The secret to life is in the barley
- Courtney Skalley
- Jan 15
- 18 min read
I swirled my fingers in the rice, partially to mix it with the dal curry and sautéed spinach, partially because it felt warm on my fingertips in the cool evening air. The temperature had dropped noticeably after the sun disappeared into the fog, signaling its final descent with a glow as red as the Hindu tika smudged across Yashoda’s forehead.
I looked up from my plate of vegetable dal bhat and realized that Yashoda, her husband Shiv Raj, and their niece, Anupama, had switched from English to Nepali. They were laughing mostly, twirling right-hand fingers in rice. Shiv Raj’s elderly mother was watching the fire, her fingers braided neatly together like the salt-and-pepper hair dangling down her back, like my own hair that Anupama had skillfully woven for the wedding in the village. The goats were bleating as a soccer ball bounced around them, Shiv Raj and Yashoda’s three sons and their clumsy feet not far away. One stray ball had taught the chickens to steer clear, so they squawked dumbly next to the buffalo.
I leaned back, noticing that the waistband of my blood red kurta was much tighter than it was when the tailor had fitted it on me earlier in the day. I had said “yes, absolutely yes,” to Yashoda’s kind (though extremely persistent) request to have dinner with her family, despite still feeling uncomfortably full from the benevolent force-feeding I had withstood at the wedding down the road. Here, it was considered impolite not to eat all the food that you had been served, and there was no way that I was about to be rude to perhaps the nicest family on the planet.
As I took a moment of rest for the task ahead, I observed this little life around me: the family, the openness of their home, the sweetness of community growing in the spaces that we, residents of ‘developed’ countries, tend to fill with work and screen time. In the time I spent in rural Nepal, perhaps more than ever, I would question the Western way of life.
What if we are missing the point of life? That's a big question, I know. What if household appliances are the reason that only 47% of Americans feel satisfied with their lives? That's an odd question, I know.
But before I set out on a long-winded (and easily misconstrued) diatribe on microwaves and washing machines, let me back up and explain how I ended up here, in Khairiphanca, a little village without a name on Google Maps, licking veg dal bhat from my fingers.
Rewind exactly one week, it was a different scene entirely: I was huffing and puffing up an unending string of stairs amid the imposing peaks of the Himalayas. In the moments when my mind was not screaming at the physical exertion of high-elevation trekking, I was trying to think of ways to veer away from the tourist track for my last few weeks in Nepal. At the first teahouse, in perhaps a bit of an overshare, I mentioned this to the group of women sitting next to me at the table. Coincidentally, they ran an organization in western Nepal that provided a home for orphaned, marginalized girls and helped those girls go to college. The women had visited the girls’ home a few days before and, even more coincidentally, had been asked to send back a volunteer, if they could find one. One of the women warned me, “You will be the only person who looks like you there.” I knew what she meant, but to me, it wasn’t a warning. It was kismet.
As I waited for the bus to western Nepal a few days later, I wrestled with the familiar pangs of anxiety. I had virtually no information about what to expect. Who was going to pick me up? What was I going to be doing every day? How do I get back to the city if things don’t go well? I was certainly putting a lot of trust in some people that I had bumped into on a mountain. But I reminded myself that the most exciting adventures of my Bonderman Fellowship had started this way. All I had to do was get on the bus.
Sparing you (most of) the details of the 17-hour bus ride in which the oversized man next to me mistook my shoulder for a pillow, I eventually found myself standing on the side of a road in a town where most certainly, no one looked like me. And judging by the way they stared at me, foreigners were few and far between here.
A man named Paul retrieved me from the side of the road and drove me to the girls’ home, a three-story cement building home to 22 orphaned girls, ages 5 through 16. Some of the older girls had grown up in that house, which had brought them together like sisters. Practically, they were sisters.
I tried to ask Paul and his wife, fondly called mom and dad by the girls, about what I was supposed to be doing for the next few weeks, but they spoke limited English. One of the older girls translated: I would stay here at the home, helping the girls practice their English before and after school. During the day, when the girls left to attend class, I would teach English at a government school 7 miles away. This was news to me, but again, I wasn’t exactly handed a “volunteer expectations” pamphlet before I left. I came in with the mindset that I was here to help in whatever way they needed, so that was that. I would be English teacher by day, English tutor by night.
Within a few hours, a man on a motorbike came to take me to the government school. His name was Shiv Raj, which took me three days to remember. Not that it was a particularly complicated name, but the Nepali language, I learned, was built from speech sounds that met halfway between the English consonants that my tongue was used to.
