A Woman's Work is Never Done

The women are the heart of the engine that drives Nepal. Out in the countryside it's very obvious that Nepal is a very traditional, male-dominated society.  When we were hiking, I saw nothing but women working the fields. Women who appeared to be my age (and older) were out tending animals, tending the crops and climbing steep, steep hills while carrying loads nearly twice their size.

"Why are only women working?" I asked Bhim one day. "Men work too!" he insisted, sounding somewhat defensive. "Men help to dig and plant and they work the harvest. Women do the other work" he said.

Bhim lives in Kathmandu with the two children who go to school there. Bhim's elderly father refuses to leave his traditional lifestyle in the family home he built some 40 years ago, and although Bhim's wife, Apshara, wants to live with her family in Kathmandu, it is her responsibility to stay in the family home and to cook and tend the house for her father-in-law. (Bhim's mother died when he was a baby and his father raised him and three brothers on his own. "She died and I had no mother love," Bhim told me one evening at dinner in Kathmandu. He said his mother died from "woman" problems that could have been remedied, had there been a doctor available.)

Bhim's wife never stopped working. I learned that she got up at 5 a.m. every morning and worked until nearly 10 pm every night. On my second morning there I went and sat in the kitchen to spend some time with her. She spoke no English, so our interaction was limited; however, she was so gracious and  I wanted at least a little bit of "face time" with her while I was there.

Bhim came into the kitchen to translate for us and he explained what his wife was doing. I understood that this morning, as usual, she had milked the cow (water buffalo) and had already made yogurt. Now she had placed the yogurt with some water into a tall wooden structure. She was mixing it by pulling two ends of a rope that had been wrapped around a pole.

Then she took some of the mixture and put it in a pan and cooked it over the fire. I believe this was the portion that became ghee (clarified butter) that she used for cooking. The remainder was milk which they drank. (My notes aren't very good on this. I just remember being impressed with the amount of work this woman did every day of her life.)

Nothing was ever wasted. The flame under the pot was a fast-burning flame and when the wood became slow burning embers, the embers were removed and put in another clay oven where they were used to slow-cook the rice.

All the dishes are washed outside. The water is in the container at the far end of the photo. Apshara worked all through the day. While she was completing some tasks, like cutting leaves for feeding the buffalo and goat, she carried a khukuri knife in her belt. (A khukuri is a long, curved blade.)  At one point she picked a fruit - I can't remember their name for it, but it tasted something like grapefruit. She sat on her haunches and held the khukuri knife, blade side up, with one of her feet and she ran the fruit against it to cut it open. Then she sat and tore the fruit apart and placed individual helpings in the bowls she had made by folding large green leaves together. She passed a leaf bowl to each one of us.

I'm not sure who chopped the wood and loaded up her shed. I wouldn't be surprised if it was Apshara herself.