The past week in Kathmandu

Before I start this blog, I just want to say that I will be using words like "bomb" and "curfew" and "tension" and "end of ceasefire" and "security"...but I am fine, I have been fine and I will be fine, so do not worry. There are so many lovely people keeping an eye out for me that all is good.

So if I thought it was weird turning on my radio to find the BBC had been switched off, imagine turning on your mobile phone (I finally have a Nepali mobile phone, getting it was an insane amount of beaurocracy and involved giving my father's name, my grandfather's name and my fingerprints...but I'll save the whole crazy story for another blog) to find you have no signal. Ok, if you have 3G, this is not that weird but I mean no signal, no amount of waving or banging or standing on furnitute and holding the phone upside down by the window will help. Nothing. Becasue the Government have switched off the phones and then you pick up your landline only to find that is gone too. I didn't even know Governments had the power to switch off phones, but turns out they do and there is nothing you can do about it, just switch your phone off, head to work and hope that they'll turn it back on again soon. And if anyone does organise a demonstration then the government has the power to call a day curfew, meaning no one in the whole city can be outside for the entire day. And there is nothing you can do about that either, because the army are allowed to shoot-to-kill anyone breaking the curfew, no questions asked, no apologies made. But I am jumping all over the place, this was meant to be a tale of the last week in Kathmandu, this was also meant to spread the news of nepal because it also turns out that if you are a tiny land locked, poverty striken country, no matter how beautiful your mountains or how amazing your people, the fact that you are falling apart and bombs are going off and governments are flexing their powers...none of this seems to matter to the rest of the world, cos you're just not news.
So on January 2nd the Maoists ended their cease fire. And last Saturday a bomb went off in a place called Thankot, which is on the outskirts of Kathmandu. It is an army/police (army and police are the same thing here) checkpoint and I think around 10 soldiers were killed in the ambush. (Did anyone in the West hear about it? No of course not, cos we're not news here!) Now this scared the living beegeebees out of the Government, because it was the closest the Maoists had come to the capital in a very long time (they tend to concentrate their attacks in the rural areas,where people are poorer and have more grievances and the Maoists can garner more support) and they made an announcement that they recommended people to be in doors by midnight. They made it very clear that this was not a curfew. But 24hours later, on Monday night, they changed their mind and put a curfew on the city, meaning everyone had to be in doors by midnight. Then tuesday this was moved back to 11pm, then changed again to 10pm. Wednesday was the day the phones got switched off (the landlines came back on a few hours later, but still no mobile reception) and the curfew was moved to 9pm. And it is crazy, right up until 8.55pm you could hear the usually constant noise that is Kathmandu, the cars and the motorbikes and the rickshaws and the yelling and the really quite annoying man who plays a small wind instrument outside my bedroom window every night. Then suddenly 9pm and nothing, not a sound, not a person, anywhere. Like I said, the policy is shoot to kill and if you need to leave your house during curfew you have to get special permission from the government. Now I found all this out from people at work and a lovely UNICEF lady who is like everyone's mum and calls round (even to our Nepali country manager) to check everyone is inside watching Topgun (bizarre but true, she called me and said "Gemma, stay in tonight, watch Topgun, Topguns a nice film, so stay in and watch it" ... ) but how tourists or people who don't speak nepali and don't know any Nepali people find out the latest is beyond me. I would always call my buds Nara and Simone, and they never knew anything that was going on. So thursday rolls round (i am feeling fresh as a daisy on account of all the early nights) and the Government are still really scared, and it is not just about the Maoists, the 7 party alliance (namely the other political parties who have formed an alliance against the king and the government) are planning a big demo for the next day. So in answer to this, the Government issues house arrests and arrests a number of the opposition leaders and then calls a day curfew for the next day. So just to recap, bombs have gone off (and not just in Thankot, a number of explosions have happened across the country including in Pokhara, which is the main tourist, trekking town), curfews have been called, people have died, phones have been switched off, opposition leaders have been rounded up and now a day curfew has been ordered...and all this in just one week. Every evening I switched on the world service, convinced that something will be mentioned but nothing, nothing until thursday night when, get this (ok soap box out now!) the headline (or the 5th headline behind Iraq and the like) was that India (yes the headline started with India) INDIA was worried about the rounding up of the opposition leaders in Nepal. HOw is it possible, that we only made the news via India's concern!!! The world is crazy, my belief in news agendas is getting shaky...India was worried??? What about the people of Nepal? Surely their concerns and the events happening in their country is enough to warrant a mention in the news. Insanity. Can you imagine if just one of this week's events happened in London? THe news would be rolling, for days. Craziness. Anyway, back to the week. So Friday (yesterday) was my first experience of day curfew. At 7am I got a phonecall from the guy at the desk to go out and buy any food I might need, so I pulled my fleece and tracksuit bottoms over my pjs and headed to the shops. The streets were full of people stocking up and scurrying about (government workers had to be in their offices by 8) I got a few things and headed back to bed. When I woke up again at 11am (I was tired, I been working hard!) the streets were empty. I looked up and down the usually crazy hectic road outside my window and there was no one, just a couple of security guards, and later an army man and a couple of street kids. The curfew lasted from 8am - 6pm and I just hung out in my flat all day, occassionally peering out of the window. Then at 5.30, just before the curfew ended, all the electricity went off. You gotta laugh! Just as one thing is about to end another thing starts! Turning off the electricity is part of something called load-saving (or something like that) and happens for a few hours, a couple of nights a week, in order to save the supplies. Normally when this happens around my area, the generators kick in, but because no businesses were open and everyone was home, no one started the generators so as the curfew ended, everything was dark. Load saving was til 9pm, by which time the night curfew had started and I had already got back into bed!
So this was my week in Kathmandu. February will probably be more of the same because there are elections (which the Maoists and the 7 party alliance are trying to disrupt), it is also the anniversary of Feb 1 (when the King called a state of emergency, disbanded all the parties and took over) and also a Maoist anniversary too. But as I said, don't worry about me, I gots plenty o' people lookin out for me. So I'll be all good. x

ps Nepal finally made it onto the World Service news in its own right on Friday afternoon, but I don't know what was said because every time the news mentioned Nepal, somebody sitting somewhere in Kathmandu would turn the radio signal off!