E-Kantipur

MAR 20 - In January, I spent two weeks with the kids at Ama Ghar, a home for underprivileged children in Godavari. It’s a narrow four-storey red brick building off of a busy two-lane road that houses 38 children whose parents are dead or debilitated from physical or mental illnesses. Many of them come from remote villages that are a full day’s walk from the nearest road; from communities without electricity that have high illiteracy rates.

The founder of Ama Ghar is a man named Shrawan Nepali, who himself grew up in the Paropakar orphanage with 50 other boys. Having established a successful life in California, USA, he returned to Kathmandu to found Ama Ghar, travelling far and wide across the country to hand-pick the children who needed the most help.

Materially, the kids at Ama Ghar have little beyond the bare necessities. Their toys are footballs made of rubber bands and old car tires. In the mornings, they wash their hair and brush their teeth at a cold water tap outdoors, and after school they play with their half-exploded imitation Mizuno volleyball near the neighbour’s pigsty until the sun goes down. Most nights, they do their homework under a single solar-powered light-bulb because of scheduled electrical outages, before going to sleep in tiny rooms crammed with second-hand bunk beds.

My time at Ama Ghar was, in many ways, magical. My travel partner and I taught the kids volleyball drills and algebra; they in turn taught us the proper way to wash laundry in a bucket and greet elders according to their customs. Every morning, we were met with an enthusiastic chorus of “Hi Sister!” and every night, the children would bring us generous platefuls of dal bhat and handmade achar. After just a few days of living without heating, bright lights, and continuous Internet access, I realised that I didn’t miss these creature comforts at all. I was quite happy fooling around outdoors with the kids until dust, dusk, and the dinner bell forced us back inside.

The most surprising thing about these kids is not their living conditions. It’s their attitude. These are really good kids. Generally speaking, they don’t cheat, steal, complain, sneak off, or flake on their chores. During an eight-hour field trip to a Hindu temple on the other side of the Valley, the children kept tabs on each other without being told to do so, waiting patiently for the adults as they bargained for potatoes on the side of the street. Not one child complained about being hungry or needing to use the bathroom. Like a tight-knit family, they hugged each other often and shared everything without selfishness. The children all studied hard at school, like their lives depended on it—probably because their lives really do depend on it. As Bonnie Ellison, the resident manager, told me, “It’s not easy out there.” Hers is the epitome of tough love: an American who grew up in Kathmandu, she is arming them with the skills and attitude they need to survive and thrive in Nepali society. I left Ama Ghar with the strong conviction that these spirited, bilingual, ambitious kids could very well shape the future of this beautiful, struggling nation.

On my way home to San Francisco, I stopped through Tokyo to visit my parents and had the opportunity to make a quick stop at an orphanage there. It was late in the afternoon, and none of the kids were around. School uniforms and comic books were strewn across the floors of the oversized bedrooms shared by pairs of teenagers. The director, a gentle, large man with thick glasses, told us apologetically that the kids had dropped off their books and gone back out. “All our children have severe social issues,” he said. “They can’t stay in the same room together for more than a few minutes before a fight erupts. I’ve been here for 25 years. Back in the day, it was indeed like a big family; the kids used to go on outings together and take care of each other. But these days, that’s not the case at all.”

One might expect the children in the Tokyo orphanage to be happier than the children in Nepal. After all, they have cash, video games, washing machines for laundry, and a huge urban playground to goof around in (the Nepali kids carry no cash, can’t afford electronics, and wash their own clothes by hand). But the kids in Tokyo aren’t happier. They can’t get along with each other, never mind anyone else. There is no semblance of family life at the Tokyo orphanage. It felt like a repository for unwanted children.

In many ways, Nepali culture of today closely resembles pre-tech revolution Japan. The way the aunties at Ama Ghar prepared food in the kitchen or washed clothes in buckets of cold water reminded me of the way my Japanese grandmother went about her daily chores—it’s something about the pacing and the commitment to what may seem like the most menial tasks that made me nostalgic for my childhood. I see many similarities between Japanese and Nepali culture. They’re both traditionally patriarchal societies, with heavy Buddhist influences; children are taught to respect and care for elders, and society as a whole values community over individualism. But an unfortunate side effect of economic growth was that some of these cultural values have been compromised—if not ignored outright, they have at the very least become marginalised.

At Ama Ghar, the aunties live and sleep in the same rooms as the children. This type of setup is common in Nepali homes today and was also common in Japanese homes not too many generations ago. At the orphanage in Tokyo, all staff members go home in the evening, except one night a week when they’re required to supervise the children on rotation. I believe this makes a big difference in how home-like each of these two places feels to the kids who live there. I believe the disintegration of these kinds of long-held values has something to do with the unhappiness the Tokyo orphanage was sheltering. Maybe the Tokyo orphanage could use a values lesson from its own history or from its counterpart in Nepal.

(You can make a donation to Ama Ghar at Ama-Foundation.org or by calling 5560652.)

Katayama is a magazine journalist in San Francisco and an editor at the technology and culture blog BoingBoing.

Posted on: 2010-03-20 12:00

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