One of the challenges the people of Nepal have to contend with, on a regular basis, is power outages.
A couple of ways these occur: One, by a mandated shutdown through the Nepali government to ease the strain on the power line infrastructure or Two, the power infrastructure just collapses on its own due to overuse and for, sometimes, up to two hours there is no electricity. For this past week we experienced blackouts every night and a couple of evenings more than once. The villagers do not flinch when the lights go down; grab candles, light’em, and continue on.
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| This photo is taken during one of the backouts. Bijaya and Hementhe challenged me to find them in the dark through the eye of my camera and take a picture of the their different poses. I am probably 12 feet from them and could not see either them or a shadow of them. When the lights go out, it is really dark in this village. In this photo I caught them by blind luck (again, no pun intended) and just hit the shutter. |
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| Without them telling me Bijaya and Hementhe moved up on the porch where I was standing and at maybe 2.5 feet away I could not see them at all. |
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| The candles are the only light in the kitchen. L-R Davaki Dahal (my host mother) Ranju Dahal (sister) Subha Dahal (paternal grandmother) and Sirju Dahal (sister). Ground Corn (Maze) is what is being placed on the plates, and is eaten as if you would cornbread. You use it to sop up Daal which is, for westerners, no different than Lentil Soup. Damn Good. |
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| Bijaya's headlamp is our only lightsource in this photo. |
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