Category Archives: family

The wisdom of a Nepali street dog

Stray dogs happily sleeping the day away ©Donatella Lorch

I had noticed her only in passing. On any given day there can be as many as 10 stray dogs moving up and down a 40-meter stretch of my street but I usually just pay attention to the two trouble makers that try to intimidate my Rhodesian Ridgeback when I take him out for a walk. The others either sit and watch or completely ignore our temporary presence.

Kathmandu's 20,000 stray dog are an integer; part of the city ©Donatella Lorch

Kathmandu’s 20,000 stray dog are an integral part of the city ©Donatella Lorch

Recently, a local crowd caught my attention, hovering over a dog lying and whimpering in an open sewage ditch, unable to move. A car had hit her, I was told, and she was incapable of walking or standing up.

Living in Kathmandu, an interaction with a stray dog is inevitable. There are, after all, more than 20,000 of them in the Valley’s tri-city area. When I first moved here a year ago, I lumped them all together into one large category: destitute, miserably hungry, unloved, unhappy and most critically, unvaccinated and un-neutered. Rabies is present throughout Nepal and Lucas, my nine-year-old son, knows never to reach out and pet a stray dog. Nepalis in general coexist with the strays, feeding them scraps, letting them hang out on their stoops, but the dogs are not family pets and the Nepalis do not care for them. On the dark side, I’ve seen dogs kicked and abused. I’ve seen little kids garrot a puppy and drag him around for fun. Some dogs, starving or maimed, grovel for leftovers from the stronger strays.

Raksi was lying in a ditch whimpering and unable to move. ©Donatella Lorch

My Nepali neighbors hovered over the dog and attempted to feed and give her water, but she was in pain and intensely afraid. In Kathmandu, injured stray dogs are left to their fate, even if it means days of suffering. But I couldn’t walk away. At the same time, I was hesitant to interfere. In the back of my head I was replaying a line that my producer at NBC News would tell me regularly: “Dony, you can’t play God.”

A mobile vet injected her with anesthetic. ©Donatella Lorch

Perhaps, I reasoned, I could make her death more peaceful if in fact she was badly injured. I couldn’t move her so I called the local mobile vet. Though Kathmandu is Nepal’s largest city, it is home to all types of farm animals, and vets also treat cows, buffalo, goats, sheep and elephants. After some time, two young men arrived on a motorcycle, pulled out a syringe and anesthetized the dog. They packed her in a cardboard crate, placed her between them on the bike and drove off to their roadside two-room clinic to X-ray the injury. I followed in my car.

The mobile vets packed her in a crate © Donatella Lorch

The dog had only tissue damage, but she needed a week of daily steroid, antibiotic and pain killer shots. This meant keeping her virtually immobile in the vet’s small cage, recovering for a week. If she was then immediately released back on the street, her chances of survival were slim. By then, it had become clear to me that I had inherited a stray and its hospital bill. She had also at some point been blinded by a stick or rod in her left eye, so before I changed my mind, I added in drops for the infected eye as well as rabies, distemper and paro-virus shots. Lucas named her Rexi. The Nepalis, having some difficulty in pronouncing Rexi, renamed her Raksi – after the local moonshine.

For the past year, in my morning runs and commutes to school, I have studied the multi-layered social interactions and relationships between Kathmandu canines and the world of humans. The Nepalis who have dogs as pets (often white, furiously yapping, furry Spitzes) keep them indoors or on their rooftops. Some people tie their guard dogs on such short chains outside their houses they can barely lie down.

Raksi’d first efforts at standing up. © Donatella Lorch

The vast majority of strays, like Raksi, are community dogs that live their lives outside in a self-delineated territory of a couple of city blocks. They drink from the open drainage ditches that often double as sewers, and beg–always patient, unobtrusive and even elegant–from store fronts and especially from the ubiquitous one-room butcher shacks. They are mostly thin and dirty though some are strikingly handsome. Raksi had a thick black and brown coat and impressively healthy white teeth. Some are social and wag hello, others are terrified when I walk by and on rare occasions there will be one that snarls or barks. In this city of massive and aggressive traffic, a week never goes by without seeing at least a couple of dogs lying on a road, killed by a vehicle. Sometimes the animal lies there for days before being removed.

Kathmandu dogs are nocturnal, and their baying, howling, snarling, yelping and ululating barks punctuate my night. Silence only descends briefly between 4am and dawn. In the winter, the cold takes the weak. In the dry, hot months, thirst kills. Puppies have a particularly high death rate. Wounds from nighttime fights fester. I never cease to be amazed by the dogs daytime ability to sleep — absolutely anywhere — though they love to spread out in the middle of roads, oblivious of honking trucks or speeding motorcycles. During my weekly runs, I’ve taken to greeting the strays on my route. Occasionally one or two will join me for a stretch of road.

Within two days of moving in, Raksi was walking around our garden. ©Donatella Lorch

After her stay at the vet, we took Raksi to our house to recover. Once in our home, she stayed in a makeshift corrugated iron shack with cardboard and a towel as a bed. My dog, Biko, immediately disapproved of Raksi’s presence and not only ignored her but me as well. After a day, she began to limp around cautiously, and then soon was wandering around the garden, sleeping in our garage and trying to find ways to enter our house. Gentle and courteous, she wagged up a fury whenever she saw anybody, circling her head high so as to catch us with her good eye. I began to worry that she would never leave. I knew with each passing day, I was falling for her too.

At the end of the first week, as Lucas and I walked one morning onto the main road, Raksi followed. She went to sit facing us on a mound of half-burned blue and pink plastic garbage bags. Lucas tried to woo her back through our gate with her favorite dog bones and a bowl of milk, but she sat there sphinx-like and dignified and finally just turned, crossed the road and disappeared down a narrow alley.

