In Feb. 2013, I turned down a, international teaching job offer to follow through with my plans to return to Nepal for good, after more than two decades abroad. I had many reasons for doing so. One was to see if Nepal was still my home, and, if not, if I could make it my home.
My attempt at inspiring students at Dhaulagiri Boarding School in Jomsom, a village in my home District of Mustang, to pursue their dreams, to break out of the limitations and constraints imposed on them by Nepalese culture and society.
Retirement celebrations were a big deal in the our village of Tangbe in Mustang District. But before 1990, even with a sizeable number of the people living in Pokhara, I don't think many held their celebrations in the city because of the shame they felt in being ethnic Tibetan. Things have changed a lot since then. Here's a glimpse into a celebration that I attended last month.
Since 1990, little by little, my people from the little village of Tangbe in Mustang District have been reclaiming their identity. Here's one of the ways they are doing that.
Climate change, which the President-elect Donald Trump calls a hoax, is real...painfully real in many parts of the world, including in the district of Mustang where I come from in Nepal.
The cave dwellings and secret temples are some of the cultural heritages of Mustang district, the district I am from. A National Geographic team explored and studied some of those caves earlier this century. Embedded within the blog post are videos of those expeditions into the caves.
Want to learn a bit about the plight of ethnic Tibetans in Mustang, the district I am from, and those of Tibetan refugees in Nepal? Watch the embedded Al Jazeera video.
The first experience Mustang had with development aid was in the nineties, some of which I saw first hand. And they failed miserably! Part of the reason was the condescension with which Kathmandu has always treated Mustang.
The influx of tourists to Mustang bring little benefits to the local people. On the contrary, the visitors not only have little regard for the ways and values of the locals but also question and threaten the most important aspect, and therefore, the very basis of their way of life: their religion (their spirituality).
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Our political leaders and the Kathmandu elite have always been arrogant, self-righteous and patronizing when it came to the way they treat marginalized Nepalese.
Here's an example of that going all the way back to the early nineties when they opened and served up Mustang district as consumer products to trekkers and travellers.
Is it any wonder they are treating the people in the southern plains as they are now?!