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The Namche Conference: May 24-26,
2003
Sessions Report |
Session 6. 3 – 4:30 pm: Namche Youth Group presentation (Venue: Namche Bakery)
You came very far, so we would like to give a little information about Namche. Right now they call it Namche, but in Sherpa it's called Namoche or Nawoche, not Namche. Namoche means, we have a spring water here, from that spring water it got the name. We don't have any written history about Sherpa. My great grandfather, my mother's grandfather, died when he was 94 year, when I was very young he told me many things. First they tried to settle where the national park headquarters is now, but because of the water they put it down here. And my great grandfather used to tell me that Namche had a very dense forest surrounding here. Very very big - trees biggers than this [arms outspread]. So if you would like to see some old houses, I can show you my great grandfather's house... the floor planks and the roof beams are like this [arms outspread]. One time I asked how they brought the wook... [and he said] it was here, nearby. In the old days, before the tourists came, all the Namche people were traders. They use to go to Nangpa and to Kering [?]. They use to take from here zopkio (a crossbreed that the Tibetans use for plowing their fields), buffalo hides, dye, and needles, and all kinds of things from India and Nepal, and from there they used to bring wool, meat, salt , and other things. The bigger traders used to go to Calcutta to sell their wool and other things, and the small traders used to trade here. Namche was a trading place since a long long time ago. Forty years ago there wasn't a bazaar like this. People used to come down, any day. So they had their own kind of party, people knew each other, so they used to bring down some rice and millet and corn, and they went in their own - in Nepali they call it "istal" [stall?] -- they went in their houses. They sold the corn and all these things, and from Tibet they used to bring salt, and they exchanged it here. In those days, besides a very few in the Lama family which used to be very powerful, people from down valley could not go to Tibet. Tibetans could not go further down there. So they used to trade in Namche. Forty years ago, during the reign of King Birendra, there was a big administrator who started the Saturday market. So this business continued until about 1980 or 1982. There were two guys, [...] and Mr. Ong Gombu [?] - they were the last traders who went to Tibet. Because of tourism increasing day by day, Sherpas were diverted to tourism. After 1982, 83, 85, Tibetan people started to come to Namche, now they are bring Tibetan [...]. Some days there were 100, 200 yaks... in October, or in [spring]. Right now they bring meat, clothes, salt... [which] Sherpas used to do. "Sherpa" means "shar-wa" or "shar-pa"-- people from the east - we are from Kham, in eastern Tibet. My name is Ang Dorje. If someone asks "Who is Ang Dorje?" they tell my clan and everyone knows that. We have a clan system, and we cannot marry each other in the same clan -- whether it is four or five generations, or where it is from the eastern part of Nepal, if it is the same clan, we cannot marry. And we are pretty liberal about castes. In there is a caste system in Nepal. But in Sherpa the lower caste people can come to any Sherpa house and have tea ... there is no restriction for that. In Namche there are around 90 families, and about four or five blacksmith families -- permanent residents, with houses. Blacksmiths came here in the old days to make tools for plowing and everything. We had to have blacksmiths, it was very important. So the people gave land, and that's how the blacksmiths came here. And we have at least 13 Tibetan families that have been living here for a long time, 25 or 30 years, some of them were born born here. All of them are shopkeepers and souvenir sellers. They don't have a house and they don't own anything, but they do business. And we have one permanent Tamang, only one Tamang family living here. Other than that we have quite a few Nepali families living here, for business purposes. In Namche we have the SNP headquarters, army headquarters, bank office, police office, health post, dental clinic, Tibetan medical clinic, public telephone booth (we used to have telephones in all the houses, but now we don't), we have the KBC [Khumbu Bijuli Company] office, we have the SPCC office, we have beside our youth group another "Gomba Administering Committee" which looks after the gomba - the monastery. Women are very active here - we can see in business, in house and [...] they are in the same category as men. But in our group we have very few women. They don't have their own group or co-op. In Namche we have festivals and ceremonies year round. New Year falls around ceremony. And we have another big festival called Dumji, coming very soon, in July. It is mostly a religious festival, karma dance and so on. Monks from Tengboche come here and they give a blessing and they pray for long life, [...] we have Sherpa dancing at night. And Pangye [?] is a kind of tea party. We get together with our same age group mostly... [...] and we eat for three or four days. In the summer, in August, we don't have too much work, so it's a nice festival. And three times a year we have fasting in the gomba, so if anybody wants to, they can go there and pray and fast. It happens on special occasions, like when Buddha was enlightened. And we have Tengyur. It's a text book [?], a Buddhist scripture, it consists of 108 volumes. It takes 20 people 15 days to read. We collect moneyi from all the villages, monks from Thame, Namche, Tengboche come here and pray for us, read for us, and go once in a while to there, get a vision [...?] Every five years we have Tengyur, it's more detailed about this Buddhist scripture. It's 216 volumes, so it takes a lot of time, and it is very costly, so we are only able to do in five years one time. So that way the money comes from the local people. Beside that all this prayer happens in all the Sherpa houses, it depends on their time, their mood, their money, you know, so we do that often. In the Sherpa calendar