Life Without Limits, A (12 page)

The woman’s name was Sita. She spoke no English, but my Nepali was just about good enough for us to communicate. I befriended her over a period of a few months. Her younger daughter, whose name was Parbati, could not walk and would feed only from Sita’s bosom.

In Kathmandu, as in so many places, you see heartbreaking sights every day of families suffering the direst poverty and the most debilitating conditions. You have no choice but to pass them by, and so their plight never becomes personal to you. You feel powerless, because no matter how distressing their conditions, you can’t possibly help them all. And the more you pass by, the more immune you become to the sight of the destitution.

If you can’t possibly help them all, then how can you justify helping any? Well, when you find yourself getting to know a family on a personal level, as I did with Sita’s, how can you not? It just happened that Sita and I became friends, over the months. I learned of Parbati’s problems, and played with her elder sister. In time, I met Sita’s husband, who earned a meagre wage as a porter. I visited their home, in a crumbling building, which was a tiny room with bare stone walls and a bed.

The further I entered into their world, the more I wanted to do something. Their cause became a mini-crusade of mine, particularly that of Parbati. I arranged for her to have some tests and, with a donation from my parents, paid for an MRI scan, which cost around £60. It turned out she had tuberculosis of the spine.

I raised a little bit more money, mostly from my own pocket, for an operation, which was successfully performed in a local hospital. Parbati’s deformity was corrected, but she had to be fitted with a brace during recovery. I visited them in hospital every lunch hour. Their plight also touched my mum, who, in addition to some money, sent over gifts for the girls from England.

This was now August 2005, and I realised I had done enough in terms of handouts. What we needed to do was to find a way of helping them earn a living. So I bought Sita a
chana
cart for about a hundred pounds.
Chana
means ‘chickpea’ in Nepalese, and these carts are portable snack stalls. There’s a little stove on it, an awning and dishes from which you can sell chickpeas, popcorn, peanuts, and so on. Sita had really wanted one. It seemed a realistic way for her to earn some money without having to revert to begging. I also introduced Sita to my friend Nonna, who had founded a charity called Girls Education Nepal, and she agreed to accept Sita’s elder girl on the programme.

Things seemed to be going well. I saw Sita at Durbar Square a few times after that, selling food from her cart. But I also saw her begging again, playing on Parbati’s problems as a sympathy tool, which annoyed me after what she had been through to have the condition corrected.

Then, one day, I visited Sita’s home and saw that the cart had gone. Sita confessed that she had sold it. I was so hurt and angry, but you don’t express such feelings in Nepali culture, so I had to let it go.

From that day on, I would see Sita occasionally begging in the square. She wouldn’t look at me, still less speak to me, so I think she knew I was upset. But the temptation to sell the cart was too great. Those in poverty are often forced to adopt a short-term perspective. It’s hand-to-mouth. She would get more money from selling the cart than she would in a week of selling
chana
, so it was an inevitable decision, I suppose, even if her longer-term interests would have been better served by keeping it.

Unfortunately, a darker side to Sita was emerging. The first sign of it was when she asked me to buy her a watch, around the time Parbati was having her scans. This chilled me, not just because it was an aggressive line for her to take but also because of the possibility that she was adopting it because of the gifts I had provided up till then. Had it bred greed and dependency in her?

Soon she was flying in the face of Nepali culture. Certainly, her family was unusual in that she was the matriarch, where traditionally Hindu women are somewhat subservient. Things started to get out of hand, though, after she sold the cart. Her elder daughter was now going to a local school through the support of Girls Education Nepal. Sita strode into the headmaster’s office to demand the money he had received from the charity to buy books; she did the same with the tailor who had been paid to make her daughter’s school uniform.

