Wow. Wow. That is all I have to say for what happened just now.
I've spent quite a few of my past blog posts talking about Asha and her situation here. Yesterday, Laura and Claudia had bought her a pair of dark skinny jeans (she had mentioned that those were her favorites and given them her size) as a gift. We'd discussed when to give them to her and decided to wait until we knew about the decision regarding her giving us massages (see last blog post if this is confusing). I think I mentioned this at the end of the last post, but Mr. Prutan had agreed to it, while Mrs. Prutan (or Auntie) had said it wasn't okay as it would take away from her work. Asha was going to try to talk to her again sine Mr. Prutan had agreed to it.
(Quick note before I begin...this is all second hand as I was not actually in the room when any of this happened) So flash forward to earlier tonight when Laura and Claudia were sitting talking to Asha (as they frequently do at night), when Auntie walked in. Asha instantly stiffened and stood up and went to the other side of the room, and Auntie harshly said something to her in Nepalese. Auntie then turned to the girls and said, "Laura and Claudia, please do not treat Asha as an equal. Asha likes to talk and she comes down here and then doesn't get her sleep so that she can work in the morning. When you treat her like an equal she gives me trouble (AS IF!), and takes advantage of me. Please don't treat her as an equal." OH. MY. GOD. First of all, she said all of this with Asha standing right next to her. The girls had NO idea what to say (obviously) and were simply speechless. Auntie then went into Rajiv's room to ask him to not bring up the "massage thing" and essentially repeated what she'd said to the girls.
Auntie then returned to the still dumbstruck girls and said "I know all humans are created equal, but there's just some...space between some of us."
So. That was our night. As Rajiv put it, quite the eye opener to Indian caste system and culture. And now we have absolutely no idea what to do for the next month. Apparently Asha doesn't actually want to go to Delhi which causes a few problems when it comes to finding another job. And the truth is, that as an uneducated female, it's very likely that Asha will simply return to working as household help in someone's home in a similar situation. Rajiv pointed out that to a certain extent, this house really is one of the better ones because she's not beaten...something he's seen many times before in homes.
Gah. Apologies for the fact that this post is a little all over the place (we are concurrently having a discussion about "Slut Walk" and the term slut and everything associated with that) and I'm incredibly tired. And trying to process what happened tonight. It's one of those moments where something you've been aware of in the abstract and tried to deny exists in front of your face suddenly has just jumped out and slapped me in the face. This is truly another world, a world where people treat their help as though they are literally a possesion or pet, a world where people don't feel a true human connection with someone else and where people aren't, by my definition, human.
And a world where a pair of jeans could cause more problems than we can possibly imagine.
I think that's all that I have energy to rant about tonight. I'll update a little more tomorrow about the situation and what else we've been doing.
Lots of love from a world far, far away from reality,
Sara
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