Lucas went to school in tears that day. He thought that he had lost a friend. But Raksi didn’t really move away; she moved back to where she always had been—on the streets in our immediate neighborhood. Since then we have seen her every day, sometimes in front of our gate or on the concrete landing in front of the local tailor shop next door, even as far away as across the main road by the green grocers. I see her sleeping, surrounded by her many companions. She’ll get up and limp over to sniff a newcomer, warning him off with a bark. Her favorite spot is the sand pyramid on the construction site opposite our place. She has always greeted us with utter delight and wagging tail, dog-tracking towards us with a huge grin, one black ear perked, the other flopping.

Lucas visit Raksi on her street side home where she lives with half a dozen other stray dogs. ©Donatella Lorch

I like to think that this is her way of telling me that she is okay. The dog rescue organizations in Kathmandu had warned me that there was virtually no chance of finding her a home and that if a foreigner adopted her (the most likely possibility) he or she would probably leave Raksi behind when leaving Nepal. If she was healthy, the street was the best place for her.

I still grapple with all I have learned from Raksi. When I saw street life as misery, why did I automatically believe she thought the same? Why did I assume my joy was her joy? I thought she was like my Ridgeback, an obsessively loyal animal whose idea of home was lying by my side. Biko won’t even smell the street garbage that is Raksi’s food. But it’s obvious to me that Raksi, like so many other dogs here, is only at home in her pack. She and several other dogs move, eat, sleep together. She has the freedom to roam. She perks up with the chaos of trucks and honking horns and it also lulls her to sleep, lying inches away from the paved road. She likes to lie with her nose on the edge of the open sewer. And though she greets me effusively, when I see her, one thing is clear: This is her world.

Where ancient rituals rule in modern times — ‘Tis always the season!

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Growing up in New York, I rarely associated religious festivals with a national or even a city holiday, though occasionally alternate side of the street parking was suspended – to my father’s delight.

Half way around the world, Nepal has taken the idea of religious festivities to another level. Beginning in late August and continuing until the end of October, religious festivals follow each other like tumbling dominoes, occasionally bridged by government holidays. The festivals can last a day or a more than a week. Parking, though, is not an issue in Kathmandu, a capital where parallel parking has yet to be discovered and the rule on the hair-raising narrow roads seems to be: “Never give way.”

Fires are often part of religious rituals as these impromptu ones along a procession route. © Donatella Lorch

It is a season when the complexities of Nepali society seem to surf above the capital’s physical chaos, pollution, political disorder and venality. The ties to yore, to myth, to custom and to religion may be a matter of worship or just a question of habit or a mere acquiescence to an insistent mother-in-law. In any case, Nepal’s festivals are not a matter that can be ignored.

Depending on how you look at it, life in Kathmandu either slows down as stores and offices close or it hums with an entirely different undercurrent. There are different colors, smells, noises. Traffic jams change locations. In Nepal, the kaleidoscope of Newar, Tamang, Chhetri, Brahmin and other holy days challenge the most ardent ritualists, who consult multiple types of calendars not only to stay connected with the outside world but also to follow the local customs. Most of the calendars are based on a lunar cycle, so every year, schools, offices and government nimbly have to readjust their schedules. To keep everyone on their toes, some holidays rely on astrologers.

The land where Puja is intertwined in every aspect of daily life.©Donatella Lorch

In Nepal, Puja is intertwined in every aspect of daily life.©Donatella Lorch

This year, the season began on August 10^th, with Janai Purnima, when Brahmins and Chhetri communities go visit their guru to have their sacred thread changed. For good measure, there are those who add on a dip in a local river. Just a day later, on the 11^th is Gaijatra or Cow Festival, a huge event in the Kathmandu Valley, when you decorate your cow or one of the many stray bovines in your neighborhood and join the dancing, singing parades. Some choose to wear cow head-gear. It is meant to pave the way towards heaven for any relative that has died that year. As the end of the month nears, there is Father’s day and close by the day when Hindu priests give (or more precisely sell) the faithful some ‘Kush grass’ so that Vishnu will live in their home for the coming year.

On Teej, women queue on long lines to worship at temples all over the Kathmandu Valley and beyond. ©Donatella Lorch

Some festivals are all-inclusive, others pick their ethnic group, pointing in numbers to the changing ethnic powers in the Kathmandu Valley. Take Teej, which is followed by Chhetris and Brahmins but not by the Newars, the area’s original inhabitants. If color is a sign, then the Newars are far from being the majority they once were.

For the five days of Teej, observant women wear red saris, turning the entire valley into a red sea. The government closes down the roads in one of the busiest sections of Kathmandu so that thousands of red clad women can worship at Pashupatinath, one of the holiest Shiva shrines in the world. Red saris are scrunched against the windows of overloaded public buses or billow elegantly in an Isadora Duncan sort of way on the back of motorcycles. Teej is billed as a woman’s festival – but it is really about the men, for it is a time when a woman either prays for the well-being of her husband or, if she not already married, for a husband-to-be.

If a woman is very traditional, she will fast and she will also bathe her husband’s legs and drink the run-off water. This has some of my women friends in the States decrying marital abuse. But watching these red saris dancing in front of temples, standing and chattering on endless lines with their girlfriends and daughters, puja (offerings) and smart phones in hand, all bedecked in traditional gold jewelry, it is clear that, for them, Teej is not only about bonding but also about a great escape from endless daily chores and demanding husbands. It’s a time of year when gold prices in Kathmandu skyrocket. I’m inclined to believe that if you acquire new jewelry and a new sari, and spend five days with your friends, worshipping a husband is a fair exchange.

