Bringing Solar Lighting to a Gurung Village

Here I'm accompanying Mitch Silver on a follow-up visit to the Lamjung District for his Village Lighting Project. Many Himalayan villages are as yet unreached by electrical power, so wood and kerosene have been their main sources of energy for heat and light. The impetus behind the Lighting Project is to replace the noxious, dangerous, and expensive kerosene lamps used by women and children inside the house with clean portable LED lamps powered by solar-rechargeable batteries. As a pilot project, in March 2010 Mitch distributed LED lamps to the 68 households of Namarkhu village in Lamjung, together with solar panels and a recharging system. Now, six months later, we are visiting Namarkhu to see how well the system has been adopted and maintained by the villagers, as a prelude to extending the project to nearby villages.

Friday, October 15

This is the time of the Desain holiday, Nepal’s biggest annual festival, a 10-day celebration of Durga’s slaying of the demons. So all the Nepalese, it seems, are traveling at the same time as us. Mitch and I break up the trip out to Lamjung by stopping in Bandipur, a crossroads hill town founded by merchants from the Kathmandu Valley to handle the trade in rice and salt between the Terai and Tibet. After going into decline when the main east-west road was built and bypassed the town, Bandipur has been reborn as a resort for both Nepali and foreign tourists. Indeed, we discover that the hotels in Bandipur are full at this peak season, so we arrange to stay at the house of Mr. Pradhan, the former local schoolmaster whom Mitch knows. The afternoon clouds clear to reveal expansive views of Himalayan foothills in every direction and the snow-covered Ganesh Himal to the north.

We walk past a house where Mitch’s former professor of Nepali at the University of Wisconsin grew up. Over tea, Mitch tells me how he traveled to Central Asia and Nepal in early 1970’s, and gravitated naturally to majoring in South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He stopped out periodically to travel, and following his junior year, was going to drop out in order to work on a UN-FAO water project in Nepal. His teachers suggested that he instead use this experience as a senior thesis project for credit. Thus he received his diploma by mail, seven years after starting college. And he’s been to Nepal at least 30 times since then, working on projects from water supply to hydroelectric power to computers, as well as trekking all over the country. Mitch’s intimate knowledge of the language and people allow us to circumvent the tourist routes.

Not long before dusk, a procession of Hindu devotees parades down the the main (and only) street of Bandipur Bazaar carrying the sacred sword, wrapped in layers of cloth, from the Khagda Devi (Goddess of the Sword) temple, which is opened only once a year for this Desain ceremony. After dark, we have an open air meal as a dance stage is set up in the street. Our bedroom is filthy, so we spread our sleeping bags out in an attempt to block bedbugs, and fall asleep to the blare of Gurung hip-hop music rising from the stage.