A needless amount of time was spent by us at the bleak Foreign Ministry today in pursuit of Alisha's travel document, a mini passport that would allow us to take her out of the country next month. We were invited to present ourselves at 12.00 noon and, quite predictably, when we got there we were told to come back at 2 p.m. At 2 p.m. we discovered that the staff who were dealing with the documentation would be on tea break for another half hour. They finally turned up at 2.45 p.m. and we were at last issued with her little black book.
Waiting around we speculated on what was going on around us, or not, as the case may be. The young Nepali staff member of Alisha's orphanage who had accompanied us suggested that all Nepalis were lazy. We quickly - and politely - disagreed. Anyway, this is certainly not the case. Bev and I continued the discussion over dinner this evening. She opined that from what she had seen there is a tendency (and let's try to avoid generalisation) for people who have a job to do here to get distracted so that they lose focus and don't achieve their work goals. There is certainly truth in this as you can see it happening in offices across the land, with visitors coming and going all the time, chats taking place and clerks trying to juggle everyone's interests at the same time. Objectives aren't achieved on schedule in this chaos and this is most definitely a land of lost opportunities.
However I have a different take on this. I often reflect on a pearl of wisdom that I read in a tourist guide book when I first came to Nepal in 1999. In a section of the book it stated something to the effect that "in Nepal time is an abstract philosophical concept" with people unable to time their arrival for meetings, meet deadlines etc. That's definitely true, but what I have seen is not just people losing a grip on their own time management but also their making a very good job of wasting the time of others. I wonder how many man hours are lost per week in Nepal through this inescapable and infuriating practice? Herein lies another problem that just cannot be addressed by the development sector - one of many that bedevil our attempts to improve society. Sadly no one seems to care in Nepal, just accepting this as being the norm, which is why this country is going to get left so far behind as its more tuned in neighbours recognise and seize opportunities with alacrity.
Before Christmas The Daily Mail, the leading UK tabloid newspaper, invited its readers to write in and propose their favourite charity for a prize. Generously, the Mail was offering a top prize of £100,000 with 90 runner up prizes of £10,000. I was very touched to read what some of our supporters wrote about us and we published some of these on our website:
http://www.ebtrust.org.uk/site/testimonials.htm
I was over the moon to learn this evening that we have been selected as a runner up prize winner. That's a very welcome boost just as I was starting to worry again about meeting our rapidly growing commitments.
