Dinner with the In-Laws

Ok, so this has nothing to do with handbags or Fair Trade, but as I am in Nepal on business, this is normal part of my life running a fair trade organisation.

I come to Nepal twice a year and usually my Nepali husband has to stay in England for the shorter trips in September. During these visits, my In-laws worry constantly that I am OK and are keen to look after me, mostly by making sure they feed me Dal Bhat (Rice, curry and lentil gravy) as many times as they possible can because, since I lost 4 stone last year, they think I am too thin and undoubtedly ill.

When I married Prem, I married into a huge extended family of 'Tamang', a Buddhist caste of Himalayan hill tribe people with ancestry from Mongolia. Prem has 17 brothers and sisters, all from the same father, who was in the British Army, but three different mothers, all of whom were sisters. Prem's mum was the oldest sister and, at 87 years old, is the formidable matriarch of the family.

They have very strict traditions surrounding food and eating; the children are fed first, the men eat whenever they want to and the women usually eat last, when everyone else has had their fill. Being a 'foreigner' I don't really fit in anywhere, so as a guest, I'm usually put with the men to eat.

However, at the moment, all the men are in India working and can't get back because the floods in North India have closed the roads, so it made a really pleasant change to spend time with the wives and children and not be bound by the usual social etiquette. When the men are around, the women are always warm and friendly, but stay in the kitchen cooking and don't often spend time in the family room chatting where I am expected hang out. In Nepal, the kitchen is still the woman's domain, is the centre of the house and you don't go into the kitchen unless expressly invited, so it was a great honor for me to be invited into the kitchen this evening.

None of the wives speak any English and my Nepali is, so say the least, in need of improvement, but luckily the children do speak English to varying degrees, so we manage. It is a rare opportunity for them to talk to me openly without the risk of being chastised for stepping out of line by their husbands and after a little while, the conversation gets round to my white skin. I'm embarrassed when they tell me I have beautiful skin and they want to have white skin. "No", I tell them "You're skin is beautiful, everyone in England wants to be brown." Nepali colour is an olivy brown, the colour we always strive for when sunbathing. They don't believe me and we have an argument over which is better brown or white skin; when I tell them that every time the sun comes out in England, everyone rushes down to the seaside and takes off all their clothes and lies in the sun, they fall about laughing in disbelief, why would anyone do that?

This reminded me of the times four years ago when I first came to Nepal and was teaching English to the girls who had been rescued from bonded labour by The Esther Benjamins Trust. I had a group of 12 girls between the ages of 15 and 22 and I used magazines from England to teach "I like" and "I don't like" The girls were tasked with cutting out pictures from the magazines of things they liked or didn't like and pasting them onto sheets of paper. In every case, one piece of paper was full of cut outs of skinny celebrities cavorting on beaches in bikinis, with a big title at the top of the page of "I Dont Like". When I asked them "why don't you like this", they answered "because they are thin and they don't wear clothes".

So, it just goes to show, our media fuelled culture of being obsessed by skinny perma-tanned celebrities and the perfect 'beach-body' is just a western obsession and if you happen to be lilly white and have a 'plus' size figure, move to Nepal; you will be considered the most beautiful person around, get treated like a local celebrity and, by the way, they will also think you are 10 years younger than you really are! What a bonus.

PS. No one has heard of Victoria Beckham here, I wonder why?

Just when I wonder why...

I love my job and mostly I feel very blessed to have the life I do, however, when the materials are stuck at the Indian border yet again, another political party has called a bandh (strike) in Nepal and all the roads are closed, the shipment has been delayed, customers are shouting for their bags and worst of all, the british press is scare mongering everyone with the doom and gloom of the credit crunch, I do sometimes wonder why I started this. Surely, having a regular 9-5 job, a stable salary, leisure time and some sort of quality of life was a whole lot easier than this?

But then it's time to visit the production centre in Nepal again.

After battling across Kathmandu in the pollution choked traffic, dodging cows and dogs, near misses with a dozen bicyles and half an hour of trying to hold a conversation in my pidgeon Nepali with the taxi driver, I pull up outside the new centre to be greated by a excited chorus of "Emma Sister" and a sea of smiling faces leaning out of the windows to greet me.

I don't need any more than this to remind me why.