INSTAURATION SEPTEMBER 1986

NEPAL ON THE ROPES

The people glut prevents all hope of progress, reports an ex-Peace Corpsman

IS AID FROM the industrialized nations helping the poor countries of the world? It is not at present; it will not in the foreseeable future. I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal from 1978 to 1981, a job which radically changed my outlook on undeveloped countries. My long-held, liberal-inspired assumption of "inevitable progress" was neatly destroyed by the realities of Third World poverty.

Am I better qualified to make such generalizations than, say, Shirley MacLaine in China, Dick Gregory in Iran or Billy Graham in the Soviet Union? For starters, I had no political axe to grind. My preconceptions about Nepal were extremely limited. I had neither heard nor read anything about the country, and my motivation for going there was a simple mix of adventure and vestigial altruism.

I lived for 2½ years in Nepal on a monthly allowance of $80. This measly stipend put me right down to the bare subsistence level of the average Nepali, way below the living standards of any member of an aid or diplomatic mission. What's more, I was able to converse freely with the people in their own language. My score of 3 out of a possible 5 on my final test in spoken Nepalese was considerably higher than the grade of most Peace Corpsmen and Corpswomen.

Because it takes so long to find out what is really going on in a Third World society, the length of my stay in the country was significant. My initial impressions of Nepali society were quite different, almost the opposite, of my final ones. All of these factors—the duration of my stay, ability to speak the language, living like the ordinary Nepali, and lack of political bias—enabled me to better understand the essence of this remote, mountain-encircled nation.

It is one of the [sc. false] cliches of our time that "people are the same everywhere." Nepal taught me that some cultures exhibit tremendous differences, which are reflected in equally tremendous differences in human behavior.

The Reality of Disease
The first and worst shock was the health standards or lack thereof. Many, if not most, of the food in the open air shops and eateries of the capital, Kathmandu, were unsafe for newly arrived Westerners. After a violent introductory bout of diarrhea, I decided to investigate what was wrong.

The culprit turned out to be the water. Utensils and plates were washed in it and most foods prepared in it, despite its close and constant contact with ubiquitous human and animal fecal matter. Kathmandu and some smaller cities have pit toilets, but few adults and fewer children bother to use them. There are no toilets at all in the villages where the bulk of the population lives. People simply relieve themselves on the ground, generally near a stream. In Kathmandu an old Nepali man will squat by the Bagmatic River at dawn, where a woman at the same spot will fill her earthen jar with water an hour later. Every gutter in Nepal has its mounds of human and animal dung.

A Peace Corps friend told me of the coliform bacteria concentrations in Kathmandu tap water. Coliform bacteria live and thrive in the large intestine and are reliable indicators of fecal contaminants in the water. In the U.S., a count of four such bacteria per liter makes it mandatory for health departments to issue a warning to the local water treatment plant. A count of six means an automatic shutdown. One liter of Kathmandu tap water often has a count of 2,000.

Organisms that cause cholera, hepatitis, amoebic dysentery, typhoid fever and a myriad of other diseases proliferate in fecally contaminated water. These infectious, often lethal, ailments are the major reason life in undeveloped countries is sickness-ridden and short. The average life expectancy in Nepal is 45 years, with an infant mortality rate of approximately 50%. The recent increase in life expectancy from 42 to 45 years was celebrated in the national newspaper as a great step forward.

Two-thirds of the people in Nepal are hosts to internal parasites. If a Nepali survives infancy, his system is fairly well conditioned to withstand the trauma of these infections, so he rarely becomes as visibly ill as a Western visitor. It is obvious, however, that a country so burdened with debilitating diseases cannot have a very efficient or productive citizenry.

I had been aware of the controversy over the use of Nestle's infant formula in Third World countries, but until my arrival in Nepal I did not know that the use of contaminated water in the formula mix is the reason it is so dangerous. Peace Corps volunteers put public water faucets in villages which have never had them, but little or nothing can be done about the quality of the water. Water treatment plants are simply too complicated and too expensive.

