June 14th - Pashupatinath
Perhaps development means getting everything wrong, but in a new way.
Yesterday Nick and I visited Pashupatinath temple, the largest Hindu temple in Kathmandu. Anil, a Nepali friend of Nick’s, and his friend Sharwan guided us. The place was crawling with monkeys, Sadhus (Hindu holy men) and mourning families. The river that runs through the temple grounds, the Holy Bagmati, has served as a final resting place for millennia. We watched as a family carried the cadaver of their relative to the riverbank, washed his feet in the sanctified and polluted water, peeled back the brightly colored cloth that wrapped him and shaved his head. They adorned the corpse with orange flowers and placed it on a pyre. We did not see them burn the body, but it took no skill of imagination to envision. There were no less than four pyre ablaze from the moment we stepped onto the temple grounds.
This was a place Nepalis came to die, and tourists came to take pictures.
Near the grand temple there is a rare and curious sight. Our friends described it as a consequence of modernization, Western values and behaviors seeping into Nepalese culture: a retirement home. Not the type of sterile asylum where we store our fermenting elders in the States, this place had the feel of something ancient and yet, fully remade. The building itself must have been very old, recently refurbished for its modern function. We walked the grounds during a ceremony in which older women were pasting red globs of some floral substance on the foreheads of men. A ceremony and a party, with dancing and chanting and food, this is the way in Nepal. There seemed to be nothing extraordinary about it, especially for the participants. But I was captivated.
“These people have been abandoned by their families. In America you think taking care of your parents is a burden, but here it is a tradition, a responsibility.” - Anil
“It is common for us to live with our parents until we are much older and we take care of our parents when they are old.” - Sharwan
“This is the effect of modernization. Your culture has created places like these.” -Anil
I’ve been having several conversations lately regarding the nature of development in Nepal. Nanda R. Shrestha, those book I’m reading (In the Name of Development, 1997), takes a pretty hard stance. He thinks, or at least thought in 1997, that international development agencies should be counted high on the list of things to blame for the problems currently faced by this country. I think that’s pushing it, but I see his point. International aid has fostered dependence and whatever lip service may be given to words such as “sustainability” there’s a long way to go before many institutions and programs will become self-sustaining. Meanwhile, the impact of globalization is spreading Western values and marginalizing those unprepared or unwilling to adapt to new economic realities.
But 12 years have past since Shrestha wrote. The 10-year-long Maoist insurgency had just begun when his book went to print. Today there’s a global drought in the donor pool for international aid. Even the head of Oxfam recently stated that the organization is struggling to cobble together finances for vital projects. Likewise, Piush, my supervisor at CEDPA, tells me that the number of INGOs in Nepal is heading for a steep drop. In the early 1990s there were something in the neighborhood of 50 INGOs in Nepal, presently there are over 300. And Piush predicts that the bubble is about to burst. Money is one thing, but donors are now also more concerned with results than they had been in years passed. They are demanding that progress, sustainability, empowerment and a hundred other catchphrases grow some teeth.
There’s also some consensus among those I’ve spoken with that the shape of international development has changed a good bit in recent years––USAID and the World Bank seem to be learning and adapting. The Obama administration is giving people in the field hope that their work may actually represent, with some degree of sincerity, the new face of US foreign policy. But the new face of the Peace Corp has been around the block more than once. President Obama recently announced the nomination Aaron Williams, a career International Development specialist from RTI and USAID, to head the Peace Corp. Williams is certainly qualified, but Obama’s commitment to changing US international development policy is yet unproven.
On the motorcycle ride back home, Sharwan gave me some of his take on development:
––Whenever society changes there are winners and losers. You can try to fight it, but you’re only hurting yourself in the end, and it’s not as though everything about “development” (here meaning modernization) is bad.
“If it weren’t for development, we’d still be living in caves.”
––We cannot stop globalization, we cannot stop the inequality it spreads, we cannot prevent traditions from changing, but we can work to manage and minimize these negative consequences.
[This entry has been revised to include information on Aaron Williams]
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