Now, Sita and her family have lived through the kind of hardship that I, like most Westerners, could never begin to understand, so I will never judge her for her actions. But I became very disillusioned after that. It made me wonder what we Westerners can really do to help people in developing countries. I do still blame myself sometimes, worrying whether I went about things the right way. My approach was not dissimilar from the one the West adopts towards the developing world on a larger scale. We ride into town and hand things out, sometimes through guilt, but also through concern for our fellow human beings and a desire to make things better. But it doesn’t work. The change has to come from within. My time in Nepal only reinforced my belief in Kamal Kar’s community-led approach, which aims first and foremost to empower communities to help themselves. Only then can charity from the West have a chance of achieving the desired effect.

The trouble with Dr Kar’s approach, though, is that it is time-intensive but not money-intensive, and most donors don’t like cheap projects. They need to spend money, or they don’t receive funding the following year. Donors like hardware, infrastructure and other tangibles. Short-term, quantifiable results are key. Dr Kar’s approach, however, is subtle and qualitative and actively involves local communities. But this actually makes it unappealing to the large donor organisations. When NGOs switch to his Community-Led Total Sanitation programme, in place of programmes based on hardware and delivery, people benefit in a long-term, sustainable way, but directors are hauled up in front of their head offices to explain why they have spent less than a quarter of their budget. It is an insane and irresponsible attitude. It does nothing for the communities it is supposed to be helping, and it is economically and ecologically reckless.

As my first year in Nepal drew to a close, my mind turned towards the next move. My sabbatical from the civil service was due to end in September, but I managed to extend it for another six months. My friends Pete and Rachel were getting married in New Zealand that Christmas, so I decided to combine that with more travelling. It meant I left Nepal in December 2005.

I was ready to go. I had begun to see things in a different light. I had started detesting the pollution, loathing the barking dogs, despairing of the potholes and abhorring the caste system. I hated being sick the whole time. You couldn’t drink the water; you had to soak your vegetables in iodine. None of this was new, but the beauty had always outshone any negatives. Now I was becoming short tempered at things that had once seemed mere frustrations or even quirks. I was incredibly sad to be leaving my job, though, particularly my work on the CWASH project. But the time had come.

I suppose it was like some relationships. You fall in love at first sight, then you get to know each other better, become familiar with the other’s habits and mannerisms. Your love deepens, but so do your frustrations. Eventually, you have to decide whether there is a future in it. My fifteen months in Nepal were unlike any I had spent anywhere, and I came away from it so enriched.

I had also developed my aptitude for endurance biking, and that was to stand me in good stead. But my recently discovered enthusiasm for triathlon had remained unfulfilled. Sport is not so popular in Nepal. It is a different matter in New Zealand, though, which is where I headed next.

7

Prem and I

Another important thing I took away from my time in Nepal was Prem. What adventures the two of us had been on, and what adventures lay ahead! I packed up my worldly goods and flew with him to Auckland. We jumped on a bus down to Wellington, then took the boat across to the South Island. In Nelson, I stuffed those worldly goods into panniers, loaded up Prem and off we cycled to Marahua, the gateway to the Abel Tasman National Park.

Pete and Rachel were getting married on a beach in the park, so I left Prem in Marahua and joined the wedding party on a boat to Awaroa. The beach ceremony was idyllic, and afterwards we headed to a rustic resort just back from the water, surrounded by rainforest. It was here, swept along by wedding euphoria, that I reversed a policy I had been following for the previous five years.

We sat down for the meal, and, as a vegetarian, I dutifully contemplated the tomato-based dish in front of me. The guy to my right had a plate of lamb, to my left a plate of chicken. Maybe it was because Antipodean meat looks so good; maybe it was because I was so excited to be among friends in such a beautiful place; maybe it was because I was fed up with depriving myself. Whatever the reason, I took a deep breath, leaned over towards the chicken and whispered, ‘Can I try some?’

My last plate of meat had been 3 July 2000. This was 22 December 2005. I took a bite and then leaned over towards the lamb and sampled that as well. Absolutely delicious; every bit as good as I’d remembered. The party moved on to the campsite on Totaranui Beach, where we spent Christmas. In between the beach games, the carol-singing and the fishing, there were barbecues – steak, sausages, fish. I ate some more.