When I asked people at Western aid agencies about the water problem, some replied they had no intention of purifying the water, cynically adding that it would only exacerbate the already intolerable increase in the population.

The Reality of Race and Language
Nepal has a population of 14 million, composed of 35 distinct ethnic groups, each with its own language or dialect. The country is predominantly Hindu, most of its people having come from India. The Hindu caste system, though officially outlawed, still governs personal life. One of the first questions asked when Nepali meets Nepali is, "What's your caste?" Nepal, consequently, has the double disadvantage of being divided vertically by caste and horizontally by language.

Mongoloid ethnic groups inhabiting the hills and the northern border speak a variety of Tibetan and TibetoBurman dialects and have lived in Nepal longer than any other population group. In the lower slopes and river valleys are the Hindus, Brahmins (the priestly caste), Chetris (the warrior caste) and various untouchable castes such as tailors, blacksmiths and cobblers. These are the descendants of the people who, fleeing a Moslem invasion of India, moved in some 600 years ago. They conquered the Mongoloids and in 1769 created what is now known as Nepal. Comprising perhaps half the population, the Hindus occupy the choice agricultural areas and their mother tongue, Nepali, is the national language.

Though there is tension between the Indians and Mongoloids, most of the latter speak Nepali and manage to get along with the Hindu castes, even to the extent of practicing some form of Hinduism. Both of these groups have provided Britain with its famous, hard-fighting Ghurka soldiers.

The most important cultural division within Nepal is between the hill people and those who live in the densely populated narrow plain along the Indian border. These border castes are ethnically pure Asian Indian and are easily distinguished by their taller stature, darker skin and different dress. They are less likely or willing to speak Nepali.

Language, it is often said, carries with it culture and a way of looking at the world. A society of many different languages often has a multitude of viewpoints on any particular issue, and its chances of reaching a consensus on any matter are remote. A Nepali teacher who went to the U.S. for a few months of training told me on his return of his surprise that everyone there spoke one language. "Such a big country and only one language," he kept saying. (He had not spent much time in New York, Miami, South Texas or Southern California.)

He was of the Newar caste. Shortly before I left Nepal in 1981, there was a controversy over the use of the Newari language in official government documents. The Newars, who are the original inhabitants of Kathmandu Valley and comprise a large percentage of the civil service, were demanding that their language appear, in addition to Nepali, in official government documents. Yet 99% of Newars cannot even read their own language. Although they represent less than 5% of Nepal's population, the national government may very well give in to their demands for language parity. If the precedent is set, each of the several dozen other castes will almost certainly agitate to make their language "official." This in a country where the illiteracy rate is 80% and where teachers argue about what language to teach before they get around to teaching.

One Saturday on an exploratory hike, I walked along a dirt road that paralleled a stream, through villages, banana trees and fields. The day was hot. After several hours I reached a large village and had some tea. As usual, I attracted a crowd, and a young boy asked me if he could walk with me back to town. (This sort of instant acquaintance is common in the East.) As we were walking, he asked me if I wanted to see "where the dead man was." Assuming he meant a grave, I nodded. We left the road and went down an embankment to a strip of grass bordering the river. My eye caught sight of something white in the grass. There is something unmistakably eery about a human skull. Except for the backbone, the rest of the body was gone, probably carried off by animals. While staring at the "thing," I asked my young companion what had happened. He said a man, a stranger, had come to his village, taken sick and died. Why had no one bothered to cremate or bury him? Because he was a man from the plains, a dark-skinned ethnic Indian who spoke a Hindi dialect—in other words, a foreigner. So the locals let his body be pulled apart by carrion kites, jackals and pariah dogs. No one felt the slightest compassion for the man, either well, sick or dead. People are mainly interested in looking out for Number One. Such an attitude destroys all hope of people working for the good of the state.

In Nepal, as in most Third World countries, the various population groups have no urge to assimilate. Society has always been divided or fractured. The primary loyalty, perhaps the only loyalty, is that directed toward the family or caste.