Women in traditional "wedding day" saris are scrunched on buses returning from worshipping at Pashupatinath, a World Heritage Site. ©Donatella Lorch

Women in traditional “wedding day” saris are scrunched on buses returning from worshipping at Pashupatinath, one of the world’s holiest Shiva shrines. ©Donatella Lorch

The festivities don’t end with Teej. A short break afterwards, there is an eight-day Indra festival in Kathmandu. More masked dancers and drums in procession with the Kumari Devi, or ‘Living Goddess,’ blocking more traffic. And then Nepal’s most universal and longest festival – Dashain – begins and continues for about 15 days. This year it falls at the very end of September. On the surface Dashain is a celebration of the victory of gods and goddesses over demons or of good over evil, but between the prayers, it is mostly a celebration of family and community. Flights into Nepal have already been booked for weeks now. Nepali migrant workers in the Middle East borrow money to return home, others fly in from the U.S. and Europe. Kathmandu empties out as families return to their ancestral villages spending long hours on buses and often walking the last bit to grandma’s old mud- wattle or stone house. Aside from hotels and a few restaurants in the tourist neighborhoods, Kathmandu shuts down. The sky is a jumble of kites maneuvred by young kids on rooftops. The chaotic traffic jams and the smog melt away.

This is a time of sacrifice – animal sacrifice that is. My friend Keshav, has been fattening his mutton for three years just for this year’s holiday. On October 1st this year, the day will begin with the army’s ritual throat-slitting of scores of buffaloes and then everyone has the go ahead to kill and feast on their own buffalo or goats and the drain-less roads will be covered in blood. Even if you live in an apartment, there is pressure to buy and butcher your own animal.

Nightime poetry during Tihar in Patan’s old city. ©Donatella Lorch

My favorite festival is none of these, but comes a bit later. After the dancing, chanting, techno-filled boom-blasted nights of Teej, just passed, I look forward to Tihar, the festival of lights, at the end of October. If poetry can transcend words, it is found at night in Patan’s old city. Every household creates on their road-side stoop mandalas of rice and painted flour lit by butter lamps. The narrow roads cornered by ancient temples are full of families strolling or going to prayer in the flittering, smoky lamplight. If there are no power cuts (and the government goes out of its way to avoid them during Tihar), cascades of Christmas lights decorate the taller buildings. Of course, modern times intrude. On Tihar, it is traditionally auspicious to buy metal; these days that means buying electronics, and so phones, televisions and stereos sell briskly.

I too turned red – briefly. My dog, Biko, was just a prop. ©Bimla Shiwakoti

Luckily, when it is all over, I won’t suffer from withdrawal. There are of course many more festivals during the year but in the meantime I still have my neighborhood Hindu priest to remind me I live in Kathmandu. Without fail, 365 days a year, he starts clanking his bell to wake Shiva at 5:15AM. I lie in bed, counting the 25 to 31 reverberating sharp and hard rings occasionally enhanced with some megaphone chants. When I moved here a year ago, the head-thudding noise forced me up and out of bed but these days, it has a soothing quality, alternating with the baying packs of neighborhood stray dogs and the coo-ing pigeons on my windowsill. I roll over, a smile on my face, knowing that the ancient is still there to guard the new day.

Dhaka to Kathmandu — A different commute

“Way to Massacre Place” – We know the Where. Please fill in the Who, What, Why

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The Narayanhiti Palace, now a museum and a former residence of Nepali kings. ©Donatella Lorch

The sign is nondescript and small. For my nine-year-old son, it is the first tantalizing hint of what lies ahead. “Way to Massacre Place,” it declares, an arrow pointing right, followed a few meters beyond by “Location of Royal Palace Massacre,” in case somehow visitors manage to deviate from the one-way path guarded by an armed soldier. Personally, I was already having an Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole moment. This was my second visit – a palace massacre recidivist – scribbling notes on a wrinkled sheet of paper, as all visitors have to surrender their bags, their cameras and their phones before entering.

In Nepal, an absolute monarchy not that long ago, the 2001 royal massacre is the stuff of legends. A large crowd of Nepalis queue regularly in front of the elegant metal gate of the Narayanhiti Palace, now a museum, but until 2001 the primary residence of Nepal’s kings. It does not seem to have the same magnetism for foreign tourists, even though it is walking distance from Thamel, the humming hub for all things touristy.

On June 1, 2001 (according to the official version), King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, 55, considered to be an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, was gunned down during a family dinner party here by his 30-year-old son, Crown Prince Dipendra. In swift succession, Dipendra, dressed in camouflage and armed with an M-16 and a collection of various deadly automatic weapons, killed nine family members, including his mother, brother and sister. He then turned the gun on himself. He lived long enough after he shot himself to be declared king–but as he lay dying the 240-year-old monarchy was dying as well. In 2008, Birendra’s brother and Dipendra’s successor, abdicated, and Nepal became the newest democracy on the South Asian block. But in many ways, the massacre and its aftermath, coupled with an ever-growing plethora of conspiracy theories, remains an emblem of the ethnic and political complexities, traditions, superstitions, conflicts and distrust that pervades today’s Nepali society.

