of society. When walking along pavements in Kathmandu (we don’t have pavements in Besisahar where I live!), if a group of men are walking towards a woman, the expectation is that the woman will step off the pavement into the road to get out of their way.  The traffic in Kathmandu is such that I am not prepared to do this, so I have rebelled against it and just stand still, making the men move around me, which they often look puzzled or cross about.  Recently, I was being served in an office near my flat when two young men walked in.  The female office worker immediately put my forms aside and served the two men before returning to finish serving me!  Fortunately I don’t have a good enough command of Nepali to make a fuss about this – as I would have wanted to!!

The government is committed to encouraging more women to be represented in decision-making roles, both at grass-roots and higher political levels, but this needs to go alongside an increase in women’s confidence to speak out and be heard.  One woman I met recently told me that although she is a member of the School Management Committee, she is rarely able to give her views because men, who talk and are not prepared to listen, dominate the S.M.C. Women must be confident to make their voices heard and men must be more prepared to listen.

Big and Little Sisters working together

These attitudes are changing, especially amongst better-educated adults, but in the rural villages where I work and many adults themselves have not had education, many girls are still treated as if they have no voice.  If all girls completed their education I am sure this would help to change this culture.
This is what the Sisters for Sisters' project is all about!

The situation was summed up very well by one of the Headteachers I work with said "Girls must complete their education so that they become more confident and not down-trodden"

The old trekking route

Namaste.

In an old trekking book, circa 1980, that I bought in a charity shop before I came to Nepal, it talks about the route up the valley to Besisahar from Dumre, which had to be walked as part of the Annapurna Circuit, before the road to Besisahar was built.  This trail was across the river, coming up the opposite side of the valley from the present road. Nowadays most trekkers catch a bus at least as far as Besisahar and often even further up the valley, but in those days there was an extra 50 kilometres to walk just to reach Besisahar.

As it was a beautiful clear Saturday with warm sunshine despite being January, I set out to try to follow the trail down the valley as far as time would allow in a day.  I hoped it still existed and was good to walk. I left Besisahar via a footbridge across the river that I know, and turned right instead of the usual left. 

There was a good track to follow, that undulated up and down the side valleys and over small ridges, always well above the river, the Marsyandi Nadi, a beautiful aquamarine colour from the glacier water it contains. 
























I crossed a couple of pretty streams on stepping-stones and once over a small suspension footbridge.  In places there had been small landslips and the old trail had disappeared, but there was a makeshift path over the rough earth, rocks and debris. This old route is obviously still well used by local people.

Washing hanging like flags in front of this small house.

In places the path went through small settlements, where people smiled and children shouted “Namaste!” or “Hello” and waved.  Men and women of all ages, sitting outside their houses in the sunshine were very curious about me.  “Where was I going?” 

'Where had I come from?” 

“Eklai?” (Was I alone?) 

Even one group of ‘old men’ sitting in the sun, after several similar questions enquired how old I was, and were amused (as I was) to find I was older than most of them! 

On display was the everyday life of simple rural people. The woman doing the family washing at the communal tap, children playing cricket with an old piece of wood for a bat and a round stone for the ball, men ploughing terraces with pairs of buffalo, women collecting fodder for their animals, young girls fetching firewood in their dokkos (cone-shaped baskets carried on their back by a head strap) others carrying dokkos full of manure for the fields.

Dokko shaped piles of manure dotted across the field.

Young women fetching firewood.

Several pairs of men were carrying very long bamboo poles along the track, which were obviously heavy as they had to take frequent rests.  I asked if I could feel the weight – they were heavy.  They invited me to sit down with them and have a rest too.  My language skills were not up to asking them what they were going to do with these poles, although I was curious.

How long? How heavy?  What's it for?

Sometimes the path led through forest and I listened to the chorus from the birds high in the trees.  Bamboo clumps with tall new shoots stretching up toward the sky, contained flocks of small twittering birds.

Part of the trail was below a steep rocky cliff and I watched a pair of eagles riding the thermals, but they were too high to photograph.  A kingfisher, beautifully bright with turquoise, skimmed up a stream and a family of four small brown squirrels scampered across the path and up into the nearby bush where they squealed to each other.

At intervals I could look back up to the snow-capped Annapurna peaks that towered above the valley, the town of Besisahar on a flat plain nestling in the valley is far below them. 

I finished by crossing the river on the long bridge above where it is damed for hydroelectricity. I know this bridge too, as it is the start of the route to two of the schools I visit. Once back on the road I returned to Besisahar by bus.  

What a great way to spend my day off!