There was plenty to keep me amused in Gumda, despite the lack of electricity and English speakers. I taught in the school six days a week and usually did some unofficial lessons too. I spent a lot of time drinking tea and holding odd conversations in three languages (plus many hand gestures and a good deal of mime). I collected oral histories and generally investigated the different village customs. I read a bit, played cards and chess a bit, played cricket and volleyball with the kids (their favourite games), went for the occasional walk to nearby villages and mountains, and sang and danced on demand.
I think we've talked before about reading in/appropriate books while travelling. The book I took up to the village was The Bugatti Queen by Miranda Seymour, which is an interesting biography about Helle Nice. She was famous between the world wars, first as a starlet then as a racing driver, but died in obscurity. It actually made me consider a career as a racing driver, until I remembered that it isn't like that any more and F1 is incredibly dull. Still, seemed like a good ambition to harbour whilst in a place where there nearest road is two days walk away. Heh.
Teaching at the school, as previously discussed, was fairly straight forward once you overcame the translation problems but there were still cultural differences. Now, the tet book was written by the Nepalese government and had plenty of entertaining SPAG errors. It also amused me that we taught 'i is for ice cream' and 'j is for jam' but none of the children knew what ice cream or jam are. For educational purposes, we got a jar of jam from the shop to show the kids. This was even more amusing as even the shop lady didn't know what jam was or that she had it in stock until we pointed it out. It looked like it'd been sitting on the shelf for a while and it wouldn't surprise me if no one in the village has ever eaten it. How the hell it came to be in the shop I guess I'll never know.
I got into the habit of going to bed early as there was little to do once it got dark. Once I got into living on 'village time', I found I was wwaking up pretty early too and took to taking early morning walks to watch the sun rise from the top of the hill. With the lack of electricity, the stars would be really clear and bright when I got up (around 5am) and the greatest sources of light pollution were the moon adn my torch. It was great. The village is so surrounded by mountains that the sun appears to rise quite late. Still, even before it gets above the horizon, you can see shafts of light start to illuminate far away mountain tops. My favourite view was the one towards the Ganesh Mountains, so called because they're supposed to look like an elephant. I suppose they do, in the sense that elephants are big and grey, but beyond that there's not much of a resemblence. Still, they mountains are still a beautiful sight at any time of the day, but especially at dawn before the snow melts.
Gumda and the surrounding area are pretty interesting in terms of their beliefs. For a start, they believe in yeti who are five feet tall, have pointy heads and backwards feet. It is a predominately Buddhist area, but they have their own form of Buddhism. Not only do they celebrate festivals and perform rituals in a slightly different way, they also have their own Llama. They have a very strong belief in ancesteral spirits and offer them food every day to keep them happy. They also believe in witchcraft. When people or animals get sick, or children have bad dreams, or really anything goes wrong, the people consider that either the ancesteral spirits are unhappy or it is the work of a witch. Accusations of witchcraft should not be taken lightly. Witches - which are called 'boxie' - are still driven from villages and even killed form time to time.
The people who placate angery ancesteral spirits and fight against the evil powers of witchcraft are the jakari - the witch doctors. It is always a part time job as they only get paid in 'roxie', the local tipple made from fermented grain. Sometimes it is almost tasteless just with an aftertaste of brackish water, sometimes it tastes like rotting cereal. It depends on the batch. Still, it's a big favourite amongst locals who will always offer it to any guests who go to their house, and they'll always offer some to the spirits and a bottle or two to the jakari.
When the jakari are called to a house, they communicate with either the spirits of the family's ancesters or with the spirit of the 'victim', who will tell them what is going on. They go into a trance and, the people believe, can be considered as gods whilst in this state. Once they've diagnosed the problem, they can do the appropriate ritual to solve the problem. For my observances, this usually involved a lot of chanting, burning herbs and some kind of sacrifice, usually a chicken. At the beginning of the ritual, the chicken would be alive and well but waved around a lot. Water or rice would be tipped on it and, from time to time, it would be put firmly on it's back in a circle of rice and sacred symbols. It would usually stay on it's back, stunned, for a minute or two before it would start twitching... then make a sudden bid for freedom. I saw a number of birds leg it out of the house and have to be chased and re-caught so the ritual can continue. In the end, however, it was always beheaded as the spirits and the witches require blood to be appeased. They only needed to sacrifice the blood, though, and the rest of the chicken was always used to feed the family for the net few days. It it's really serious, sometimes a goat is sacrificed. If that failed, the family often turned to Christianity - there was a small church in the village whose congregation was made up of people who's relatives had been miraculously cured. However, should that also fail then the family might trek to the nearest town with a hospital, carrying the sick person in a large basket.
