Butterflies

“To give, this can be a dangerous thing, if we only give! By giving and giving only, you swallow man. He then only has one worry: to ask." Sister Emmanuelle in “J'ai 100 ans et je voudrais vous dire” (I am 100 years old and I wanted to tell you)

"I've seen you for a while around here. How long are you doing here?" I ask Brian after a few minutes of silence sitting next to him on the chia shop steps.

"Oh, I don't know, I'll see what happens. I just can't figure what exactly we're doing time for though."

We laugh. It's the first time I speak with Brian. I had seen him sitting on the street drinking chia for a couple of weeks, every time I walked Z street, a popular Kathmandu street going from Thamel, the busy tourist shopping and bar area to Pakhnajol, a more quiet area, just outside Thamel. In his 50's, his clothes never changed. Army pants, a brown shirt and a cow boy hat. I thought that eventually, I'd have to stop by and sit to have chia with such a character. That day I finally did, which lead to a series of mind stimulating conversations.

Mind stimulation. A thing greatly appreciated, especially when the mind is not constantly bombarded by the stimuli that TV, radio and other sources of information can offer. The average foreigner in Kathmandu doesn't do much time in this dusty city. A nice conversation with full sentences containing proper grammar takes a whole another value here. Like a gold nugget for the mind, it seems to feed the soul as it can wake up a sleepy brain activity from Himalayan slumber.

For 20 years, Brian has been teaching English and doing various networking jobs for big companies around Asia.

"As a man, it's impossible for me to get aroused by most Asian women of developing countries. It would be pedophilia, they are like kids, each a xerox of the other." he says one day as we discuss my relationship with Bikas, my nepale boyfriend for the last year and a half.

"Have you ever seen a mixed relationship work?" I ask.

"Very few. Usually it last a few years and then finish. Except if it's an Asian woman and a western man. That can work. But an Asian man and a western woman almost never works. The western woman is too strong and doesn't bend to the man as easily as an Asian woman bends to the man. The Asian woman is more submissive than the western woman."

In Kathmandu, people coming and going very fast, it is a pleasure to find some familiar faces day after day. So, we sit when we cross each other, and enjoy conversations watching life pass on Z street. In front of us, the street kids go through giant bags of garbage in which a few of them could fit. At night, the kids sniff glue, burying their dirty faces in plastic bags.

By age 15, the kids will probably be dead, or involved in crime if not already in prison. By age 15, their nervous system is already melted into a puddle of neurons by the glue that takes away their loneliness and puts them to sleep every night. The truth is that if they are not taken out of their environment while they are very young, they have almost no chance to make it.

The fresh tourist, still naive and full of humanitarian TV adds notions, gives them cookies or whatever treats. The kids get a treat for a minute, and think that if they beg to foreigners they'll get food. The cookies like a carrot in front of a stick puts them even deeper in a state of assistance, as well as making the tourist feel better and far superior about itself.

"How do you see a country like Nepal develop in this age of globalization and all that it brings?" I ask one day.
"Oh, it won't change. Nothing will ever change here. It can not, they don't upgrade like we do in the west." While others say that the country is falling apart, some say it’s how it’s always been and that’s how it always will be.

Meeting many volunteers, who come here with what some would call good intentions, I am forced to wander about the very nature of what we call "humanitarian help". What is it exactly we are doing when we say we "help" another?

Nepal's revenue is 60% foreign help. Regularly in the newspaper, one can read an article about the millions being offered by such and such country for "communication development", "infrastructure improvement" and other such bureaucratic words. Where do those millions and millions go? One has to wander when one sees the difficulties of daily life in Nepal. The millions sure don’t go to the people who need it, so where do they go?

Every year, thousands and thousands of tourists come to do "volunteer work" in one of the too many NGO's and various caritative associations found in Nepal. Orphanages being a large majority of the NGO's work. The "volunteers" not only pay for a plane ticket, a visa now more expensive than most Asian countries, but also pay for room and board. Room and board which doesn't really cost anything to a household or a village since there are plenty of empty rooms or houses, and a dhal bat is only a little more rice and dhal.

Their work should not be called "volunteer", since last time I looked in the dictionary the word means that one gives work free of cost. Actually, the word "volunteer" has now been made into a legal status by NGO’s, which provides a plane ticket to the designated country of a mission, cost of living while in mission, as well as other benefits. The word "volunteer" used everywhere in Nepal for example, should therefore be changed into a more appropriate word.

