31. A fishing line or a fish?

While you are engaging in the practice of giving 

you should do so with great happiness and 

radiance on your face. One should practice giving 

with a smile and with mental uprightness.

So saith Dalai.  


This is a lesson I needed to learn today.

Luda and I went to the Pashupantinath temple this morning, so I could show her the sadhus. There were some glorious faces, a new palette of colours and designs, some impressive headgear, a Hanuman with a long tail and red face, the usual Saturday morning cremation rush hour complete with weeping widows and shaved sons, gawping tourists, begging women, insistent junk jewellery touts, Bogmati bottom scrapers, wheedling guides, and a few psycho agressive semi naked babu sadhus wearing multicoloured top hats and brandishing tridents through the choking dust of cremation pyres and fires. Just your average Nepalese morning.

Luda didn't want to come with me to the zoo, to the see the street children that Monika had coralled from various dispossessed points of the city. I didn't press her:  I've been here six weeks and am hardened to the tragedies and dark corners of this city;  Luda is still in semi rapture. Let her enjoy as long as she can.  

She befriended a sadhu or two; where ever she stopped to draw breath, she was surrounded by boys trying to sell her something.  Or just gawp at her blonde hair and blue eyes. Or try to stand close to absorb some of her angel dust!  So we dropped her off, and my taxi continued through the relative quiet of a Saturday closed-shop morning which meant that cows could cross streets without becoming kebabs and shopkeepers could climb on each others shoulders to erect neon signs.  

P's and Queues

The zoo was ghastly. Queues of sweating visitors squabbled and pecked and poked and shoved to get tickets: three heads at at time tried to fit through the ticket window. Only after I'd loudly retorted "Why don't you just climb right inside the *&&^ing  ticket window!" did the people move for a second to let the White Sahib with the dust mask, Paris Hilton sunglasses, Decent Straw Hat, We Could buy a House with the Cost of That Camera,  and Kathmandu multicoloured hand woven water bottle carrier ($2.40) buy her ticket that cost ten time more than the locals. I had to run the gamut of lapis sellers, peanut vendors, fortune tellers, pink candy floss and balloon carriers, squeaky bears and knock-off pink crocs before I reached the gate.


I don't like zoos. I could smell elephant and stressed animals and urine.  I was immediately besieged by a dusty, stoned mob of dishevelled children begging for rupees. I asked them:  "Where Monika".  All shook their heads and asked for rupees again, apparently not understanding me.  Monika soon appeared, and the children clung to her, switching their requests for dahl baht, rides, drink.  She spoke to them in English. They understood. She'd gone round to the various places the kids hang out, and spread the word about the zoo.  Eighty five turned up today, all of whom were transported in a bus that was designed to seat 35; the smaller children sitting on the laps of the older ones. 


I don't know how to write the blog from here without sounding like a .... white colonialist princess with her values in the wrong place.  But this blog is about being honest - so if I have been able to be honest with my emotions concerning D and all the rest, I must be true to myself here as well.  So please forgive me if I do come across as a white colonialist memsahib princess who lacks empathy. 


I've written and erased and written and erased and written and erased.  Let me start by saying I was confronted. I was horrified.  I was appalled.  I was angry.  I was upset.  I was dismayed. Swarms of these desperate, filthy, hungry, stoned, emotionally orphaned children in battered clothes that were either three sizes too big or two sizes too small, or had torn arms and legs, weaved between nuclear families in pretty saris and clean shirts and party dresses having a family day out.   Who loved them, cleaned them, fed them, or taught them social skills?

Wondering what it's like to have a parent

Those not cruising or squabbling were sniffing glue under bushes, or inhaling something noxious from plastic bags.  Many were so stoned they were unable to focus and some tripped over, to lie glazed on the dusty, sparse grass. When the time came for their one ride of the day, they mobbed the oldest boy in the group who was the "organiser" ... he had to keep moving, his hands above his head holding the tickets, as the children skirmished around him for their valuable piece of paper. 


I looked at Monika, a lovely, radiant young woman with an impossible task on her back, as she organised their food, their transport, and ensured that the children kept relatively together.  They hung on her, they made demands of her, they interrupted her, they pulled her arms, her backpack and her clothes. She never lost her composure for a second.  I felt luminous in my transparency, distinctly uncomfortable about being in their midst, wondering how a group like this can ever be helped, when they have been constantly sexually abused and constantly abuse themselves with substances, and when every person they encounter rejects or abuses them in some way. 

Monika coralling the kids at the zoo

Yvonne sent the money to me with a request that I should give it to a cause here of my choice.  I first chose the school because it was concrete. Then I vacillated and decided to give it to Monika for her zoo visit because the gift would have immediate effects, whereas the school, at this stage, is still a nebulous concept.

Monika and street baby

Then when I was at the zoo watching this melee from an emotional vacuum, and I'd given Monika the money, I thought:  what difference has this day trip to the zoo made to the kids' lives?  They'll be out there again tonight, sniffing glue and giving sexual gratification to paedophile tourists; they'll be hungry again, and begging again. Monika's soon to be achieved goal is a safe house in which they can live, be schooled and be taken off the streets - but as she acknowledged, there is the persistent problem of peer pressure.

