Traveling with Kids in Nepal

Life Lessons from the Village

/ Liesl Clark / 7 Comments

Living Simply in the Himalaya

Voluntary simplicity, back-to-basics, modern homesteading, opting out, just plain living: these are the terms given to a modern movement toward more sustainable living practices. The tenets are based on old values before the day of single-use throw-away items and readily available running water, electricity, home heat, packaged food, and gas at the pump. The practices are from the days when people had no choice but to grow their own food and harness the resources around them: collecting water, power and heat from the sun, food from the soil, products like eggs and honey from the critters we cared for. In this country, we look back toward our great grandparents’ age to re-learn the old less-harmful ways of living. But in many cultures around the planet, those ways are still practiced out of necessity and due to remoteness from a metropolitan center.

Through the eyes of a 3-year-old

We first took our children to Nepal when they were ages 3 and 18 months. This first trip, for us, was seminal in its impact upon their lives. Our daily rhythms were occupied by the business of living, free of phones, cars, computers, and central heating. Through our friends, the Sherpa community of Kunde, our children learned what it meant to not have running water in our home, instant food cooked over a stove, or delivery by car to a village 10 miles away. We made our own food from scratch and only ate the produce that was stored over winter past the harvest season: potatoes.

Daddy and Baby, 15,000 Ft

It was a very special time for us and formative for one 3-year-old mind. This little film tries to capture that moment, which still informs us on how we hope to live the rest of our lives:

High Mountains, Pure Water

/ Liesl Clark / 6 Comments

Sample Nepal Village Zero Waste Plan

(A work in progress)

1)    Locate village waste sites. Are they trash pits dug out for burning? Are they in a windy spot? If so, build a fence around them so rara (ramen) and biscuit packets don’t blow away. Do cows frequent the site and forage? If so, a fence will stop this. Cows die from ingested plastics, and the plastic can’t be a positive influence on the milk the cows produce.

2)    Are there incinerators for burning trash in the village? Review which plastics are being burned and at what temperature.

3)    At the trash pits (and also in a few volunteer homes) separate out the resources from the trash: aluminum, glass, compostables like paper, cardboard and food scraps.

4)    Find a nearby source that will buy the aluminum and a local willing to carry it out.

5)    Find a nearby source that will buy or recycle glass and a local or foreign NGO willing to carry it out. Often there are porters willing to carry for a small fee or trucks heading downvalley that are empty.

6)    Conduct awareness camps with locals to re-assess why compostables like paper, cardboard, and organics like food scraps are ending up in the trash pits. Methane gas from organic waste in landfills is a large contributor to greenhouse gas worldwide. This organic waste should be seen as a resource for compost piles. Remind locals that tea bags can be composted. Eggshells can be composted. If locals are going into the forests to collect leaves (carbon) for compost, they should be saving their paper and cardboard which has the same affect on compost piles if shredded into smaller pieces. Teaching locals to keep the leaves beneath the trees to prevent erosion will take time, but showing them that the paper and food scraps can take their place could go a long way in reducing the amount of leaves being taken from the already denuded environment.

7)    Toxic waste drop-off site: designate a local place (either one right at the pit or at a community center) where people can drop off their toxic waste – batteries, lead acid car batteries, CFL light bulbs. Find a local conservation group that will transport them to a safe disposal site.

8)    Cut down on single use items. If there are many plastic water bottles in the trash pits, locals can look into getting a potable water filter donated to the community. Informed trekkers will bring their own water bottles to be re-filled with safe drinking water. Signs in the village indicating where the safe potable water can be purchased will help reduce plastic water bottle waste.  The village or individual lodges that purchase the water filters will get a return on their investment.

9) Create goals for the future: plastic bag bans in your village, public potable water station.

Thanks to Clif Bar, we’ve been able to take some of these steps in interested villages in Solukhumbu and Mustang. The goal is to get the plastic and toxic waste out of the critical high mountain watersheds. Our steps may be small, but with continued follow-through they will have a lasting impact on Nepal’s increasingly threatened, garbage-choked watersheds.

Think Locally, Act Globally

/ Liesl Clark / 10 Comments

There are a few places left on Earth where cultures and individuals have not lost touch with their past, their knowledge of how to live in harmony with the natural world, rather than overcoming it and destroying it. As far as carbon footprints are concerned, these are the people who have perhaps a heel-p

rint on the environment, as compared to the ski-boot-size print we know we have upon the Earth every day we live our average American lives. This is the story of one family’s journey to seek answers to the myriad questions about what we can do to reach back toward our past and re-learn the ways of the people who still respect the gifts of the Earth, conserve them, re-use them, and ultimately have the power and education to refuse the modern products that are toxic to our environment. This blog is a snapshot of where things have gone awry and an offering of simple solutions to stop the flood of plastics and non-reusable garbage into our wild places.

We don’t have a blueprint for living the perfect zero impact life, but we can provide a road-map for an ever-changing journey toward a more mindful way of living, whether we live in the most remote villages in the Himalayas or on a both rural and suburban island 35 minutes by ferry to metro Seattle.

Filming large prayer wheel in Upper Mustang

I’m a documentary filmmaker, with 20 years’ luck making films for NOVA, the BBC, and National Geographic in the world’s wildest least inhabited places on Earth. My husband is an explorer/climber who became known at the turn of this century for his 7 successful summits of Mount Everest. You might say our combined experiences have aided our re-thinking of the everyday worlds we live in. We’ve lived the sparse mountaineer’s life, a modern-wilderness-caveman-style existence in all sorts of extremes and have analyzed it closely, paring down our essentials and power requirements to the absolute minimum. And we now know there can be great joy and satisfaction living a life more simple, far from the cough of motors, hours if not days from the nearest shopping center.

We continue to make films and do research in the remote places we love, but what has stunned us and inspired us to change our lifestyle at home and live more closely to the rhythms of the Earth is the amount of waste we’re seeing in the world’s highest watersheds and the trickle-down of those misguided waste disposal practices, those plastics and toxic chemicals, ultimately, into our pristine waterways and oceans.

Spring Snow in the Himalayas

3 Year Old Post-holing Over a 13,000 foot pass

We’re taking simple steps, as you’ll learn in this blog, to initiate pilot projects, both at home and abroad, to help both our local island townsfolk and the indigenous cultures we work with see waste in new ways: separating the resources from the toxics and opening up a dialogue about how to reduce the waste that is ultimately detrimental to us all. We’re re-learning what our great great grandparents practiced.

Mostly, it’s our children (ages 5 & 7) who inspire our work. They find solutions long before we do and adapt to every environment they face. But they can no longer enjoy the beauty of the highest Himalayan villages, for example, because their eyes are caught by the tree limbs wrapped in blowing plastic bags, the ancient mani walls carved with Buddha’s teachings and stuffed with ramen noodle packages, and the wild grasses glittering with sweets wrappers and water bottles thrown from the hands of their Sherpa friends.

Stopping For a Hug, 13,000 feet, Khumbu, Nepal

“Let’s try to do something about it,” are the words Finn & Cleo spoke last February when we spent a month in the Mount Everest region of Nepal working on a Magic Yeti Children’s Library we had established a year before. This short film is a brief look at the adventures we had in coming up with simple solutions for a beautiful village at 12,600 feet at risk of becoming another trash heap sending its waste down into the greatest watershed in the world. The people of Phortse are taking positive steps to prevent this.