At idealist.org you can pay 400 dollars and more every months to be such a volunteer!! That’s an expensive grain of rice and a perfect example of corruption: http://www.idealist.org/if/i/en/av/VolunteerOpportunity/133104-258

If one stops a minute and looks at the reality of the work done by most of those NGO's, one should see that the given time and money to such organizations is too often not beneficial to anyone, but the heads of the NGO's themselves, as well as paying the "guilt tax" of the naïve volunteers and workers when one visits materially poorer countries. The "guilt tax" consists in volunteering a couple of weeks or more in a NGO’s, the tax taking away the guilt felt while facing the material poverty of countries, then being able to go spend large amounts of money to trekking the Himalayas, bungee jumping and other such luxuries. The nice volunteers can then go home with pride with stories of the horrible conditions in which they lived and the feeling that their action was a positive one. Yet, those same concerned and caring people would walk next to any bum in a western city, with a thought of disgust for the suffering human behind the dirty clothes and sad faces, or even worth without even the thought at all.

In many orphanages, the volunteers simply spend time with the kids, bringing whatever activities they can think of. Some orphanages even bring fictitious "orphans", just to have more kids to appeal to the naive foreigners. Many of those orphans being the result of an entire religious and cultural problems, the real issue that should be looked at is the system which creates those orphans. A large number of those orphans are the results of Maoists activity and of broken couples, when the mother has to remarry and the new family does not want to have another mouth to feed. Many families even put their child in such orphanages because they simply can not take care of them. The source of the problem here becomes the lack of education of women, their financial dependency on men, and their constant slave positions as baby factories.

A new fashion in so called eco tourism are "organic farms", some of them charging quite a bit of money to stay on the farm and work on the land. The very word "organic" is of course a lie, when we consider that most of such farms use genetically modified seeds, and the neighbor uses chemical fertilizer brought in by India or other "helping" countries which of course leeks to any land touching the contaminated land. Does paying over priced fees to the farms truly helps the farms to develop in a healthy manner? No, instead it gives the farmer the feeling that he’s better of building a shack in which to welcome some tourists, asking for over priced fees, than to work on the land.

If, you are interested in working on such a farm and learning about agriculture, check out the WOOF program, which doesn’t ask such fees, and therefore doesn’t give wrong notions to the farmers.

If one studies such "humanitarian" actions across the world, one is forced to think that something is just not quite right. The help which materially rich nation offers to materially poorer nations is not a help at all, but on the opposite puts those countries in an even deeper hole than they already are in.

The so called help is making assisted nations, in which the people think that they can keep on going in such ways because there are enough naive and well intentioned westerners who will come and pay money for having a few months of exotic fun. Paying over priced for anything, also develops in the less honest men, a feeling that they can be even more dishonest. Since the tourist is an idiot, why not constantly take a bit extra from him? As in many countries, here, there is the tourist price and there is the local price. The naive tourist contributes to creating thieves out of men and women who don’t have enough courage to remain honest regardless of the situation.
Let’s get real with what we are really doing. Very often the notions of caring are just covering the fact that we want to have some fun, some wild sex (NGO’s contributing greatly to sex tourism), and we simply seek some quick adventures which would alleviate the boredom of our materially comfortable lives, at least for a moment .

When I speak with such volunteers, who still believe that their days spent on an "organic farm" or in an orphanage really does change things for the better, I ask them honestly what they understand in the word "helping"? There is nothing wrong with wanting to have fun in an exotic country, and maybe do some positive work with a few. But one has to remain really honest with what their given time and money will achieve. If one truly wants to "help", then one should be extremely careful to use a platform where the time and money spend to "help" should be used. If truly one wants to "help", one should find a place where resources should be used at their maximum. If not, then it's ok if one simply wants to have fun and enjoy time. But don't go home all proud thinking that you truly helped, because you might have only helped the locals to make them more dependent on others "help".

Instead you might have contributed to this great humanitarian genocide that a majority of the "help" out there really is.

"What about the small tribes and ethnic cultures around the world that are disappearing? We have to do something about that. We have to preserve them." says Florine, a French woman reporting on Medecin du Monde's activities in Nepal.

"Why?" I ask back. "This attitude might just be a lost cause, a form of romantism" I go on.

As she looks at me with a certain disgust at my words I go on:"the only way to truly preserve an indigenous culture is by not touching them or their land. By the time you do any intervention, you are changing their traditional ways of life. The only way to "save them", is to put them in guarded zoos. So, ok, let's keep all the remaining indigenous people in zoos. That's a good idea."

Maybe, they already have such zoos. If you look at the regulations and the official park menus in the trekking areas such as the Annapurna and other national parks, it’s too easy to see the effects of the tourists route on the local population.

The pro humanitarian help, would use arguments for the need to develop the less materially developed countries.

Why? Who does this development benefit really? Who does it benefit to displace, for example, jungle Indians in the Yucatan (Mexico), place them in concrete boxes with "garbage disposal and running water", and to in exchange make them work the same hours than western man works, building 5 star hotels which the Indians, if they are really lucky can wash dishes in? By displacing them from their jungle habitat, and making them work under the blazing sun at hours and a pace which they would never naturally work, the humanitarian help is instead killing their ancestral ways. The German man who was proud to show me this "humanitarian" project when I was beginning to travel at age 16 called it "help". It is not help, it is slave work, as well as the genocide of an entire culture.