we have only 360 days, so that's why there's no correct ...like when Mani Rimdu falls, it goes 15 days up and down. So we have a lot of complaints for that, too, because the tour operators want to have the exact date. But actually it comes out to 365 days. Some days we jump: like today is the eighth, tomorrow is not the ninth but the tenth. Sometimes we double: today is the twelfth, tomorrow is the twelfth too. [...] Do you have any questions? Ray Basson: Won't you just tell us something more about the economic base of the community, and how that interacts with education? Ang Dorje:Well, I have our tourism plan. ... We have a very good school due to [...] We have two buildings, and we are going to build another building. But we have a very bad - not bad, I would say unqualified teachers... compared to Kathmandu education It's not sufficient now. So for instance a child from fourth grade here would drop one grade in Kathmandu. So there is a big gap. And we've had a lot of discussions about that. We have a management committee and the government are trying to give power to that committee, how to run the schools. So we're in the process of doing that, and it should be okay in two or three months. Once it's okay, we have to [...] everything. Number one, what we want to do is bring good teachers. We'll find 20 or 30 friends, we'll run this school with our own money for six or seven months. Once the education gets better we'll ask all the parents to pay the teachers' fee and so on. We know who can pay and who cannot pay. For those who cannot pay, we'll subsidize it or make it free or whatever. Education is very important because, if we don't do anything right now, after 20 years it's going to be a very complicated situation here. Once families can have development and very good schools and all opportunities [in Kathmandu], those who are left here will be very far behind in education. If we don't give equal opportunity, in the future the economy will be very different, and that will make the society a not very good community. To have a good community you have to have the same opportunity. Right now the problem, there are many small children who are just playing. So they took them to the Kathmandu boarding schools. So number one, when they are in boarding school in Kathmandu they don't speak Sherpa language; number two, the boarding school food is not very good, and they don't get the love or care they should. Our first target is to get a very good educational system for the first five grades, so even if someone wants to [transfer later] to Kathmandu at least the local kids should stay in Namche for four or five years. Greta Rana: I wanted to ask you something about the clans. Are they still the as they were when - - or, within memory anyway -- are they still the same clans that came [...]? Ang Dorje: In my knowledge, in Tibet there are no clans. They just originated here. I'm not very sure, but in Tibet they don't have clans ... in many places... but among the Sherpas we do. Greta Rana: So how many are there? Ang Dorje: We have four main clans and many sub-clans. I'd like to talk about what the young people, the Youth Group are doing in Namche. Clubs are not new in Namche. About twenty years ago there was a club, Saturday Club [?], Sagarmatha Club - the name changes. The priorities have changed. In those days they used to build prayer [walls], they used to bring in water sources, and they were more interested in cultural things ... dancing, and so on. Right now we have a different kind of challenge. Four or five years ago, the biggest problem here used to be garbage. So we brought the whole village together in one location and we declared that in one year Namche village would be litter-free. We monitored, and all our members committed 22 to 28 days per year. In the first couple of weeks, we collected 17 or 20 sacks of rubbish. And it was increasing, increasing, and within a year it was okay. Now if you take a sack around Namche, you cannot fill it. The situation is getting better, but we cannot have volunteers every week. So we decided to do something different, to raise money. For that we went to the VDC. At that time the VDC was active. They used to collect money from the marketplace, 70,000 per year. They made a profit. Instead of making a profit, we told them, we'll collect the money voluntarily -- every month two people will collect money from the merchants. We discussed it with the market people, too. We told them it's for their sanitation, their toilets. They said it was okay. And we collect 50 rupees each from the teahouses there. Not inside Namche. Within that area there are 42 teahouses. In some houses there are four or five teahouses. That area didn't have a toilet, and a lot of teahouses didn't have a toilet either. So after that we employed three permanent staff-members to take care of the whole area. And we built a running-water toilet. There is always one guy, 8 hours a day, to look after the toilet. So far it is running very smoothly. You can go and see - I think it is one of the best public toilets. They built many toilets in area,, all the way to Everest, all these things failed, because there was a proper cleaning system. We are the first to raise the question about the bottles -- ban the bottles -- we raised it many times in meetings. So we would like to thank the national park for implementing the law. But when you pass the law, it's not enough. Even after they banned the bottles, people used to drink the bottles, because the bottles first went up [?] So we went to the bazaar many times to monitor it, and we went often to every tea shop to check. I think still they have bottles that come but not much. You can see the dust-bins here... we finance the SPCC, 50% comes from our money. It is under the supervision of our Youth Group. We decided that it is not only enough only in Namche, so we went to the base camp, and the passes ... Dingboche, Pheriche, all this area... We gathered the people, and we worked with them, and we convinced them that it was their job. Although SPCC is managing the rubbish, Everest wasn't there- [end of recording] ... they are managing their rubbish
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