July 10, 2008

Trekking Through the Life of a Guide

Posted by Neha Inamdar at 1:24PM

• Comment Now
• Email
• Print
• Reprints
• Share

I'm sitting at a tiny, dark, and dingy café tucked away in the busy streets of Kathmandu, having milky Nepali tea with Ang Sherpa, a 24-year-old young man who guides tourists through the tortuous terrain of Nepal's soaring Himalayas and captivating hills. If you've ever been to Nepal, you'll have seen tenderly young Nepali child laborers. Yet Ang, who does not 'look' disadvantaged and is older, tells me a story mixed with politics, economic insecurity, and familial obligations that most tourists would never know unless they asked. At an age when most in the US are expected to 'invest' in their future by attending college, for Ang, working is investing in not only his future, but that of everyone else in his family.

Ang, who is a Sherpa (a Himalayan ethnic group which is prominent in high expedition trekking), is the second oldest of eight children. Along with two of his brothers who have been working in Dubai and Saudi Arabia for the past three years like thousands of other Nepali migrant laborers, all three work full-time to support their unemployed, 52-year-old parents and a Buddhist monk brother. They also pay the private school fees of their two younger sisters, their brother's English and tourism classes, and an ex-Buddhist monk brother's English language classes. Ang works as a full-time trekking guide, an industry that compromises 8 percent of Nepal's Gross Domestic Product, though it is certainly not a steady income throughout the year, because trekking seasons runs from September to May-after and before the monsoon season. . During the off-season, Ang doesn't work because jobs are hard to come by: the unemployment rate is estimated to be at least 42 percent, and young people are particularly hit hard since 38 percent of the working age population is composed of youths.

His family hails from Phapre, a hill village in eastern Nepal. His father was the village development committee chairman, and part of the Nepali Congress, the oldest political party in Nepal. His family was not poor back in the village; they owned property. But his father's victory in the village elections raised the ire of the Maoists, and according to Ang, they confiscated his property, threatened to kill him, shot at him, and kidnapped him for two days. In 2002, Ang's family feared for their safety and fled to another village in the same district after having walked for an entire day.

Ang, like 26 percent of young men in his age group, completed high school and was determined to attend college, where only 6 percent are enrolled in higher education. As many have done before him, he came to Kathmandu by himself in 2000 to work and study. He was a part-time student in political science and economy, and part-time trekking guide and porter. Two years later, he dropped out of college to work full-time because his family was due to arrive Kathmandu in a year's time. It fell on Ang and the eldest sons to take care of the whole family. Now, after years of full-time work, the family lives in a 4 bedroom apartment. And his father's past experiences with politics did not discourage him from becoming politically active once again in Kathmandu: during the April 2006 Jana Andolan II movement, his father was on the streets of Kathmandu demanding democracy with thousands of other protestors, and the police shot at him. Later, a minister gave him a certificate for being a supporter of democracy and republicanism.

I ask him if he misses school. "Yes. I want to study more for a good future." He says that once he gets enough money, he'd like to open up his own trekking agency and set up a school for Kathmandu's estimated 800-900 street children. "I see many on the streets of Kathmandu, and they live very difficult lives." Will he return to school once he has enough economic security? "Maybe", though he doesn't think it's likely because perhaps it's "too late to go." But for right now, money is a constant source of anxiety, and he puts money away in his savings account in case of "bad times."

"You've had a hard life," I remark. Ang gives me a lopsided smile. "Yes, I have. Very hard."