Ben’s Blog

So, five weeks of come-again go-again diarrhoea, extreme tiredness, and generally being at feeling-really-crap’s door, is all the responsibility of a very small, hard-to-diagnose, algae.

When I told my 6 year-old what was living in my guts, he asked why it didn’t just find a lake to live in? It’s a good question, but I’ll mainline the killer antibiotics first and ask questions later.

I’m just back from my second trip to Rukum, in Nepal’s mid-Western hills. (My post on the first visit, “Dancing with Magars”, is here.)

My schedule said:

• advocacy training with partner NGOs; and
• time with staff discussing ways to help empower communities and build more accountable and responsive local governance.

But Rukum likes to put me in interesting situations. This time I was invited off the street to observe, “just for a minute”, a cross-party program launching a campaign against caste-based discrimination and untouchability.

Though explicitly prohibited by law and Nepal’s Interim Constitution, the group of people known as dalits (which means “the oppressed”) still face the stigma and exclusion of untouchability on the basis of their status in the Hindu caste system. (Or at least in the prevailing interpretation of the Hindu caste system.) For some it means that they will never be invited into the home of a higher-caste person, or that no higher-caste person will accept a drink from their hand. It can mean exclusion from and under-representation in schooling, administrative positions and the like. It can mean being locked into a traditional caste-based occupation such as tool-making, tailoring, and so on, with few opportunities to develop new skills and techniques to compete against cheap imports. It can mean being bound in a form of peonage, serving one or more families in exchange for food and small items, rather than wages, in an arrangement that can last generations.

So, bad on pretty much every level. Socially, economically, psycho-socially, politically… just bad.

I was interested to observe the event and my Nepali is up to following a large part of what people say as long as there’s not too much unfamiliar vocab and the speaker doesn’t talk too fast. (Though, on reflection, these conditions were unlikely to have been met at a political event.) However, my chances of remaining an observer started diminishing rapidly when the event organiser came over to ask my name, organisation, and country of origin… Then another chair was placed up on the stage among the invited guests and speakers… Then I was asked (in Nepali) if I would say a few words about the issue and about conditions in my country…

Polite refusals having accomplished precisely nothing I sat on stage ransacking my Nepali vocab and grammar to see what I could say about caste-based discrimination. And managed to give a 3 or 4 minute speech that went something like:

I’m sorry to tell you that there is discrimination in my country, Australia. Sometimes the rich look down on the poor. Sometimes white people discriminate against people with dark skin. Sometimes there is even violence. So there is discrimination. But there is no untouchability. Anyone can take water from the hand of another. Anyone can enter the home of another if invited.*

Caste-based discrimination needs to end in Nepal. If people’s rights are not respected, if caste-based discrimination still exists, then Nepal will not develop.

So, seeing this campaign, I am very happy and supportive. I wish you success in your actions against untouchability. I hope that together you can change society.

*These two lines about receiving water and being welcome in another’s home were greeted with applause. And, Australia, you came off pretty well in the speech, mostly because I don’t know the words for racism, xenophobia and mistreatment of asylum-seekers.