Sharing the parental load

The smallest child in the group has just started walking.  He or she, together with two very young siblings, have been abandoned by their parents and the street kids now care for them.  Not five minutes goes by without someone picking the baby up, wiping its nose, putting its shoe back on, hauling it over a back or on shoulders, or cradling or cuddling or wet nursing it. 

Cleaning little hands

When all the kids were queueing for, and having, their one ride, this little tot was plonked next to me under a dusty tree.  He cried when I touched him.  He looked utterly miserable when his enormous extended parental unit screamed and whooped and shrieked and whistled as they rode the spinning top. Tears brimmed from his sticky eyes;  his little lip trembled and his little hands reached out to these kids.  He was filthy from head to toe.  Luda had given me a bag of chocolates to give the kids: I gave one to this baby.  He had no idea what is was. He refused to lick it and was visibly upset when the chocolate melted on his fingers - he probably thought it was poo.  

Chocolate? What's that?

When one of the girls had finished her ride, she came and reclaimed the baby, cleaned his hands with some bougainvillea flowers, and hoiked him on her hip. He stopped snivelling, and she wiped his nose with the he of her filthy skirt.  Then she made a snaking motion with her hands and pointed to the toy train, and opened her fingers twice to show me the number 10.

Ticket to Ride

Ten rupees for a ticket for the toy train for the girls to take this baby, who hadn't had a ticket to ride.  I bought one for each of the girls. They queued for twenty minutes. When their turn came, the bossy woman in the pink sari who was strapping one of the girls in, removed the baby from her arms. 

The baby started shrieking, so the girl got out, forfeiting her ticket.  I leapt up, said NO, the baby stays with the girl and the girl gets the ride and I'll buy another ticket.  Both got back in.  This is the face of the baby. It looks as if it's going to burst with excitement. It's probably the first time its smiled in ... in ... any time.

Blue eyed blonde Nepalese street baby?

The eighty five children were each fed some dahl baht in a plastic bag, and some momo -steamed chicken and vegetables in soft patty. There wasn't enough food to go around, but the kids sat quietly, and shared what they had.  Afterwards, they went back to glue sniffing.  And back to their streets, to hustle, beg, be paid for sex, be beaten, arrested, abused, starved, kicked and infected.

On my taxi ride back to Thamel, I brooded about the outing, angry at my outward lack of compassion, but realising the physically sick feeling was impotence about the situation, and more anger at a world that can allow this: guilty for being able to spent 250rp on a taxi when the kids get beaten by their pimps if they don't produce 50rp at the end of a day, by any means possible.  

Back in Thamel, I showered, I washed my hair, I scrubbed myself.  I felt as if I had been assaulted, and it was probably in hindsight, by my own white colonialist imperial memsahib princess expectations.  Easy:  Give a kid a meal and some clean clothes and they will stop glue sniffing and hand jobs.  

After my shower, I sat on my bed and downloaded the photos of the day. So many people comment that as a photographer I am so busy seeing life through the lens that I don't see the world as it is happening.  I have always defended this.  Life happens in slices of seconds. 

Having the luxury of reviewing the photos later, there are expressions in faces, and happenings just beyond the frame that we don't catch with the naked eye. I looked closely at the expressions on these kids faces, at their interactions, and I saw something I didn't in the ugly dust of the day.   I saw that behind all their horrors, they were children.  No, they ARE children.  They've been let loose on the street and they have to survive as animals do. But they are CHILDREN.  They have their big or little personalities, and characters and idiosyncracies, and affectations and style.  Look into the eyes of these children;  they speak more than I could ever write.  In the clouds of dust they generated, and their language barriers, and the collective recoils of horror from those who had so much more, it wouldn't have been easy to miss that tiniest spark of hope and humour, still alive, in there, somewhere. I saw it in that small baby, through the grime on its face and the matted hair.  I saw it.  

I wondered about Monika and her huge task.  She's not only up against the children, but up against the glue sellers, the &^*%-ed up tourists who use the kids for the own advantage, the corrupt police and greedy governments, and the people who govern Nepal who remove the children before official visits, so everything looks pristine  ... and normal.

I also fretted about whether the money Yvonne sent should rather have gone to the school, because that would have been concrete.  The only glue there would have been used to stick pretty pictures in books.  I hope.  Then I remembered the look on that baby's face ... the most high risk in the group.  And I didn't mind giving a fish for a day.

In Thamel that evening, after Lu and I had been out for dinner, bought some pashminas and dresses, we were besieged by glue sniffing street children begging for rupees. I recognised them from the zoo.  They didn't recognise me. 

SO, did I give the children a fish, or a fishing line?  Today, I think it was a fish. Monika is working on the fishing line, with her new safe house.  I'm collecting for the fishing line for the village school.