As the title suggests, here are things I don’t get about both Nepali and American cultures:
The Wasps’ Nest
There was a wasps’ nest in the entrance to my house since I’ve been here. When I first got here, it was no bigger than a quarter, and just as my Nepali skills grew, this thing ended up the size of a soccer ball, dangling precariously over my head every day. I decent amount of time wondering how people here get rid of wasps nests. I’m pretty sure in the US there’s a spray or something that you use, and you can call people to remove bees’ nests since they shouldn’t be killed. I seriously considered like getting a big bag and taking it down or something until the thought of being a headline in some State Dept newsletter — Fulbright Scholar, 24, Dies of Million Wasp Stings — deterred me.
One day, I come home, and the wasps’ nest is gone. There’s nothing but a small stain on the ceiling to mark its former presence. I asked my friends and family where the wasps went, and they all just shrugged and said, “this evening, the wasps just all swarmed around the hive and carried it off into the distance. The hive’s living in a new village now.” And then they’d all point to the horizon. While that is a seriously awesome image, it obviously isn’t what happened. In fact, I found the nest (devoid of wasps) in the trash a few days later. Even when I showed people, they assured me it was something else and that the wasps had just happily moved to a different village, one in the valley below.
There are all sorts of situations like this where I’m just genuinely curious, and for some reason, they don’t want me to know the real story.
Crime Scenes
The longer I’ve been here, the more I start to not understand about my own culture. For example: what’s up with our lack of mosquito nets? It never crossed my mind to use a mosquito net before I came to Nepal, but now that I have one, I can’t imagine not using it. Sometimes when I wake up, there’s little blood spatters on it. Just floating half way up, these little red-colored dots. I have no idea how they get there – Big bugs fighting to the death? The rat chomping on lizards above my head? Some of the paint from the ceiling mysteriously dripping down? Whether in the US or abroad, I don’t want no insects’ blood on me!
I’ve asked this to my fellow Fulbrighters, and they’ve assured me that American houses have a clear separation of indoor and outdoor, but I just have a hard time imagining what a clearly defined indoor space looks like anymore. After all, I’ve had my share of scary looking spiders, silverfish thingies, and creepy crawlers in my home in the US. I don’t want them in my bed. So, I really don’t understand why we don’t use mosquito nets.
Stools
Like any foreigner living in a country with unsafe water, I occasionally am sick, or have “bathroom issues.” Whenever this happens, everyone for a thousand miles knows. Strangers will stop me on the street a week later to ask if my diarrhea is still watery or if it’s starting to be solid. They’ll ask about the color. They’ll ask about the frequency.
I am not used to that information being widely shared and discussed. Clearly a big personal failing on my part.
Hairy Me
I haven’t shaved in over a year. Forgive me for not wanting to stand in the icy water, potentially getting hypothermia, just to shave my legs. Also, it isn’t a thing here. All the women were horrified when I told them. When I first got here, I hated how my legs looked. After I was bitten by the feral dog, I was horribly embarrassed every time I showed the doctors and nurses my hairy legs. But sometime around the three month mark, I stopped caring. Sometime around the six month mark, I started liking my hairy legs. Now, shaving just seems so strange. It really doesn’t seem natural (and in fact modern shaving habits of women were started by a marketing campaign to sell razors to women, since many men were off fighting WWII and thus not buying them. I can see why some women want hairless legs, and that’s great, but I don’t understand the stigma against people who don’t. I don’t understand why we have to shame fellow humans (even subtly) who don’t conform to our contrived beauty standards.
What time is it?
I’ve never gotten an accurate time here, ever. It doesn’t matter who it’s from; a kid, an old lady, a hungry leopard, they’re all going to lie to you. People claim they got to Kathmandu in two hours (physically impossible unless they went by helicopter), or that it takes an hour to walk to the next village (it takes 15 minutes including stopping for a tea break). One day, I was trekking with friends and we kept asking how far it was to our destination. Every time we asked, we were told an hour. Five hours later, we asked one last person, and he again said one hour. We rounded the corner, and there was the village. He said it would take an hour to walk maybe 100 feet.
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