King Birendra (left), Queen Aishwarya and Crown Prince Dipendra (middle)

To get to the massacre signs, you first walk through a collection of meeting rooms and bedrooms frozen in a 1970s décor, part ski chalet, part genteelly-rundown villa. Stuffed dusty tigers, lions, stag heads, paintings of former kings, elephant feet used as footstools, antelope-hoof candleholders, a gigantic Gharial crocodile nailed to a wall. The portrait hallway has the Nepali King and Queen posing with various international visitors, such as Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Zia ul Haq, Nicolae Ceausescu, Francois Mitterand , and some of lesser fame such as the president of the Swiss Federation. The bookshelves in other rooms mix biographies of the Dalai Lama with classics such as Lord Jim and Kitty Kelley’s The Royals. White mothballs decorate the carpets and chairs and, whether it’s to ward off the densely humid monsoon weather or to mummify time, every room greets me with the pervasive smell of naphthalene.

On the ill-fated evening of the massacre, Eton-educated Dipendra was hosting his extended family. Dipendra (known widely as ‘Dippy’) had issues, according to published reports. He drank hard, loved hashish, liked to torture animals and watch them die, and didn’t get along with his mother Queen Aishwarya, who disapproved of the woman he wanted to marry. His bedroom closet was stocked with a vast array of weaponry and ammunition. Survivors described him as single-mindedly going after his victims one by one and even leaving the room to switch weapons. He shot his mother and brother in the garden before killing himself. You can see re-enactments on YouTube.

The Western world had the Empiricists, the Rationalists, the Scholastics, the Logical Positivists, the Imperialists. In the U.S. we added the Survivalists who believe that black United Nations helicopters will invade America. Post-massacre Nepal gave an orchestra seat to the Bollywoodists.

The initial palace reaction was a public relations disaster, a critical weakness that only enhanced the belief that they were disconnected from life outside their gate. The official statement said a gun had accidentally misfired, killing the king. Dipendra, then in a coma, was named king, and held that position for three days. Subsequently, the building where the shooting took place was razed and the victims cremated, without any autopsies. Later, an official inquiry, headed by the chief justice and one other Nepali, produced a 200-page report that identified Dipendra as the gunman but left many unanswered questions.

Nepal was isolated from the outside world until the 1950s. Citizens, like this woman, knew no government other than an absolute monarchy and a king who was considered a god. ©Donatella Lorch

While the masses outside the gates may have believed in the divinity of their king, they didn’t believe the palace’s story. Thirteen years on, interest has not waned. This week, yet another book was published further promoting the mystery with the underlying theory that if you can’t prove it and no one will admit to it, it must be right.

When things go wrong in Nepal, India is usually high on the list of culprits. Some of the paranoia is founded in fact. India is the huge neighbor next door and they have a history of bullying their tiny neighbors. Many Nepalis believe that it was not Dipendra who did the killing but rather India’s intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing or RAW (for good measure the CIA is also included in some conspiracies), whose agents have, I am often told, totally infiltrated the country. RAW allegedly paid off King Birendra’s brother, Gyanendra, who later became king (an unpopular one), to organize the killing. Many of my Nepali friends say the unquestionable proof is that Gyanendra was not present at the massacre and his son survived the shooting. Another conspiracy centers on the popular Bollywood make-up artist Oscar-winning act. A cook, who was present that night but has since disappeared, claims several men in camouflage wearing Dipendra masks entered the gathering and opened fire. These mask wearers are the ones who allegedly also killed Dipendra. This links with the story-line that Dipendra had not one but two bullets in the head. (and remember — there was no autopsy. Hmmm!)

Today, Nepal is struggling with political disarray, corruption and a booming population that wants its government to supply the basics of water, fuel and electricity. Many opinion makers hark back to the halcyon days of the monarchy as the pillar of Nepali identity and sovereignty, especially when India-phobia resurfaces. Yet, many handily forget that in a democracy, sovereignty is vested in the people, not in the divine right of kings. Democracy in Nepal has an enormously difficult legacy to overcome. The monarchy was in its last throws, a spent force, with poor leadership, a dysfunctional family that was disconnected from its desperately poor subjects and the growing Maoist uprising across the country. Yet all these conspiracies could help also a royal comeback.

Nepal has come a long way from denying Dipendra’s role to posting signs to guide tourists to the royal massacre site. They now highlight the bullet holes in the concrete wall where Dipendra shot his brother. Nepali crowds flock to the palace, a once Forbidden City, where they can witness the lives of people they believed were gods. A high point is the map that details the locations where everyone was killed. Even so, the official four-page brochure handed out at the gate provides only two short sentences on the royal massacre.

The most difficult legacy of the palace massacre may be that most Nepalis are left just with a myth, anecdotes, various story lines and the looming blue Genie of the RAW. Mothballs preserve the only history they can still see.

Worshipped yes — But in Nepal, it’s a tough life to be a dog.

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Mitho taking a rest on our run together © Donatella Lorch

I met him by chance on one of my morning runs. Three black dogs sleeping in front of a gate, a fixture on my trail for almost a year, had lifted their heads briefly as I greeted them but I didn’t notice the small tan and white newcomer trotting behind me until he almost tripped me. He stopped when I stopped, sitting and cocking his head and looking up quizzically. He had mange on his lower back and he was rather skinny but he wasn’t aggressive or pushy. For the next four miles, as I zigzagged through a small village and terraced golden wheat fields, he tagged along by my right heel, never passing and immediately sitting when I’d stop to check on him. Our conversation was rather one-sided as I outlined for him all the reasons I could not keep him. By the time I got to my front gate, I had named him Mitho (pronounced Mee-toe), Nepali for ‘sweet.’ He gulped down the food and water I gave him but when I checked on him half-hour later he was gone.