Another so called benefit of help is that it brings much needed attention to world wide health crisis and disease spreading. This is not caring for another, it is thinking about one's own self. If the materially richer nations could care so much for others, why are they polluting their food productions as well as the entire planet? Something just doesn't work in the logic of wanting to help others when a nation can not even take care of it's own problems. The truth about many pro humanitarian arguments is that they are simply thinking about saving their own asses, projecting their fears on poorer nations, and making profit of it at the same time. Guided by ridiculous future possible statistics produced by dumb machines controlled by programmers which for the most part have never gotten out of their office, they dare calling it "help".

Develop more and more, like mad aunts, building empires doomed to fall is not help, it is at the least stupidity and at the worth selfishness.

"One of the problems with humanitarian help is that the rich countries come where they were not asked anything, and start projects which they usually leave after 3 or 4 years. Help should be given where people have at least asked for it and shown that they are capable of enough organization to ask for the needed help" says Pierre a French man who worked in China and Africa on building projects, telling me about his Master degree at University for which he wrote a paper mentioning the changes that could be brought into the faulty humanitarian work notions.

The late monsoon rains slowly starting, the tourists become less and less with each drop of water falling. The water cools down everything, clearing up the sky and painting it shiny blue again. A nice change after the heat wave of June.

As I write in the little brick and metal roof room I stay in, the familiar sound of the steam rice cooker comes up from the kitchen next door. Every day, at the same times, morning and evening, it's thali mantra. The 16 year old boy cooks while listening to traditional nepale music. The same tunes playing day after day, the boy singing along, the song remains the same, the food remains the same, nothing changes.

Every afternoon, he sits in the garden and copies pages after pages of basic computer information for the computer class he is taking. The pages of his notebook filled up with "to turn on computer, press on", "to open folder, click folder", "to copy image press copy". Pages and pages of the same lines being repeated over and over again, and the boy never sat in front of a computer yet. Thanks to one of the thousands of "Technical education for a better future" schools that can be seen in Nepal, the boy can spend his hard earned money to copy pages concerning a tool he has very little chances of ever getting close to. If nothing else, he gets to go to class and get some homework to do, a nice change and a little more stimulation that his daily minimal menu cooking work. If nothing else, he can dream about another type of future for himself, with chances of it happening being extremely minimal…. at least in this life.

Humanitarian help is quite a new concept, as such it will keep on changing.

If truly we want to help, let's not forget that we can stay in our own country, regardless of the nation we live in, and find ways to help. No need to go to a village in a lost part of the planet if one truly wants to help. Actually the very travelling to such places is affecting the locals, even if our intention is to "preserve". As in physics, included in the very act to make an experience, the tester is affecting the results of the given experiment.

If truly you want to "help", your time and money might be more beneficial at your home. When is the last time you gave some extra time to a schooled kid who needs help, or worked in a soup kitchen in a city near you to feed those in need of a hot meal?

One thing is for sure is that paying the "guilt tax" does way more harm than it helps. Paying the guilt tax makes you just as bad as the Brahmans and other high castes having all advantages in keeping others down in order to create false feelings of superiority.

"You have too much wind. Everything can travel in you too easily" says the Tibetan doctor a couple of months ago when I went to get medication after a pneumonia that put me down for a month."You also think too much" he adds as I ask what this wind means exactly."I know" I said, "since I have been a kid people tell me that."
"It's not the thinking part that is wrong" he replies" but maybe you could try to think about butterflies instead of other things."

"ok, I'll try. Thank you doctor."

To take a break from the busy Kathmandu life, we go plant pear trees with UPF, we go spend some time at Rainbow Sisters Farm. To think of butterflies, following doctors orders, in the garden I paint a Medicine Buddha holding a Sacred Heart to keep going with the series started in Goa, we get a new tattoo shop in a popular Thamel restaurant club, I get deeper in the knots of macramé jewelry.

The butterflies keep on buttering the flowers, pollinating and mutating from genetic code to another... Conversations fly like mosquitoes, the rain covering the streets with mud and forcing us to face our solitude, all those things making travelling the amazing adventure it can be. Daydreaming with the genetically modified butterflies, I dream of zoos and skyscrapers. I dream of the day when some humanitarian help will be available for all those who want to help and save the world.

The butterflies and world wide baba stories, the sun shining in the blue sky after the rain, the peanuts seller on the streets. What more to ask really.... It's all perfect for the very reason that it seems to exist.

Links:

Part one of "saving the world" and other selfish thoughts here: http://www.fuzzytravel.com/manue/5968-save-world.html

If you still want to waste money in an orphanage in Nepal, Umbrella foundation is only 175 a week to volunteer you time: www.umbrellanepal.org

wwoof.org/

Sœur_Emmanuelle