Shiv Raj drove me to school by way of towering eucalyptus grove, an eerie but impressive forest that had trapped the fog from the night before. Men and women chopped at felled branches, loading up ox carts and tuk-tuks and bicycles with firewood bundles and the backbones of their future homes. Shiv Raj later told me that tigers occasionally prowled this forest, undetectable except for the buffalo carcasses left in their wake. On one level, I was not surprised by this, given that this forest was only separated from the national nature reserve by a single river. On another level, though, I was very surprised. Before today, tigers seldom crossed my mind, except on the rare occasion that I found myself at the zoo and in that one-off week during COVID when I binge-watched Tiger King. To find myself in tiger territory was to be reminded of how different this place was from my home.
The forest opened into a labyrinth of dirt roads wrapped squarely around mustard fields bursting with blindingly yellow blooms. We zipped through the village, but things around us were moving slowly. White-haired women strolled about their courtyards, sweeping and picking at their gardens, either oblivious or totally unbothered by their age. The old men liked to gather in town squares, in plastic chairs around the sacred peepal tree. Masala chai was always involved in those meetings. To me, it seemed like a nice place to grow old: always in walking distance of your friends, still driven by a sense of purpose and community.
Shiv Raj honked as we passed uniformed students strolling unhurriedly toward school, arm-in-arm, the little ones waddling awkwardly with backpacks almost their size. In front of one beige house stuccoed with mud, a mother braided her daughters’ hair, a boy brushed his teeth under a hand-pump spigot. Ash gourds the size of pumpkins dangled like Christmas lights from the houses’ tin roofs, which doubled as garden patches. Aunties gathered in circles around flat woven baskets, swishing some sort of grain around its circumference.
When we arrived at the school, I was greeted by the principal, Kapil, with two marigold garlands and a Hindu blessing scarf. It was thoughtful, but I blushed at this undue kindness; I had done nothing to deserve such a warm welcome aside from speaking English as my mother tongue. And, I suppose, for showing up.
As we strolled around the school’s grassy courtyard, Kapil explained to me his vision: though English was a required subject in all Nepal public schools, most of the teachers at this school struggled with pronunciation. I sympathized with this, given the uncomfortable palatal movements that marked my limited Nepali as decidedly non-native. If a teacher were absent, Kapil wanted me to step in and help the students with their verbal English skills. It seemed to be a manageable task.
As Kapil dropped me off at the doorway of a 6th grade class, it became apparent that he was more of an ideas guy; the details fell to me, the wildly unprepared volunteer that his friend of a friend picked up at a teahouse in the mountains. But not one to shy from a challenge (in addition to the fact that it would be really awkward to quit on my first day), I took my place at the podium and began to talk to the class of 40 students.
I started by introducing myself in slow, hyper-articulated English and then asked them questions to gauge their level of comprehension. Crickets. Was the psychology of group settings preventing anyone from speaking up or did they simply not understand me? As you might imagine, for a teacher, that is a very critical distinction.
I pivoted to a more targeted approach by singling out the most advanced English student. I consulted with her about her classmates’ comfort with English and made a plan for how we should spend the next hour. Verbal repetition it would be.
I read from their English textbook out loud, pausing at words that I thought might be challenging. My lessons became a game of Pictionary and charades as I (probably, definitely, looking like an idiot) wrote words on the board and acted them out: summersault, limped, gobbled. The students repeated the sentences back to me, and I listened for pronunciation. Some words became muddied in the collective recitation, like the ‘r’ in ‘world’, which softened into ‘wooled’. ‘Courtney’ suffered the same fate, so on the first day, I became Ms. Coco.
By the end of the day, I was exhausted.
The second day continued this way, with me rotating through teacherless classrooms of all ages as the substitute English teacher. I found the third grade to be particularly difficult, namely for behavioral issues. Not from the girls, though. They sat criss-cross-applesauce in the front row, staring up at me excitedly, attentively, workbooks and pens at the ready. The boys, on the other hand, were occupied with slapping each other and testing the durability of their textbooks on each other’s heads. The girls yelled at the boys to be quiet, and the boys yelled to hear themselves over the girls.
Sensing my exasperation, one little girl shot a Hermoine Granger scowl at the boys, then marched up to me and announced, “I’m going to get the stick.” Not sure what she meant, I continued with my attempts to quiet the class. A few moments later, she returned with a yardstick, handed it to me, and instructed me in her squeaky little voice, “You have to hit them with it.”