Stray dogs in mid-morning, sleeping during the daytime hours. ©Donatella Lorch

In Nepal, there is a special day dedicated to dog worship. On Kukur Puja, many of the city’s dogs are garlanded with marigolds and are fed sweet rice cakes. But this warm feeling does not seem to last long. Mitho is one of hundreds of stray dogs that live on the streets of my neighborhood on the southern edge of the Kathmandu Valley. He is one of more than 30,000 stray dogs that call greater Kathmandu home. They sleep through the day, mounds of brown, black and white fur, oblivious of traffic that is forced to detour around them. They howl and fight at night, dodge traffic and beg for food and water from shopkeepers. Their favorite hangouts are the three-sided one-room roadside butcher shops where I frequently spot three or four dogs politely sitting at a discreet distance hoping for scraps while keeping an uneasy friendship with the tethered goats outside awaiting the knife. You’ll find the dogs scavenging in the garbage-filled plastic bags in the city’s ubiquitous open-air roadside dump sites. In winter, they shiver from the bitter cold and the weaker ones die off; in the summer, they suffer from dehydration in the torrid heat. Unvaccinated and mostly un-neutered, they succumb to parasites and nasty skin infections. They are frequently abused, kicked, hit and even scorched by boiling water. They are maimed and killed by motorcycles, cars and trucks. Fifty percent of their puppies die.

Stray mother and children in the countryside in Southern Kathmandu Valley. ©Donatella Lorch

I had a healthy fear of stray dogs when I moved here ten months ago. There were two main reasons. Dog-carried rabies is prevalent in Nepal, killing over 200 people a year. Since the mere trace of an infected dog’s saliva on an open cut can give you rabies, a disease which is more than 99% fatal once the symptoms appear, we dutifully received our three anti-rabies shots. Let’s note here that the shots only delay the symptoms and give you a slightly larger window to get more shots. I warned my nine-year-old never to pet a stray dog.

My dog, Biko, gets worshipped on Kukur Puja, and receives a garland, a Tikka and sweet rice cakes. © Donatella Lorch

But perhaps more immediately relevant for me was my large, 85 lb Rhodesian Ridgeback, Biko, that my four kids insist is my main love. I am not ashamed and can openly admit it: I am a dog lover. Biko was a four-year-old bundle of energy when we arrived in Kathmandu, and he needed daily walks. But how do you walk a pampered house dog through a city littered with strays? The stray dogs in Kathmandu mostly ignore humans, but they are very attentive to any outside dog that comes into their territory, and—though they may be feigning sleep when we walk abreast of them—they often turn into barking, howling, snarling villains when our outside dog passes by. Think dog fights—our house dog against a pack of street-hardened dogs. Think rabies. We quickly learned that there was only one way to proceed: with intimidation. We had to convince the stray dogs in our neighborhood that Biko belonged to our pack, and that our pack was as tough, or tougher, than theirs. In our tentative first efforts, four of us armed with long sticks escorted Biko on his walk, a Nepali version of armed Kenyan rangers protecting individual Rhinos. Most of our neighborhood dogs now grudgingly let us through. Today, I may still carry a stick but I walk Biko alone.

Guarding Biko our first weeks in Kathmandu ©Donatella Lorch

I am no longer scared of the dogs I meet. Mostly it makes me sad to see so much loveless suffering. I may not pet them but I talk to them and bring them scraps from restaurants. I have my favorites like the Tibetan Mastiff mix outside the Roadhouse Café in Patan, or the gaunt timid bitch down the street who has obviously had too many litters and submissively lies down wagging her tail when I pass.

The world of the Nepal stray dog is divided into societal gradations. The biggest group is the community dog. They do not necessarily belong to individuals but are outdoor dogs with a narrow territory and the community feeds them scraps and leftovers. These are the nighttime howlers and many become outcasts when they are maimed in dog fights, hit by vehicles, or acquire mange and other disfiguring skin infections. Some dogs are tightly chained to buildings with barely the ability to lie down. The smallest group is the dog as personal pet. Many Nepalis fear dogs and are incredulous at the affection I show Biko and how I care for him.

Twenty years ago, the government poisoned stray dogs to keep the dog population in check. Death came after hours of convulsions. Small NGOs reliant almost entirely on donations, bring in some dogs for neutering and spaying and then return them to their area. Most often it is the volunteer work of a few for the many.

A dog is recovering after being run over by a motorcycle at Kate Clendon’s “Community Dog Welfare, Kopan” ©Donatella Lorch

Biko’s Nepali vet runs an animal shelter and volunteers to treat injured animals. Kate Clendon, a New Zealander who is a longtime resident of Kathmandu, is now housing 31 dogs at her Community Dog Welfare Kopan. She eases the last days of the ones with blood parasites, finds sponsors for the ones with disabilities. She does community outreach and last year vaccinated 150 dogs. Neighbors now bring her injured dogs. She is looking after newborn puppies abandoned in the middle of the night at her doorstep. Each dog has a name and history that Kate can relate in detail. Leo has two broken legs and is getting a wheelchair from a Swedish sponsor.

Jade has mange that has not responded to medical treatment. ©Donatella Lorch

Kare and Dorje, Community Dog Welfare Kopan in Northern Kathmandu. © Donatella Lorch

Karen and Dorje, Community Dog Welfare Kopan in Northern Kathmandu. © Donatella Lorch

Tiger had his back sliced by a Kukri (a curved Nepali knife), Jade has mange, Dorje was beaten and has joint problems. Kate knows what she does is a drop in the ocean. “To have a long term impact it’s more about changing attitude,” Kate insists. “Nepalis need to be more responsible and have more respect for dogs.”

