Festival time for rats

Life must be pretty good for rats in Kathmandu at the moment. Garbage collection has stopped for the last week or so as the landfill sites the city council uses have been closed by local residents protesting against them. As a result there are piles of rubbish in the streets and the oil drum at the end of our path is overflowing from the bags all the households in our little cluster have dumped. These mounds of rotting garbage are giving the rats a feast to celebrate the Tihar (Divali / Deepawali) festival, although from the squashed carcasses in the street some have have put food before road safety.

 

From what I've seen in the papers, landfill site is a bit of a grand title for what looks like a field where all the rubbish is dumped before being raked over by rag (plastic or any other recyclable item) pickers. Apparently the local residents are demanding some local infrastructure investment in exchange for using their districts as a dumping ground. Good to see local communities taking on the government, however, according to today's paper, the protest may have been brought to a halt by the Ministry of Local Development sacking the district committee and appointing their own nominees. Not sure this is quite in the new spirit of people's democracy but I guess old habits die hard.

 

In a weeks time we have another (yes, I know the last one only finished a week ago) festival called Tihar. This is what in India is celebrated as Divali, the festival of light. More exciting for us is that Josie and Ben are arriving next Saturday - just a week but it will be great to see them and for them to see our life here. We plan to have a couple of days down in Chitwan National Park so we'll all get to see a bit more of rural Nepal and I think elephant rides are on the itinerary.

 

I've just re-started this after a 2.5 hour break for our weekly load shedding (power cut) - on a Sunday night these are not a major aggravation, Sheila quite enjoys working by candle light and we have one rechargeable lantern + head torches to read by.

 

On the political front, the summit talks continue with mainly positive noises being made by both sides so hopefully we will have a quiet October. Just to be contrary, the Nepalese Chambers of Commerce have called a general strike for Tuesday to protest against lack of government support for entrepreneurs. Unless the buses and taxis join in, I'm not convinced this will have much impact on day to day life.

 

If I can think of anything interesting to write before next week, I'll do another blog, otherwise it will have to wait until after the kids have been and gone - should have some touristy photos then.

 

Cheers

Roshan

 

P.S. As I write this I think John Breach is in Amsterdam slogging his way round a marathon. John - if you read this, well done and I promise the cheque is the post.