Most Third World societies will be forever divided because of the endemic self-centeredness of their population groups. India, for instance, will never be as successful as China in raising living standards because of its immense diversity of peoples. China's minorities make up less than 10% of the population, whereas in India and Nepal no one group comes close to a majority. The masses simply cannot "mobilize" because their racial or cultural differences repel any serious attempt at political, economic and social cooperation.

The Reality of Numbers
Nepal's 14 million people are spread out over an area the size of Florida. The pattern of population distribution is similar to that of the United States a century ago, before urbanization. The people are mainly rural subsistence farmers whose impact on the land is extensive.

In Nepal, the population problem is often reduced to a question of sheer physical space. A Nepali friend exclaimed, "Look at all the high-rise buildings in your country. They say Nepal's overpopulated, but if we had buildings like those, we could accommodate everyone." Overpopulation, unfortunately, is a problem that won't be solved by additional housing units. In India, every aspect of a person's daily existence is affected by the sheer weight of human numbers. I could never get on a bus that was not jammed. I had to wait in line every morning for 15 minutes to buy milk. I could not put off a decision to buy some item in a bazaar because if I did and came back the next day, it would be gone. When I thought about it, I wondered how rarely I was out of sight of another human being. A British tourist I met complained—with justification—"There is no place you can be alone." Space and opportunity for privacy, an unspoken cultural assumption and value of Westerners does not exist in Asia.

I came to Nepal expecting to find a pristine Shangri-La. Instead, I found a ravaged country where every species of large wild mammal is in danger of extinction. Since Nepalis have had no real concern for their wildlife, it was hopeless to try to imbue them with a conservation ethic. The situation is desperate. If the country's shaky monarchy goes, the royal parks and the animals they contain and shelter will go. The reason wildlife has been so much more plentiful in the past was that the number of people had been much smaller. Today, both human and animal habitat is being destroyed by strip-mining, road-building or resort development all this at a time when more land is needed to raise more crops.

The vision of the future depicted in Brave New World is not half as accurate as that depicted in George Orwell's 1984. Until I saw Asia, I would have said just the opposite. It is not only the right-to-life crowd that is afraid of introducing the "contraceptive mentality" to undeveloped countries. The worry is that this will lead to a lack of reverence for life and the disintegration of the family.

Those who oppose population control cannot seem to realize that when human numbers are high, life becomes cheap by virtue of its sheer abundance. There is an inverse ratio between a commodity's value and its supply. Is it a mere trick of fate that in Zimbabwe, which has a postwar baby boom and one of the world's highest population growth rates, infanticide has reached epidemic proportions?

In Nepal there is a kind of population war taking place between the castes of the southern plains along the Indian border and the hill peoples. The numbers of the latter have been increased by immigration from India after anti-malaria spraying made the area more habitable. A Nepali teacher told me, "It's useless for us [Nepalis] to practice family planning. All we are doing is making more room for Indians." Nepali society becomes more bitterly divided as Nepalis become poorer and more numerous.

Every Westerner who stays for more than a few weeks in Nepal is aware of the need for family planning. The advocacy of some form of population control represents no political mindset, just common sense. Things simply cannot go on the way they are going. One Peace Corpsman was so moved by the overcrowding he underwent a vasectomy in a rural clinic.

The trouble is, no Nepali seriously wants to do anything about the people glut, an attitude which is partially due to the Hindu cultural trait of resignation. He feels that his own individual actions cannot possibly make a difference. So he lines his pocket with foreign money intended to prevent what he is doing, that is, to have more than two children. The Western belief that one person can make a difference is far from the Eastern mind.

Overpopulation doesn't cause poverty. Overpopulation prevents the eradication of poverty when wealth cannot be created quickly enough to keep up with human numbers.

A cohesive homogeneous society such as Japan has the consensus of values necessary to decide how to utilize scarce resources and the discipline necessary to carry out tough decisions. Japan's high level of education and public knowledge helps ensure that the consensus reached is an intelligent one. These conditions are totally absent from most Third World countries, where communal strife shuts the door on consensus and numbs any sense of the public good, and where citizens' efforts are reduced to bickering over how to get an even larger share of foreign aid and an ever larger slice of an ever dwindling pie of natural resources.

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