As Mitho ran with me, I made a list of what he needed: rabies test and vaccines, deworming, delousing, a bath and lots of food. That I could do. But he could not live with me. My husband has threatened divorce if another dog enters the house. I toyed with the idea of placing Mitho’s photo on Facebook and convincing friends to foster him or even adopt him.

Hugging Biko at the end of the day. ©Donatella Lorch

But even I knew that was daydreaming. I went home and I hugged Biko.

Everest tragedy means book deals for some and lost livelihoods for others

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View of Everest Base Camp just before expeditions left for the season © Karma Sherpa

Tragedies have a way of temporarily opening up windows on worlds we never knew, giving us a peek into how people we never thought of live and die. If we are lucky we will remember a face or a story, or the color of the sky or a smell that triggers good or bad. And sometimes it is the most seemingly banal detail that can set an event into perspective.

Everest has been my teacher this year. We all know Everest, The myth. The mountain. If you live in Kathmandu, you are never allowed to forget. It is on many of my son’s t-shirts, it is the “Top of the World” coffee shop where fellow school mothers come for the wi-fi and a catch-up, it is there at “Le Sherpa” restaurant or at the “Sherpa Adventure Gear” store. It follows you in the fish-eye photo prints that line the streets of Thamel and the ubiquitous highly imaginative oil on canvas paintings that have a tiny yak crossing a rope bridge in the shadow of the world’s highest mountain.

The Khumbu Icefall seen from EBC © Karma Sherpa

The Sherpas call the mountain Sagarmatha and this year they believe the goddess that lives there is angry. An ice Avalanche on April 18 on Mt. Everest killed 16 Nepalese high altitude climbers, most of them Sherpas, made international news for more than a week and opened a window on the dangerous work conditions, low pay, miserly injury insurance and death benefits of the Nepalese who make it possible for all the foreign climbers to get up the mountains. Within days, as tension mounted at Everest Base Camp (EBC) between sherpas, the climbing season on Everest ended before it really began. Though the disappointment of foreign climbers was widely read on blogs, very little was heard from the vast majority of Sherpas up on the mountain.

My assignment for National Geographic was to find survivors of the avalanche in Kathmandu and tell their story. As a story goes, it was straight forward reporting. I tracked down two survivors in two hospitals. I had no child-care that day so my nine-year-old followed me into the ICU and sat next to Kaji Sherpa, at one point holding his hand and asking his own questions. I did phone interviews later at home with other Sherpas in town and international expeditions owners. I went to the expeditions website and read climber blogs.

Lucas with Kaji Sherpa at Kathmandu hospital. ©Donatella Lorch

Neither Kaji Sherpa nor Ang Kami Sherpa had a formal education. But this job, as one of the luggers of heavy gear up to Camp 1 and 2, was the only option in their desperately poor villages to finance an education for their children and a better future for the extended family. On Everest, Sherpas work as guides that assist the climbers to summit but the majority set the ropes, lay the ladders across the dangerous crevasses of the Khumbu Icefall, lug up tents, cooking gas, oxygen, food even the toilets for the clients. Then at the end of the season, they bring everything back down including in some cases the client’s excrement. One climbing company advertises that it provides two Sherpas per climber to summit the mountain. When I asked a Sherpa friend why two were needed, he explained that one was there to push and the other to pull and if needed to carry extra oxygen. While foreign climbers who summit write books and go on talking circuits, little is known about the much larger number of Sherpas who go to the top over and over again. There are Sherpas that have summited Everest ten times or more, families where four and five brothers have all been to the top, others where three generations have gone all the way up.

Communication, or rather lack of, with EBC is what made this story frustrating. I was forced to rely on climber blogs and people in Kathmandu relating to me wildly different versions of tensions and arguments. EBC, has excellent internet connection though as yet no 3G so I couldn’t call Sherpas there to hear their perspectives and as of today many are still at EBC closing camp. The elusive and

Sushi preparations at EBC on the Website of Altitude Junkies

rarified world of climbers came in snippets of life through posted pictures and diary-like entries. On expedition websites, I learned that a foreign climber enjoys carpeted toilets, hot showers, movies, happy hours and for some even sushi appetizers at EBC.

But I didn’t quite understand the logistics of what it means to climb Everest until the camp started to be dismantled. While Sherpas will stay behind to pack camp, scores of climbers and western guides hiked days to Lukla, the closest airport, a single strip of tarmac sandwiched between a precipice and a mountainside and dubbed by some ‘the world’s most

dangerous airport.’ Then for several days, bad weather stopped the 19-seater flights, duffel bags backed up stacked high against the walls and in any available space. The departure area looked more like Heathrow during Easter weekend than a single room on a village hilltop. Usually there are only a couple of flights a day that land and take-off before the winds pick up mid-morning. Yesterday, four Nepalese airlines scheduled 18 flights to Lukla.

Climbers crowding the airport at Lukla trying to get on a flight to Kathmandu. © Karma Sherpa

Some agencies chartered. Though there were many Sherpas trying to get to Kathmandu as well, foreign climbers were given priority.

While their clients were heading to hotels in Kathmandu, eight international teams were figuring out how to rescue tons of equipment that had been pre-positioned in Camp 1 and Camp 2 above the Khumbu Icefall that was now deemed impassable. Alpine Ascents had in addition to regular gear, the added tonnage for Discovery Channel’s planned “Live” jump off of Everest. As non-emergency evacuation helicopter flights are not allowed above EBC, they had to get a special government permit to charter a B3 helicopter for a total of 20 flights that inserted team Sherpas to pack, repack and move the gear. No doubt an expensive venture for an already hurting industry.

