One of our newest subjects is of an Untouchable caste. Not entirely coincidentally, she is also one of the top academic performers from the 500 girls or so currently sponsored by the NGO we’re working for.

There is a huge set of prohibitions and sanctions involved in being untouchable. We don’t yet understand even 10% of what that status means. We do understand Shanta can’t have higher caste friends over to play or to study, that she can’t take water from the same fountains as regular folks, that she can’t touch food or drink items destined for others’ lips… All because of her last name, the profession of her forefathers.

Yesterday we visited Shanta in the tiny room (at a guess, I’d say it’s 7′ x 11′) which she shares with her brother, and his wife and daughter. In addition to a social call (we’re visiting as many girls as we can), we were ‘auditioning’ them for inclusion in our film.

That is to say that we were checking them out to see how comfortable they could be with us there; to what degree they could ignore the cameras; how fluidly and compellingly they could speak of their lives; and were they willing to let us into their lives for at minimum a couple of solid days?

This is all a lot to try to glean in a 90 minute visit, but Shanta and her brother passed with flying colors. They demonstrated not just that they didn’t mind having us around, but that they got what we’re doing, and understood how it might help other girls like Shanta. They were clearly auditioning us as well. Sweet!

The question of Shanta’s ‘untouchability’ is one we are optimistic, but far from certain we will be able to address directly in the film. We have some ideas, so stay tuned on that tip. It is something we are endlessly (perhaps morbidly) curious about.

And to put it in blunt terms, we hope that it does come up, and that it comes up big and scary and gross, and that we can leverage this obvious injustice into a compelling argument for supporting organizations like the Little Sisters Fund.

Because by gaining an education, Untouchables can make the jump out of the caste system.

We obviously have a ton more to learn about this whole matter. I hope we will be able to share some of it in a meaningful way.

…thirteen year old farmgirls want to grow up to be farmers, it seems. “If you could do anything you wanted to when you grow up, what would you do?” We asked Saru.

“Probably work in the fields here,” she said. “Well, I love it, and it would give enough time to hang out with my friends.”

Saru’s mother, Kancha didi, whom we also interviewed, spoke with obvious pride about the difficulties she had convincing her husband of the value of educating his daughters, and of the blessings Saru’s education in particular has brought their family.

“She taught me to speak the Nepali language,” she told us (Gokarna is a Newari village, and the many there don’t speak Nepali at all). “She taught me to write the letters, and to sign my name. I am illiterate, but now I can sign my name instead of using a thumbprint when we do any business on the farm.”

Saru’s mother is a kind, warm, solid woman with firelight in her eyes. She loves her daughters and is proud of her son, and has (what we interpreted as) a crystal clear understanding of the primacy of strong women in her world. She is a little leary of her husband, but she seems to make room for the warmth between them as well.

Kancha didi, just after the interview. Her oldest daughter and ridiculous/cute puffy dog look on.

Nutan making nice with Kancha didi, Saru’s mother, prior to our interview.

It was while we were in the field shooting that I got the leech. Apparently they hang out on the grasses, and then when you walk by, they jump onto your legs and crawl up your socks until they find leg. I’m guessing it was a little guy–never saw him, but had a little sucker hole on my leg and a patch of dried blood at the end of the day. Leeches. We’re so cool, huh?

Yesterday was a big workday for us. Out the door at 7:45am, back in the door at 7:45pm. We were met by a cleaver-wielding drunk, bitten by a leech, took our lunch at an hourly-rental ‘love hotel’, had a grapefruit sized rock hurtle down the hill where we were interviewing and smash into the precious Leica M8.

We were also directly exposed to the Nepali education system for the first time. We visited two schools where Little Sisters attend, and neither Amy nor I was quite prepared for the experience. That is to say, I think we kind of knew, on paper, what to expect–grubby, windowlit rooms packed full of eager kids in uniforms being made to copy (and occasionally read aloud) indiscriminately selected passages from books which seem to have little insidem at the hands of teachers who literally may not have more than a 10th grade education.

And indeed this is what we saw. We have agreed that since Amy is the education specialist in our family, she’ll talk about matters of curriculum and education style. That saves me the trouble of writing my impressions of the teaching we saw, which would for the most part not reflect well upon the administrators and teachers who were gracious enough to allow us full access in their facilities and classrooms.

At the end of the day, as we were headed off to sleepyland, Amy asked what was my favorite part of the day. I answered that it must have been the moment we walked onto the first campus. I was rolling tape, following Saru as she arrived at school. And I was reeling.

It was immediately clear from the facility that this was a place where EVERYTHING we saw would be new and interesting to us. Anthropology Scott and Photography Scott just got switched on, hardcore. I had to  overcome a binding sensation brought on by the overwhelming rush of pictures I wanted to make.

There is so much cultural information contained in places like this. I am a great believer in the ability of photographs to help decode the meaning of a place. It’s not an unlimited, literal decoding, but an interpretive one, subjective, impressionistic. It is not the work of a morning.

This cut paper stone hanger was literally the only decoration we saw in the whole school.

The blackboards consist of a plaster-smoothed area on the concrete or cinder-block walls, with some black paint splashed on.

Permit me a long moment of artistic woo-woo? The collective weight of the photographs that I saw and could not take in that first school nearly imploded my eyes. You know that feeling when you press your thumbs into your eyelids and you get the crescendoing psychedelic show? And you’re afraid it’ll stay with you long after you stop? Felt like that.

I grew anxious with a fear that I would not be able to do the place any kind of justice–moving as we were, quickly, making video of what we saw with scant time to consider the shots or the way they fitted meaning into the frame.

This “time thing” is a luxury we are constantly straining against. We are blessed with a good  chunk of time here, but we also have an infinity of possible stories to identify, connect with, and distill. Do we go wide, or deep? What serves our artistic and documentary and do-gooder mandates better?

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.