Yesterday we visited with and briefly interviewed one party to the Creation Story of the Little Sisters Fund.

It’s a sweet story that I don’t want to spoil here, but Bindhaya was the first girl that Trevor Patzer was introduced to after he asked Usha Acharya how he might help the country of Nepal.

We had met Bindhaya before, a couple times since we’ve been here, and it was always a pleasure. She’s a quiet, slight girl with thick glasses and quick, funny-lively eyes. Behind the quiet, always a joke. A spark.

Bindhaya has graduated from school, and is now studying in the health care world, and working on a kind of nursing internship. We followed her on her rounds yesterday at the tiny hospital where she works.

The video we shot at the hospital was really the object of our meeting with Bindhaya, but the morning we spend in her house was equally brilliant for us.

We had a wonderful interview with her mother, Indira, who told about the difficulty of raising daughters without family support–on account of having dropped out of school and gotten married at 17 in a love marriage.

Even today arranged marriages are the norm, and 20-some years ago, it was quite a scandal. She laughed about it in the interview (it’s easy to see where Bindhaya’s spark comes from), but it was clear that she is someone who’d endured some hardship.

This was the interview that convinced us we could rely upon Nepali speakers responding in their mother tongue. Indira-didi told us about how having her daughters’s education supported has enabled them to have enough money to care for their health, and to live in a decent home. 

She related, in a way that choked up all three of us (Nutan, Amy and me), how genuinely grateful she is for the support of the Little Sisters Fund, and how it is her fondest wish and full expectation that her daughters will ‘give back’ by going to do their good works in villages like she grew up in. She spoke of the good that needs doing in places with no schools, no hospitals, no running water or electricity.

Quite a while into our stay in Nepal, we were finally served some traditional, mom-made Nepali food in Indira-didi’s kitchen. About time, Nepal!

After our interview with her, I followed Indira to her simple, warm (and beautifully sunlit) kitchen, where I filmed her preparing some food. I figured it was for the family, until she served it and insisted we sit and eat.

Joy! Dal bat! Dried, pickled, pepper-rubbed radish slices. New Food! Made with care! From ingredients grown in the common patch of soil just down the hill from their house.

Most of the formal education in Nepal takes place in English–this is true (we understand) whether students are in government schools or private schools. Nepali language study is the lone exception.

The Little Sisters Fund girls are all products of this system, and for the most part, the older ones particularly can communicate reasonably well in English. The language situation is in this regard about as we’d guessed before coming.

But in our planning, with this in mind, we had figured we would be able to elicit pretty meaningful interview responses in English, even from those who aren’t conversationally fluent.

After about a dozen short interview/on-camera responses, and a couple of longer ones, it has become clear to us that our subjects are just not comfortable enough speaking in English to give us any kind of emotion or inflection–other than that of fear about messing up the language test that they seem to consider an interview.

So we’re scrapping English, and planning to conduct our interviews in Nepali. Of course we will have the aid of Nutan, who even before she had ever done a minute’s interpretation/translation for interviewing had a great grasp of what it would entail.

As I write I’m in the ‘business center’ of our hotel and Amy and Nutan are upstairs working on our Mac, logging and figuring out a translation-in-editing protocol. It’s clearly going to be a labor intensive move, but the difference between the interviews in which girls spoke in English, and seeing them speak in Nepali… let’s just say the Nepali is going to win the day.

It was disappointing at first when we realized we’d have to do this. But then we realized how much fun it would be for either of us to be interviewed–and asked to give heartfelt, meaningful responses–in Spanish, or Arabic (languages we can both kind of communicate in). Yeee!

Okay, girls, we’ll give you this one. Helping the case for Nepali was “Living Goddess”, a documentary we saw as part of the South Asian Travelling Film Festival. It was a really interesting film, and the producers had both tremendous access with their key subjects and killer footage of the violence-in-the-streets of the political upheaval in Kathmandu in 2006.

But the point is that nobody in the film spoke in English, and we were still quite aware of what went on, how people felt, and even some nuance in the film.

Duh: Subtitles. It was a head-slapping moment. Of course they work. We just kind of needed convincing. Mostly, probably, to get over the part about how much more work it’ll be.