This week at a condolence ceremony in Kathmandu for the 16 dead, their families asked for better death and injury benefits. Kaji Sherpa hopes to be able to make the trip home to his village in Solu Khumbu soon and to see his wife and three children. He never wants to climb Everest again.

Banners welcoming Everest expeditions still line the parking lot walls at the Yak&Yeti Hotel in Kathmandu © Donatella Lorch

Nowadays, the hi-end Yak&Yeti hotel is home to many of the teams. Banners welcoming Everest expeditions still line the brick walls in the parking lot. And the duffel bags from the Lukla airport are heaped in matching pyramids in the elegant lobby. There is talk of book deals from climbers and guides. But sadly none of them are Sherpas.

You cannot kill their memory — Rwanda 20 years on

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I am not good at remembering dates. My husband teases me that I have trouble recalling our own wedding anniversary. Yet since 1994, April 7^th is the date I can never forget. Twenty years ago this weekend, the world is remembering and hopefully reminding itself how little it did back then to stem a meticulously planned and executed genocide in which as many as a million Rwandans were killed. Much has happened to me in the past 20 years. I have lived on three continents, changed jobs multiple times, covered wars, married, had a son, inherited three step children, lost friends in war zones yet Rwanda is still there, stubbornly unwilling to be forgotten and always a haunting presence in my life.

A smell, a soft breeze, a shadow dancing on a wall is often all I need. I remember the utter stillness of Nyarubuye and the way the dust smoked up around my shoes. The bodies in the school and church complex lay like sprawled puppets and the stench made me gag. Pink flowers lined the road and the tall eucalyptus trees swayed in a soft wind. I counted the dead and wrote in my notebook the color of their clothing. Some looked as if they had been running, others curled up to block blows still others seemed to me as if they were sleeping. They had been hacked and shot and bludgeoned.

It was the end of May 1994, I was working then as the New York Times East Africa Bureau Chief, based out of Nairobi, Kenya, and a small group of us were the first reporters to document this massacre in Nyarubuye, an isolated Rwandan community on the Tanzanian border. We had been taken there by the Rwandan Patriotic Army, the only means of moving around the Rwandan countryside while the civil war raged. It was almost two months since the mass killings had started, hundreds of thousand Rwandans methodically killed, yet the international community was still unwilling to use the word “genocide.” For us who covered Rwanda and witnessed killings, walked through massacres and battled our editors for more space to tell the story, the anger and frustration against the lack of international concern filled many with bitterness. Many of us, including myself battled depression (no journalist I knew who wanted to keep their job would admit to an editor that they were struggling), changed jobs, left Africa but we have never forgotten.

The genocide began within hours that the plane carrying the Rwandan president was shot down coming in for a landing in the capital Kigali. Once the Rwandan rebel army captured the Kigali airport, it was possible for journalists to visit the crash site. The president’s country estate bordered the airport and part of the wreckage ended up near his swimming pool. The Rwandan Patriotic Front soliders hated having their pictures taken. The only way to do it was to pose with them. © Donatella Lorch

There are of course the countless dead, the nameless ones, the crumpled corpses that lined the steep road into Kigali when I first drove into Rwanda’s capital that first week of April. There were the doors kept ajar by bare protruding legs, a signal to me that the dreaded Interahamwe had gone house to house in that neighborhood. It was the three women spotted from a rooftop docilely kneeling and not even lifting their heads to look as a man with a machete systematically hacked their heads one by one. There were the dawn mortar attacks shattering windows at the Milles Collines Hotel where we stayed packed together in rooms with hundreds of displaced Rwandans.

It is not that the press was blameless. The Africa-based press corps had missed the signals. We had vast stretches of territory to cover. I had been mostly reporting from Somalia since 1992 as American and UN troops struggled unsuccessfully to bring a semblance of peace to the war-torn country. My knowledge of Rwanda was learned gradually on the ground, counting corpses washed ashore on Lake Victoria, meeting the hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees in Tanzania and Goma, Zaire and investigating the massacre sites inside the country.

Let’s not forget the survivors. My heroes: Zozo (Wellars Bizimuremyi), the head desk clerk at the Milles Collines, who always smiled while managing to stop the military and the Interahamwe who would sporadically enter the hotel and try to drag out Rwandans. While hiding in their home, Zozo’s wife and children were killed. Evariste was my driver for a year after the genocide and he lead me through his personal story of loss. His entire family was killed at the church at Ntarama, now the site of the “live” Genocide museum outside Kigali. In Kigali, he hid in a Hutu neighbor’s rafters living off of grass and raw potatoes until he managed to escape to the United Nations controlled stadium.

There is General Romeo Dallaire, head of the UN peacekeeping operation, whom I met at the Mille Collines the first week as he came with a lone armored personnel carrier (the other one had a flat tire) to help evacuate the journalists. (I later re-entered Rwanda with the rebel troops). We were a captive audience, and he refused to provide an armed escort until he gave a press conference describing what was happening in the city and how UN headquarters had tied his hands. Only one international organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross, stayed on in Kigali and was critical at providing and facilitating medical care and food transport. The ICRC head was Phillipe Gaillard and I am convinced he did not sleep for the first 100 days, chain smoking his way from negotiation to negotiation and ignoring death threats. Funny how sometimes it is the tiny details you remember. In a city without running water, food and pounded by artillery, Phillipe wore a jacket and tie every day for months as part of his effort, he’d say smiling, to pretend there was sanity somewhere. And far away in Buffalo, N.Y. Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch, a Rwanda expert, let me wake her many times in the middle of the night to learn Rwandan history and politics.