Suddenly, I was a fully fledged meat-eater again. My willpower simply dissolved, I admit, but I also felt it was a return to the real me. I love food, and that includes meat. We have always eaten it in my family. Not that it is a guilt-free experience. I became vegetarian on my travels through Asia in 2000 mainly because of my disgust at the slaughter of animals, which in Asia is carried out in full view of anyone who cares to watch, rather than out of sight, out of mind, as it is in the West. The inhumane treatment of animals still troubles me even now, which is why I try to buy organic produce whenever possible.

But one of my resolutions going into 2000 was to be less hard on myself. Eating meat again was a step forward in that respect. Yes, there is an element of hypocrisy and therefore, to me, a loss of self-control, a weakness. But we all have weaknesses. Accepting that reality has been one of my greatest challenges, and still is.

Acknowledging those weaknesses is vital to our development. Some are real and can be overcome, but others are not so much weaknesses as imperfections – it is just our perception that makes them seem so. Willpower and discipline have always played a huge role in my life, and never more so than now, but if they are not applied selectively, they can wear you down as much as they spur you on. Pick your battles, and accept yourself for who you are. My love of meat has always been such that denying myself had been a lot of hard work. Better to accept that I just love meat, and to be happy.

With Prem left at the gates, I went on a few runs through Abel Tasman National Park. On one of them I fell in line with a man who introduced himself as Nathan. We got chatting, and he told me about a race called the Coast to Coast that was coming up in a few weeks. It involved running, biking and kayaking across the South Island from the west coast to the east. So a triathlon of sorts, even if I didn’t know one end of a kayak from the other. (Actually I had done a bit of kayaking in Nepal. And Chertsey. But this was a very different type.) Then, just as suddenly as he’d entered it, this mysterious man ran out of my life.

I returned to the campsite and told Katherine about him.

‘Nathan?’ she said. ‘Nathan Fa’avae?’

I shrugged and described him to her.

‘That was Nathan Fa’avae,’ she insisted. ‘He’s New Zealand’s most famous adventure racer.’

Katherine, a friend of Pete’s, was a Brit, who had lived in New Zealand for years. She knew all about the Coast to Coast, having completed it herself, and suggested I take part.

‘But I can’t kayak.’

‘We’ll teach you.’

‘I haven’t got a road bike.’

‘We’ll get you one.’

She insisted I stay with her in Wanaka, near Queenstown, and she and her boyfriend, Simon (who had already converted me once that trip, as the owner of the fateful plate of chicken), would help me learn to paddle.

I was convinced. After what was left of the wedding party had made it to Christchurch by New Year’s Day, I bought a tent, loaded up Prem and set off on a six-day bike trip to Wanaka. Just me, Prem, my CD player, a tent, the mountains, the sun and the stars – amazing.

I spent about five weeks staying with Katherine and Simon in Wanaka, and loved it. Sitting on a crystal lake with the Southern Alps rising beyond, it was the perfect place to live and train. It gave me my first taste of what life might be like as a professional athlete. I trained every day. I didn’t swim much, but I ran and biked and earned my grade-two kayaking certificate, which was a requirement for the Coast to Coast. I also took part in an Olympic-distance triathlon in Gore, right down at the bottom of the South Island, near Invercargill, which I won quite decisively.

Then I spent a weekend with Katherine, Simon and a few others, practising on sections of the Coast to Coast course. It was the kayaking that concerned me. My confidence was low. The rest of the group were pretty advanced, so they went ahead, leaving Simon with me. The river winds through some gorges, where there are rapids to negotiate. The first few times I capsized I just emptied the boat and carried on, but then I capsized again, and I couldn’t keep hold of my kayak. Off it shot down the river and smashed into some rocks. I had to be rescued by a boat. Not an auspicious start.