One of the best parts of extended travel is having the time to see what’s behind the door. Normally, that’s a figurative expression, but yesterday it became both literal and figurative.
As part of our deal with the hotel owner when we begged to get into our much nicer hotel, we agreed to move rooms for a few days when the hotel is at high capacity. We knew this would mean some kind of downgrade, but even the bottom of the barrel here is better than the cream of the crop at the last place – so it was a small price to pay.
Yesterday we moved into our new room for four days. While it’s still large, clean, comfortable and nicely decorated, it is in this small annex of the hotel which is not as pretty and well constructed as the rest. For all intents and purposes it doesn’t matter at all – it’s still a great room….except for two very odd things.
The bathroom door with a very large clear glass pane is a first… In the first five minutes of being in the room, the phrase, “Look the other way!” came into use. Maybe this room was used for drug rehab or transporting prisoners? It’s unusual….
But let’s go past the glass pane…literally…to the toilet. It has a push button mechanism on top. But when you push, it doesn’t flush. Yadda yadda yadda, you have to pump it to create suction to start the water flow, like a siphon and then hold it down while the water flows. Not enough pumping, and you get nothing. Let go and it dies. Usually, it takes a few rounds to get it to work. I feel like we’re trying to jump start a battery every time someone wants to flush.
We move back to the elegant and opaque wing on the 16th.
In other parts of our day, we discussed the far more serious aspects of what goes on behind closed doors in Nepal.
Emily called up an old co-worker and friend, Devendra – a man who has made it his life’s mission to stop corporal punishment in schools. Devendra is in his late fifties, speaks eloquent English and has a smile and a gaze that shed joy on those around him.
Devendra grew up in India where his father was a mercenary in the Indian army much as many Nepali soldiers – including other members of his family – were mercenaries for the British military. His caste is a military one and forms part of the group the Western world considers Gurkha soldiers.
Devendra has education from India, Britain and the United States. He decided to take his education and talents home to Nepal and teach. Like all Nepali teachers, he hit kids for discipline and thought little of it. Then something changed for him. In his continuing education and personal thoughts, he realized that violence begets violence and that if Nepalis were to stop hurting each other, it starts with how they are raised.
So, among his different projects and jobs, he met Emily at the Center for Victims of Torture in Kathmandu in 2002.
I was amazed to hear about how classroom beatings have maimed, disabled and killed school children. I was more amazed that one of the blockades they face to getting teachers to stop using corporal punishment is that parents come to school and ask teachers to please beat their kids more as the kids are naughty at home. Beating kids is the norm for discipline even for Buddhists and Hindus. Oh, the hypocrisies we sell ourselves….
Devendra hopes that his work will do more than just save children – although I think he would be more than satisfied with that. He hopes that ending childhood beatings will in turn curb adult violence – particularly the brutality of the police.
Nepali police beat confessions out of people and falsely imprison people who confess to anything just to stop the torture. One torture technique involves beating the soles of people’s feet with a bamboo cane – often rendering the person unable to walk again.
People taken away by the police often never see the light of day again. Meanwhile, Nepal’s advanced corruption makes it so that those who can pay, can walk free. And they do.
As Devendra said, there are murderers who walk free, while innocent people are locked away for life. And while we have mistakes like that in our system – they are, I’d like to think – the exceptions.
In Nepal, like so many Asian and third world countries, corruption runs rampant. Justice is only a concept.
In fact, we’ve heard about two cases where communities have caught thieves and wrongdoers and then beaten and tortured them – vigilante-style, because the police aren’t to be trusted. So whether at the hand of the police or your neighbors, there is no trial, just brutality and torture.
I frequently ask myself if I could do anything for Nepal, what would it be? While completely unrealistic, I think regularly that I’d like to hire Lee Kwan Yew to be their CEO or at least consultant for two to three years. The controversial founding father of Singapore has dealt with all of these issues – the corruption, poverty, lack of education, squalor, disease, lack of systems, and racial and class tensions. His answers were unorthodox. People question the trade-offs.
But when confronted with places like Nepal, I have to wonder if people are better off in a completely free, dysfunctional “democracy”? Or, if a benevolent patriarchal democ-tatorship such as Singapore’s isn’t better? After all, I’d much rather be a Singaporean than a Nepali any day of the week.
Nepal, in my opinion, needs someone to be righteously angry for them. It needs someone who will call a halt to violence, mistreatment and corruption. During LKY’s early years in power, as he took out the communists, the gangs and the governmental corruption, he faced constant threats to his life. He was kept in seclusion at times.
He never backed down. He was willing to risk it. His people may not enjoy the most democratic government on Earth today, but they enjoy a government rated year after year as one of the least – and many years the least – corrupt in the world.
Someone must do this for Nepal. Perhaps a Nepali leader – their own Lee Kwan Yew or George Washington or if they’re lucky enough, a Ghandi – will emerge. In a place with a history of only autocratic, totalitarian leadership, the Nepali people have never known civil liberties. Without education or means, it is very difficult for people to advocate for themselves.
Singapore was unique in that it had this small, British educated clique who had a vision of bridging East and West in the service of their countrymen. And while it’s not the model of liberalism in some respects, it is a country that has made giant economic, political and social leaps in a short amount of time. People live a good quality of life with more freedoms than many, if not most Asian countries.
Singapore had someone advocate for them in a way Singaporeans wouldn’t have been able to advocate for themselves. When people are being beaten and tortured both in the streets and behind closed doors, I can’t help but wonder….what would Lee Kwan Yew do?
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