I spent nearly three weeks in a village that doesn’t exist. According to Google Maps or any Nepali travelers map, the nearest form of civilization is nearly an hour’s walk away. Patiswara Village in Gorkha, Nepal, is tucked away in the Himalayan foothills northwest of Kathmandu. Around 70 houses are nestled in the hillside, and the villagers live and work on the terraced lands surrounding their quiet homes. Its residents are Gurung, an ethnic group indigenous to Nepal’s north-central hills. There I lived with Maki Gurung, whose home and surrounding acres of farmland are a ten minute walk down the hillside from Patiswara. Nature is everywhere, from the infinitely terraced hills to the monstrous Himalaya that come and go beneath their mask of clouds.
In the past, Maki’s hillside and its surroundings had been devoid of any buildings or living occupants. A children’s cemetery rests close by, and, according to village myth, the spirits used to walk along the hillside. Even in Maki’s childhood, spirits would come. Each sunset brought a tiny fire that danced along the ridgetop of the mountain across the way and left with the setting sun. Lately, the spirits have stopped coming, and even the older villagers cannot find them in this age of electricity, cell phones, and motorbikes.
I didn’t expect my first conversation with Maki to be about Thoreau. Most Nepalis are not well versed in American literature, let alone on Walden, a narrative that takes place just 10 miles from my hometown. He was surprised to hear about New England's short growing season. His favorite American farmer had only grown beans for four short summer months. Maki is unconventional in many ways. He is perhaps the only Nepali I have ever met who emigrated from Kathmandu to its rural lands. Although he grew up in Kathmandu, he spent time visiting his grandfather’s farm in Patiswara, land which he would eventually inherit. After a few stints in Hawaii, Thailand, and Japan, he eventually settled back in Nepal and began his venture into farming. He has spent the past six years establishing an organic permaculture farm as well as a co-op deemed “Reep Republic” with some of the village’s young men. Together they make products to sell in a Kathmandu farmer’s market. One year ago, they began housing volunteers at the cost of $5 a day. This would alleviate some of the tremendous earthquake debt many villagers still face. At interest rates of 30%, the debt suffocates.
At Maki’s farm, resilience and rebellion are the social norm. Maki has moved from urban to rural, started a farm in his 20’s, runs a business, rejects consumerism, and embraces the organic and natural. His opinions on cows are a little less than Nepali orthodox; he eats mostly vegan but only because he doesn’t want the burden of animal raising; he is fully international yet passionately Gurung. The longer I stayed at Reep Republic, the more fascinated I became with its contradictions and philosophies.
Most Japanese music producers don’t leave the industry to become farmers. But after a winding path of city to city, country to country, Maki eventually settled with an adamant philosophy that living off the land that raised you is the most fulfilling, sustainable, and important way of life. Japanese farmer and author Masanobu Fukuoka inspired his deepest beliefs. In his 1975 book The One-Straw Revolution, Fukuoka explains his naturalistic philosophy that embraces the natural way of life while simultaneously rejecting consumerism. The book is passionate, logical, and philosophical. It attacks modern norms and lays out a brilliant “do-nothing” farming way in which he deems modern methods of plowing the land by machine and inputting unnecessary steps not only unnecessary but damaging. Fukuoka has a disdain for government agencies that enforce one position, only to flop a few years later. He dislikes the widespread international embrace of modern consumer farms that take away the individual’s relationship to the land and replace it with fossil-fuel powered machines. At Reep Republic, Maki does his best to enact these values and incorporate them to minimize unnecessary pollution and create an easier, simpler way of farming in which the inputs equal the outputs. The dead and harvested plants are put back into the land as compost and mulch; he uses no fertilizer or pesticides, and instead lets the insects to live in a natural harmony. And it’s wildly effective. His yields are high, bugs rarely eat his plants, and he does not face additional expenditures of machine or fossil fuel. In my modern American world of corporate, humanity deprived farming, his farm feels like an impossibility.
The more time I spend in Nepal, the stranger our Western relationship to food and animal seems. We get our food from grocery stores, in frozen packages or plastic wrap or cardboard boxes, and throw the waste in a bin that will be driven up to hundreds of miles and eventually end up sitting in the earth, slowly waiting to decompose. None of this is normal, in most Nepali lives. In Nepal, most trash ends up in the streets. You can’t escape it. You will see it littered on the side of the roads, and you will smell it burning. It is difficult for me to ethically consume a bag of potato chips, since I know its plastic will end up in fine particles in a child’s lungs. The system is dirty and inefficient, but at least it is honest. Our Western consumption is wildly unsustainable, but because we do not see or breathe its impacts, we often feel free to ignore it, or push its impacts to a future generation. Food packaging and consumption habits are directly died to pollution in the form of non-biodegradable waste. Transportation from far away farms to grocery store add another cost. Before coming to Nepal, these connections felt arbitrary and forced. Now I can see they are direct, and our insatiable consumer habits exacerbate the problem.
Food and life are not separated in rural Nepal. Food is life and life is food. The farmers work to plant and eat and live. Subsistence farming is an entirely different relationship to the natural world than modern America has with its ubiquitous desk job lifestyle. Many of us easily remove ourselves from the natural world by forgetting that food means plant, land, and farmer. The organic movement embraces this cycle and urges people to understand the origin of their food. At Reep Republic, I lived these virtues and fully seek to enact them wherever I may travel.
I know the terms “eat local”, “farm to fable” “organic lifestyle” can seem trite. I have often found myself rolling my eyes as well. But I implore you to look behind the buzzwords and to understand the philosophy and reasoning behind the terms. It isn’t about looking hip with a gluten free, vegan smoothie. It’s too easy to dismiss the movement as a fad, too annoying, too forced, etc. But all it’s really about is reestablishing the innate relationship of food to life. Try some simple living and eating, at least to know how it feels.
Reep Republic is an inspiration for rebellion and creativity. In my three weeks on the farm, I learned how to be human. I embraced the simplicity of the natural world, and rejected the distractions a busy American life inevitably brings. With a good backbone of ideas and a set of good friends, you can make your own Republic.
