Pokhara Parade

Girls from the Shrijana Deaf School dressed in traditional costume. They will be performing dances for the Asia Regional Deaf meeting.


Parade of Shrijana Deaf students and other Pokhara deaf, with a few 25,000 foot peaks in the background.

The last time I visited Pokhara was seven years ago, in 2001, and every night there was a curfew because of the Maoist insurgency. It was very quiet then, and my strongest memory was being on a boat out on the lake at dusk, the water and the sky silvery, and the Annapurna Himalaya looming above me. I didn't know what to expect on my return, seven years later... how would it have changed? In the last seven years, Kathmandu has become an even bigger city, sprawling to the corners of the valley and choked with the fumes of motorcycles and trucks.

Pokhara didn't look anything like I remembered it. Is my memory really so bad, or was I simply not observant then? Usually something becomes bigger in our imagination, but the lake that I remembered as small and picturesque was actually large and picturesque; there was a new pagoda on the hill above the lake, built by Japanese monks, and I didn't even remember how Pokhara, too, had elements of a sprawling Nepali city beyond the quiet confines of Lakeside.

It is wonderful to have a chance to go deeper into a place, and to meet people not as a tourist but as someone who knows at least some of the language... everyday, I had the chance to practice my beginner Nepali language, which I can speak much better than understand. But then, I often have a difficult time even understanding English with a Nepali accent.

My NSL is much more fluent, and I had the opportunity to meet the members of the Gandaki Association for the Deaf, who were preparing for this week's events: the World Federation for the Deaf was holding its yearly Asia regional meetings here. Hence the parade, which both welcomed the World Federation for the Deaf, and was also an opportunity to increase awareness in the community about deaf issues.

The marchers in the parade included GAD and students from the Srijana School for the Deaf in Pokhara (http://www.deafschool.edu.np/). One of the signs in the march read:

"Deafness is a natural disaster, not a curse."

From my American perspective, it's a strange, even amusing way of looking at deafness. I don't consider deafness to be either a natural disaster or a curse. But in Nepal, it's a common perception that deafness (as well as other disabilities) is a sort of curse bestowed by the wheel of karma. From this perspective, seeing it as a "natural disaster" may be a big step forward in terms of awareness.