by Sanjena Sathian:
I’m working in development here in Nepal, and working in development necessarily means being really, really careful. Cultural sensitivity is paramount, and no matter how much you see a practice you find morally repugnant — like women of the higher caste not letting the low caste women into the kitchen, for instance — you can’t just stomp your foot and demand that it change. This I knew. I’ve been warned plenty by expats all around Kathmandu who have come here with their own dreams of human rights, liberty and equality, who’ve taken the totally American stance of rooting for the underdog and trying to give a voice to the Other.
I assumed that because I understand a little more about women in the east than most Westerners, I wouldn’t be one of those travelers. I don’t think I’m liberating anyone by traipsing into Nepal in spandex shorts and a sports bra and running through the streets. I instead wear salwar kameez, a long top and flowing pants, or a kurta top over jeans. (See Globalist Turkey on “conservative chic”: http://globalistturkey.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/covering-up/). I feel that I am respecting the values of the place I’m in, that my desire to see it improved and changed is not incompatible with its inherent values.
That’s not what some would have me think.
In one of my many meetings with women’s equality groups around the Kathmandu valley yesterday, one NGO representative told me that he supported women’s equality in Nepal — but not in the way the West has seen it. Not with all its “bra burning” and “individualism,” he said. In the West, people go their own way, he went on — and if an individual is in trouble, no one turns to help. In Nepal, the community is the people’s greatest strength.
I actually couldn’t comprehend the connection between what he was saying. What did a community being strong have to do with not liberating women “too much?” I pressed and pressed, and got no response that clarified anything for me. That’s when I realized I wasn’t going to get one. Communities are strong here, and it’s impossible to deny the warmth you feel when entering a Nepali family’s home; it’s a warmth they share willingly with outsiders. But built into many of those communities is a patriarchal family structure, and there is a difference, according to many people, between women as equal partners in a household and women abandoning the household altogether, leaving as individuals to make it on their own the way men are allowed to do as late as their thirties. Slowly, slowly, this family structure is starting to erode. Widowed women are treated better today than they ever used to be while girls in rural areas are allowed to go to school past 5th grade and sometimes even to universities, and the culture really is changing. But it’s frustrating to wait for the slow tide of societal change, thinking I can jump in and make a much bigger splash on my own.
A small part of me wants to storm a village and grab all the women away from their stoves and carry them back to Yale with me, to throw education and liberty at them and demand that they see it the way I do. The smarter part of me knows I should step carefully and quietly into rural Ilam, where I’m going later this week for the next seven weeks, and listen to what the women there tell me. It’s easier than I thought to slip into crusader mode.