I AM WILDRICE. JOURNALISM PHOTOGRAPHY CULTURE STYLE
ISSUE 2
There is a goat in the little hatch-back next to us. He’s standing in the back where the luggage should be, face pressed against the window with a contented look on his little face, as if this is the most normal thing in the world. I look at him from the back eat of our own little car and he looks at me. Then they are gone, swallowed by the heaving web of traffic cascading down the pot‐holed roads of Kathmandu.
“Have you ever been to the Asia before?” he asks. “Uhm, yeah I guess,” I reply, “I spent a week in Tokyo once.” He smiles, brown eyes twinkling, and I can tell this is going to be like nothing I’ve ever seen before.
Welcome to Nepal... TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY BY JESS SAXTON
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I AM WILDRICE.
jessica.rhian@gmail.com @wildricetweets http://wildriceonline.com
I’m tripping through the streets of Thamel, doe eyed and foggy, with the sights and sounds of Nepal’s capital closing in. At least we are moving, that’s important right now. We need to keep moving because the ground feels like it’s getting away on us. I’m surrounded by lights poking holes in the thick dust that chokes the streets. The dust creeps in through your mouth and fills you up, sliding beneath your skin.
It seems that the children known a lot more English than the ladies running the home, but we manage through a mixture of charades, broken Nepali and basic phrases. One phrase that seems to have stuck is ‘so nice’, used to describe anything from our hair to our clothes, the food, the view and anything else. And why shouldn’t it be? Why shouldn’t we see everything before us as ‘so nice’... I was scared to be seen as another white person-‐ a pocket full of cash, drifting through life purely because of the luck of the country I was born in. I should have realised why that is how we are seen, rather than trying so hard to deny it.
The children were living on one floor of a building, shared with two other families and another living next to the kitchen in the muddy courtyard. They had a box each, stashed under the hard beds, where their clothes and school books were kept...no more. Yet what else could you want? Each day brought with it the elephants-‐ first walking past on their way into the jungle, then returning home at dusk. Each day brought the certainty of a roof over their heads, someone to play with, an opportunity to learn and plenty of rice to fill their bellies. How nice. To be housed, fed and loved. What a wealth these children have, a richer life than those who have ‘everything’, but cannot find happiness.
We are standing at the edge of the earth… As we climb higher along the ridge, the clouds close in to kiss our cheeks, The entire world just leaving our skin slightly seems to drop away damp and cold. We are in all directions, 3000m above sea level, dissolving into grey as between Tadipani and thick clouds engulf Ghorepani, and on a clear the range we are day this ridge would award standing on. trekkers with 360 degree mountain vistas; but for us, we will have to wait another day.
Excerpt from WildRiceOnline
Leaving Kathmandu You’re leaving your family, I tell myself, again wishing tears would stream down my cheeks so they would have some idea how much they mean to me. They’ve all come to see you off, and you can’t even manage one tear. What a heartless bitch. I walk through the dusty halls to the departure lounge, boarding pass and pillow in hand, looking for a place to wait. It’s pretty crowded even for the red hour flights departing this late, so I end up perched on a window sill where I figure at least I can pass the time by staring outside.
Excerpt from WildRiceOnline
Then it hits me. Finally. It was the night that did it. Isn’t it always the smallest things that mean the most. This is the last time I’ll look out into the same night as them. The tears finally came and they did so without reserve. I sat alone, with no one to hold me and tell me they’ll miss me too, as the sobs racked my body and the tears I’d wished for flowed down my face, soaking my scarf.