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Published: March 26th 2008
I am so tired of taxi drivers trying to charge me the “foreigner rate.” Yesterday, I came out of Bhat Bhateni with a bunch of bags on the way to the Fulbright office to run a session. I hopped in the first taxi that came along, and it was only after he pulled away that I noticed his meter wasn’t running. I asked him about it, and he rattled off in Nepali something I couldn’t understand. So when we finally pulled up outside the office, he tried to charge me 200 Rs (when it should have been 65 Rs at the most)! I yelled at him in Nepali about how expensive it was and that he was charging me the foreigner rate. So he quickly dropped it to 100 Rs. But, knowing that this was still taking advantage, I continued to argue with him. But he wouldn’t budge, and he was starting to get angry. And of course I didn’t have change. So I threw a 100 Rs bill at him at got out.
Today I got in a taxi outside of Fulbright and realized halfway through that his meter was running double time. So I told him to pull over, paid him 50 Rs (even though the meter said 85) and got out, walked a few yards, and got in another taxi. This foreigner may be white, but she’s not stupid!
I had another driver yesterday who was actually very sweet. As soon as I got in the car he started with the usual banter: “Which country are you from? How long are you staying in Nepal? Are you married?” (all in Nepali, of course, once he realized I could speak a little.) I told him my boyfriend is back in the U.S., so he asked if I had a boyfriend in Nepal.
No.
I could be your Nepali boyfriend.
Arko din, arko din (Another day.), I said laughing as I got out.
The last couple of days have been very busy running morning and afternoon sessions of my program. I already reached my goal number of participants. And every day the women ask me new questions I never thought they’d ask. Today we talked about intersexed people, circumcision and how it relates to HIV, sex during menses and whether you can get pregnant, and urinary tract infections. Women continue to be very excited about the program. Today I had 2 women who run an HIV hotline at FPAN tell me how valuable the program was for them, and they requested a manual so that they can do this program for people in their own communities.
Which is brilliant, actually. Mary and I are already planning to apply for big funding to run a clinical trial of the program, and if we do it by training community leaders, it could potentially be self-sustaining. Several women even stayed after the program today talking about how even though they work as nurses in the training hospital, they are still learning so much from the program. Even though everyone keeps telling me that women in the villages need this sort of training the most, it’s becoming ever more apparent that even educated women in Kathmandu can benefit from the program—because sexual education is still severely lacking.
Deepti and I also made a trip to FPAN today. We were supposed to start interviewing women who work in the sex industry (massage parlors, cabin restaurants, dance bars), but it turns out they were all at a training today. But we had an informal interview with two women working for an NGO that trains such women in other job skills so that they can get out of sex work. We have another appointment for Monday to actually interview the sex workers, so we’ll see. But our talk with the other two women was very informative.
According to the women, many of the women working in the sex industry in Kathmandu come from the villages. They migrated here because of the conflict or because they came with their husbands who were in search of work, later to be left by him with children to feed and no income. Most are illiterate. Most of them are also forced to do sex work in addition to their job, particularly in the massage parlors.
The massage parlors are particularly interesting to me because I do not know much about them. According to these women, all women working in massage parlors (the ones in Thamel for foreigners, not the one I go to at the Ambassador), are expected to perform sex work as part of the service. It is not clear whether this means a blow job or actual intercourse—I asked but they didn’t seem to understand the question. The “massages” cost about 3,000-4,000 Rs, and the women only keep 25% of that (which is actually a very high wage, but still little of what is earned by the act). The customers are mostly wealthy Indian business men, which is particularly scary considering the high rate of HIV in India. Other foreigners also take advantage of the services, but according to these women it’s mostly Indians.
They also told me that the customers at cabin restaurants and dance bars are often army officials, police, and business men. In fact, many army officials and police own the places, or they are run by their wives, so they avoid getting in trouble with the law. Places that are not owned by law enforcement require that the owner pay “protection fees” to the police. And in the massage parlors in particular, the women are often forced to offer free services with the threat of being thrown in jail. In the dance restaurants, women are often given very hard liquor (“raksi”—a local moonshine) to drink so that they get nice and drunk, strip completely naked, and remember very little the next day. I asked if there were drugs in the alcohol, but they didn’t seem to know.
The two women we spoke with were only 18—they both left their villages because they had “more than one mother,” meaning their fathers took multiple wives. They both wanted to work in dance bars in order to make quick money. The one woman met the president of the NGO before she even started the job and said that the woman saved her from it. Now she is vice president and is working on her bachelor’s in population studies and sociology. The other woman worked in a dance restaurant for a few days before meeting the president. She is now the NGO’s treasurer and is working on her bachelor’s in journalism. Both women were very well poised and mature for their age. They both live above the NGO office.
So hopefully on Monday I’ll actually have a chance to interview women currently working in the industry. They promised 8 women for us. Hell, even 6 would make for a good paper with the little bit of ethnographic work I’ve done. Regardless, our informal interview was very helpful.
Now I’m at Chez Caroline (again!) waiting to meet a couple of friends for a very expensive meal. I might end up blowing $20 tonight!
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Mahtab
non-member comment
Good
Good to read.