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Two Nepalese girls approached my car on the Prithvi Highway, a serpentine sine-wave of impossible switchbacks, on the road to Kathmandu. They looked about six and five-years old, and I probably startled them, when I snapped this photo, probably three feet away, out the window of my Mercedes.
Being the first Nepalese I encountered, I was struck by their nonchalance, native dress, and red Hindu bindi on the forehead of the girl on the right. Little princesses, they both seemed, adorned with exotic jewelry and scarf, and the girl on the right, somehow worldly beyond her years. Compared to the bustle of India, the mountains of Nepal had a feel of calm.
"Ride to Kathmandu?" the man with them communicated, and we made room. I was with various--I guess you would call them--hitch hikers of Western origin that I had met along the trans-Asian trail. Some, I dropped off here; others, I picked up there. Also, Brits, Germans, Dutch, and god knows what. Usually, they would chip in for gas.
I suppose it is natural to gravitate toward other westerners; English-speaking ones, anyway. A cocoon of commonality sometimes helps the commute, as long as one communicates with the natives, enough to absorb some understanding of the human condition and shared sensibilities...culturally reconfigured, as they may be. Little did I know that my next Nepalese passenger would be Nepal's ex-Prime Minister.
First, I dropped the girls off. They directed me to a rickety hotel, where I roomed with my friend, an American just out of the Navy and headed to Australia. That night, we could hear the married couple (who had ridden in the back seat) fighting through thin walls (crying and arguing). This is not what I had driven six thousand miles from Germany for; neither enlightenment nor nirvana, just my friend grumping that he would sure as hell "never" get married.. Some realization. Sometimes, it was a comfort to travel with westerners, although he had a penchant for W.C. Fields, and I had to listen to "my little chickadee!" impersonations for a thousand miles. Surprisingly, a month or two earlier, I had dropped him at the Afghan-Pak border, when I had to go back to Tehran for papers, but found him later, alongside a road in New Delhi. It felt like feathery fate.
Back to the children--At the time, I was observing but not really comprehending everything around me. Looking back at the photos, the girls had seemed pretty healthy and happy. But now I wonder. I read that more than 50,000 children die in the small country of Nepal each year, with malnutrition as the underlying cause. Half the children in Nepal are underweight, and three-fourths of pregnant women are anemic. Life expectancy at birth is 58.95. The outdoor laundry leaves a little to be desired.
Nepal's infant mortality rate is 48 deaths for every 1,000 children, which is deplorable, although better that 64 deaths, like it was in 2002, or 212 deaths in 1960. Nepal has only one doctor per 18,439 people. There are better places for children; the U.S. has an infant mortality rate of 6.3, with 390 people per doctor. In spite of the U.S.'s cutting edge in medical technology, its ranking fell from 12th best in 1960 to 33rd in 2009, which makes its infant mortality rate worse than Cyprus and Slovenia.
