Drive Slow, Accidental Area

Having spent five hours waiting at the airport (where the approximate number of seats in which one can wait for arriving passengers is 15, and the approximate number of people waiting for arriving passengers is 5.2 million), spending an hour fighting the bureaucrats in order to renew our tourist visas, and taking one cab ride where the cab driver wasn’t listening to where I wanted to go and instead took me to the other side of town; I was headed back to the monastery with a can of beer and my earphones full of rock n’ roll. On our way up, we passed a sign that said “Drive Slow, Accidental Area.” Rather than just alerting drivers to a potentially dangerous intersection (which intersections aren’t dangerous in Kathmandu?!), I had a vague feeling that this sign was actually referring to the whole of the city. It often has the feeling I would imagine one would have living in a warehouse run by the blind, constantly having more and more stuff haphazardly piled on top of you until there is nowhere to go and very little room to breathe. I also saw the lovely petals of the lilac trees resting gently in a ditch. These ditches are where garbage is thrown so that it washes downstream to the river when it rains. They reminded me of the flowers thrown at the feet of a bride or the queen, although in this case the queen is the trash that will soon fill the ditch, which will then fill the river.

According to my cab driver, Kathmandu is home to 1.4 million people (depending on the source, these numbers range from 600,000 to 1.4 million). Of those, 800,000 have jobs. Of those, only 100,000 have good jobs that can really support themselves and their family. Therefore, there are a lot of destitute people. I have no way of verifying his information, but it seems more than possible that he is in the ballpark. Apparently, the Maoists are persuading people that moving to the city brings with it the promise of a better life, so many of the people moving to the city have very little work skills beyond farm work and hard labor. I will not describe the process of building as I’ve witnessed it, but suffice it to say that one cement mixer could put six people out of work. The Maoists were holding a very big rally today, bringing in anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 people (depending on who you ask) to the city for a massive protest. This promise of a better life is reminiscent of the flowers in the ditch; these elegant and beautiful ideas are empty promises that will soon be covered with with the grime of poverty and suffering.

Having shut down the city more or less entirely, there are some positive reverberations of the Maoist descent into the city. There is much less traffic, and thus less smog. From the monastery, you can actually see the city, which for me is unprecedented. Many, if not most businesses are closed, so there’s less strain on the grid, and hence more electricity. If they could make manifest hot water from the tap, I might consider joining their movement. If, however, they keep things shut down too much longer, we’ll be in trouble because we wont be able to buy food or water. Protesting the inability of the government to provide for its people by depriving people of their own ability to provide for themselves seems a bit off kilter, but maybe it will work out for them in the end. After all, you never know what might happen in an Accidental Area.