Complaints: Nepali things

Two complaints, among many.

First, I was watching a news video about agriculture in Nepal earlier today. It was about how silk production in a certain district had significantly gone down. The reasons given were many -- lack of technical assistance, disease etcetera but the one they really focused on and the farmers seemed to feel really passionate about was this: that the government didn't have subsidies for silk farmers though it had promised to subsidize it. So they were not really farming for the silk, they were farming for the subsidies and once the subsidies dried up, they moved on to a different item to milk the subsidies from.

Second, this is from years ago, when I had this awesome laptop-share idea to provide Computer education in schools in Kathmandu. Schools didn't have enough computers for students even though they were charging the full amount: an investment in a full computer lab didn't make financial sense for them. So my idea was to collect a 'cluster' of schools, have a bunch of medium-range laptops rotate between them over a week, along with a computer teacher if they wanted one. It'd be cheaper for schools the students would get what they were paying for and whoever was renting the laptops out would be recovering the initial cost in less than a year. I needed people to work with me in Nepal so I asked folks from KCM. They were pretty excited about the entire idea until I explained to them where the money came from. The schools would pay us money, I explained to them, the money that the students are paying to use the computers would come to us and we'd provide us the service. They were confused disappointed disgusted even. Take money, they gasped! We thought this was a non-profit project where the computers would be given for free to schools or somehow someone would just shuttle around the laptops free of cost to the school. They didn't agree to work with me on that because the project involved taking money for goods and services provided.

There's a little bit of frustration yes but a whole lot of confusion about how people think the world works and what exactly they think runs the economy. It's almost as if folks expect money to come from the heavens shower them with it in the time of need and that's the end of the story. You can't generalize generally and maybe these two examples were poorly chosen to make a point but that's the experience. Maybe the millions going back after all of this will come up with a different perspective.