In 2009, I returned to Rwanda. There were moments when I still smelled it, or thought I caught a glimpse of a corpse. But it was beautiful too. That year, Alison died in the air crash of a Continental commuter flight coming into Buffalo. Gen. Dallaire had gone public in 2000 about his fight with PTSD. After giving hundreds of interviews during the Genocide, Phillipe Gaillard left the public eye for eight years before resurfacing with the message that we must never forget. Both Zozo and Evariste married Genocide survivors and have large families.

Memory is smell, suffering, silence, courage, pain, love and beauty. It should not be just something we grasp on April 7^th this year. Memory is everywhere. Everyday.

A rugby match and the cost of development

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Smoke haze from burning forests making way for palm oil plantations has covered Malaysia and Indonesia recently. In Kuala Lumpur, schools have been closed. © Donatella Lorch

We landed in Kuala Lumpur at nighttime yet before the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 737’s tires hit the runway, the fog was so thick I couldn’t even see a light outside the plane window. Almost immediately, the cabin was coated in an eye-smarting burnt smell. I am a nervous flyer, and on this evening my anxiety was enhanced by the fact that MH370 had disappeared just four days before and that our pilot had not mentioned the weird weather to the passengers.

My son Lucas and his school rugby team, the Yetis, were representing Nepal in a tournament in Kuala Lumpur. © Donatella Lorch

My husband and I were tagging along on my nine-year-old son’s school rugby trip. This was a huge event for Lucas and his seven schoolmates as their primary school team in Kathmandu, the Yetis, was (to the best of our knowledge) the first Nepali rugby team to play outside the country. The boys’ excitement was palpable. My third-culture son, who has lived overseas for almost six years, had been reminding me for weeks that he was going to Malaysia to “represent my country!” When I had wondered which of his three nationalities, American, Canadian and Dutch, he was referring to, he had dismissed my obvious ignorance. “Nepal, of course!”

What we didn’t immediately realize is that the fog with the burnt smell was not only coating the airport but blanketing almost all of Malaysia and parts of Indonesia as well.

The smoke haze even reached beyond Malaysia’s shores onto its islands, such as Pulao Pangkor where it filtered the setting sun. © Donatella Lorch

Many airports in the region had already closed and by the next day, the Malaysian government declared the air quality dangerous, closed over 200 schools in the capital and advised against any outdoor sports. The first day of the rugby tournament was cancelled, much to the boys’ disappointment. The stinging smoke that was affecting their dream school trip was in fact the end product of the needs of billions of people who live far from Southeast Asia.

Palm oil plantations like this one line Malaysia's super highways for hundreds of miles. © Donatella Lorch

Ever wonder about that “vegetable oil” listed as an ingredient in a huge amount of food we all eat? That vegetable oil is often palm oil, and it is an essential ingredient in margarines, frying oils, cereals, baked goods, sweets and potato chips. It is also in soaps, washing powder, cosmetics and animal feeds, and it can also be used as bio fuel. Since the 1990s, the demand for palm oil has increased by more than 45 percent. Though 17 countries produce it, Malaysia and Indonesia account for 85 percent of global palm oil production. Millions of Malaysians and Indonesians rely on palm oil for their livelihood.

The choking smoke and palm oil are inextricably connected. Just drive for hours on Malaysia’s magnificent super highways (yes, they have Starbucks stops) and the countryside is almost entirely blanketed by thousands of acres of palm oil plantations. But growing world demand, especially from China, means both legal and illegal unfettered cutting down and burning of pristine forests in Malaysian Borneo and Indonesia. The governments, either because of lack of will or corruption, do little to control what has become an environmental disaster. This year, lack of rain means the burning season is particularly vicious on the lungs. The forest peat burns underground for weeks and the heavy smoke just sits over three of Asia’s most important cities: Singapore, Djakarta and Kuala Lumpur.

The cost of unfettered development is very visible in Nepal. Both licensed and illegal quarries strip the rivers of stone for building roads and houses but cause landslides, floods destroying homes and bridges. © Donatella Lorch

Lucas gets basic global warming. He knows it makes winters colder and summers hotter and that New York and Toronto, where our extended family lives, have had wicked snowstorms this winter. His school is plastic free and on eco days, he walks to class. Our lives in Nepal are an unexpected first row seat where we can witness the cost of development. Lucas knows well the fetid smell of raw sewage from Nepal’s holiest and dead Bagmati River.

In Nepal, garbage is the gift that keeps on giving. Trashed plastic bags are everywhere. © Donatella Lorch

Unregulated dumping of garbage on city streets makes Kathmandu a filthy plastic-bag littered city. An open sewer runs near our house. Massive and frequently illegal stone quarrying in Nepal’s gorgeous rivers and streams supplies the unquenchable thirst for roads and building construction but result in massive erosion, flooding and landslides, destroying bridges and roads and buildings.

Kathmandu Valley smog is not only from the many cars but also from the brick factories sprouting up everywhere as demand for construction materials increases. © Donatella Lorch

Still it hadn’t occurred to Lucas that eating his favorite sour cream and onion Pringles or Honey Nut Cheerios or washing his hands with soap could be connected to the smoke that cancelled his rugby match. I was struck by the irony that Kuala Lumpur, a modern, vibrant, clean, green gem that stands apart from the region’s capitals, was being asphyxiated by the very development and industrialization that had provided the money to make it so special.

Malaysia has built itself up as a favorite tourism destination. Its ubiquitous slogan, “Truly Asia,” could be misconstrued on smoky days. Luckily for the Yeti team, it rained and then it poured, and the smog cleared. They won one match, tied another and lost two. The memories will last a lifetime.

tangledjourneys

A personal perspective on human interest stories from an American journalist living abroad