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| Chitwan Kitchen |
CHITWAN, NEPAL “The walls of our house are made of mud and brick,” Hemanta explaines. “The roof is thatched. We don’t have a bathroom or a kitchen. Our kitchen is like the one I showed you in the village, a little hardened dirt floor off to one side where my wife and mother can start a wood fire and cook our meals. Like everyone in the village, my wife washes our clothes by hand. And like the others, we have a small rice paddy, which keeps us in rice four months of the year. We have sixteen ducks and I have a bicycle, which I use to get to work. Wages are very low and prices very high — stores are mostly for tourists — villagers barter and trade to get by. We want our two kids to have more, but it’s difficult. I want another male duck so we can breed more. A male duck cost 1,000 rupees ($12.50). My wife wants a water buffalo, but a buffalo cost 60,000 rupees ($681), and that’s too much for us. In the ideal world, I’d like to buy an elephant, but they’re really expensive, four million rupees ($45,454). If the tourists come back, (that’s a big if) a good elephant can pay for itself in two years. But there’s a lot of uncertainty with our government and that’s creating problems for the tourism industry. Our Prime Minister, who’s a Moist, dissolved the parliament. The parliament had two years to write a constitution, but failed, so now we have neither a parliament nor a constitution, only a Prime Minister, and no one knows what’s going to happen next. We hope that fighting doesn’t break out again. When that happened, it was disastrous for the Park. Poachers were able to come in and kill some of our animals. The Park animals and tourism are our livelihood.”
