Last Friday night I stayed out late for the first time in Nepalgunj, late in Nepalgunj meaning well past 9 o clock. Dipek invited me to go for beer and momos (Tibetan meat dumplings) and so we found a nice outdoor table at a local restaurant called Siddhartha Cottage.

Dipek and I spent most of the night discussing at great length the program I am currently helping to design. It essentially is a peace initiative to be undertaken at the local level. During our discussion I had a host of questions regarding local villages and both their dispute settlement procedures and their relationships with the police. Dipek offered many answers to my questions, but after a few minutes he announced that if I really wanted to know I should ask the local communities directly. I responded that I would love the opportunity to do exactly that. Without missing a beat Dipek announced that the next day we would conduct field research in a Tharu village.

Our day in the field started promptly at 9. Dipek came by with his motorcycle, I hopped on the back, and soon I was back motoring through the fields of Bardiya district. Our first stop was not the village, but rather Dipek’s house. He wanted me to meet his wife, and more importantly enjoy some of the huge mangoes that grow in his garden. They were delicious mangoes, not quite fully ripened so that they were just a little tart, exactly how I like them. After a couple hours and more than a couple mangoes we made it back out onto the road.

The village we were heading for is called Kali Nagar. Dipek had worked in Kali Nagar previously on a project designed to keep students in school. He became close friends with some of the success stories from that program, one of which is now the local school teacher. While he had been many times before, finding Kali Nagar is no simple task. Monsoon season and cultivation result in somewhat migratory dirt roads that are the only way to reach the village. The further we were from the main road, the more often Dipek stopped to ask locals for routing advice. We were turned back from several roads that had fallen into disrepair, and spent more than an hour winding through villages and farms.

Perhaps the most striking settlement we passed through consisted of a small and colorful mosque, an even more colorful altar dedicated to Shiva, a collection of huts with thatched roofs and mud walls, and one huge brick mansion with beautiful European style architecture. This huge house that seemed so out of place was boarded up and the gates locked, in years gone it had been the home of the local landlord. In the not so distant past the man who built this house had owned most of the farmland in the area, and all of the local villagers had been his bonded laborers. In Russia there were serfs, in America we had slaves, in Europe there were peasants, in Nepal the name for landless farmers is Kamaiya.

Nepal still has thousands of Kamaiyas slaving away for a handful of rice a day today. The VDC (VDCs are like counties in America) we were in, Mohammadpur, had been a Maoist stronghold during the conflict and was therefore no place for landlords. Faced with the threat of Maoist violence the landlord had boarded up his house and fled to India. Ever since then that magnificent house has remained locked and uninhabited while the local people crowd into their huts all around it.

We did eventually make it to Kali Nagar where Balkrishna, the schoolteacher was waiting for our arrival. Balkrishna is the name given to the Hindu God Krishna when he appears in the form of a child. I suspect there is a power to his name as despite his 28 years Balkrishna from Kali Nagar looks more like he should be listening to lectures instead of giving them.

Balkrishna had been waiting for us at the community phone. There is only one phone for the village and there is always a local boy sitting vigilantly at its side. When a call arrives for anyone in the village he pulls out a little microphone and a huge megaphone. He selects one of the children who come running when they hear the phone ring. His newly selected assistant holds the megaphone up over their heads and slowly turns in a full circle, while the electric chord slowly wraps around their ankles. While the child rotates the youth with the microphone calls out the name of whichever villager had received the call. Throughout the village curious heads emerge from doors and windows either in hope of hearing their name called or at least collecting something to gossip about later on.

Waiting by the phone, and amusing the local children by my mere presence, I was introduced to another of Dipek’s local friends, Nayan. Nayan is 24 and recently married. He has had a great stretch of luck recently during which he married the village beauty as well as found a new job working as a local facilitator for an economic development project.

Sitting down in the grass near the village phone, I started learning about the village from the collection of young men that had gathered. Kali Nagar’s inhabitants are almost all farmers and almost all Tharu people. The tharus are one of Nepal’s many ethnic groups and are the original inhabitants of the Terai region. Most Tharu villages are still very traditional in their practices. During this introduction to the village and Tharu traditions, I asked if the Tharu people had any traditional leadership structures within the village. The answer was yes. According to the Tharu tradition, each village has a group of village elders called aguwas. Among the aguwas there is a hierarchy at the top of which is the badhghar, who has the final say in almost any decision made within the community.

Seeing how interested I was in this topic the youths around us launched into a discussion in their mother tongue. Following a few minutes of deliberation, Balkrishna and a few others took off on their bicycles. In the meantime Nayan started leading Dipek and I through the village. It took a few minutes before anyone stopped to explain to me the intent behind all of the sudden activity. As it turned out, the boys had gone to gather the aguwas.