So as you might imagine, on the third day, when Kapil told me that all teachers were in attendance, I was secretly relieved. He assigned the star student at the school, Anupama, to show me around the village. Somewhere between the school and the river, Anupama became Anu to me. We talked about her dream to move to the United States to become a nurse, her family, her TikToks.
Somewhere between the river and the town square, I commented on the music coming from across the field. Anu told me that it was her uncle’s wedding and asked me if I wanted to go. ‘Is the pope Catholic?’, was apparently not listed in Anu's English textbook as a reasonable and appropriate response to a yes or no question, so I clarified with an enthusiastic, "Yes, absolutely."
We arrived at the wedding, Anu in her school uniform and me in Western clothes, standing out like a lightbulb among the red sarees and kurtas. I was self-conscious at first; was I allowed to be here? Weddings at home are not known for their open-invite policy, and I was not so sure that the bride and groom had stamped ‘BYO foreigner’ on Anu’s invitation. But those fears quickly dissipated as the women in red took my hand and pulled me into their dancing circle, which contracted and loosened like a heart that beat to the music. For the millionth time in my Bonderman travels, I stood out: my fair skin, my clothes, my awkward dancing. Anu said she could help, with one of those things, anyway.
She brought me to the tailor in the town square, just down the road. Fifteen dollars and five minutes later, we were marching back to the wedding, me in a bright red kurta. Within seconds, another group of ladies spotted me and insisted on making a TikTok video and taking photos with me, the ‘very white lady’ in a kurta.
The wedding was no different; I was featured in three TikToks, a dozen photos, including a portrait with the bride and groom. But there was one woman who took great interest in me: Yashoda. She, Shiv Raj’s wife, tugged at my arm and spoke at me in Nepali, beckoning with a semi-aggressive ‘come here’ hand gesture as if I was about to be reprimanded for crashing the wedding. I braced myself to be told off, but Anu translated the opposite: Yashoda insisted that I spend the night in her home with her family. I weighed this invitation with the fact that I did not have my malaria pills on me, and I had already accumulated so many mosquito bites that I was certain that one missed pill would catapult me into a blackout of my traveler’s illness bingo card. But spending the night with Yashoda’s family, in their house made of mud and wood from the community forest, was an experience that I was not willing to miss.
As soon as I accepted her invitation, Yashoda yanked me to the buffet line, piling my plate with rice and curries, then filling it again once I dutifully ate everything on the plate. Anu and I danced with the women in red once more while she explained her relationship with each of the attendees. To summarize, everyone knew everyone here.
As the night wore on, the dance circle continued to spin, plates were filled with curries, baby cheeks were pinched, heads were bowed to elders, and I was content, so content to belong to something for the first time in months, even if it was just for one Wednesday night wedding.
Later in the evening, Anu and I walked back with Yashoda to her house, which was just down the road, directly in front of the school. That was the funny thing here: everyone lived just down the road. Yashoda assembled a neat pile of firewood and twigs on the courtyard of clay and began to roll out roti dough into perfect circles. She tossed the flattened dough over the fire, using quick, practiced fingers to flip the dough as it goldened and speckled with char spots, like craters on the moon above us.
Anu and I were chatting and drinking masala chai by the fire, mesmerized by Yashoda’s skillful preparation of veg dal bhat, when we heard a shout and commotion from the barn. Four goats racketed into the courtyard, followed by Shiv Raj’s mother, clapping behind them for some unknown purpose. A few minutes later, Shiv Raj and his three sons joined us around the fire. The seven of us leaned in, hands extended into the warmth, laughing and talking about anything that came to mind.
For me, being a part of this community, even in such a small way, was conjuring up feelings similar to those baked into the most wholesome, pre-internet memories of my childhood. I’m not sure why, but in the sun's final glow, I started to think about the summer block party my neighborhood used to put on. The parents would gab at picnic tables over beer and barbecue, we kids would zip around on Razor scooters and play capture the flag. There was a heightened sense of community that day, a one-day hall pass to sneak through bushes and into backyards in search of the other team’s flag. Being in the early 2000s, we were phone-free, absorbed wholly into the silly game unfolding on a cheery dead-end road in the late afternoon.
Here, in Khairiphanca, that was everyday life. Not the snatching flags and Razor scooter part, but the part where the community is so tight-knit, so peaceful, that fences were only used to keep out the wandering buffalo. And despite all having smartphones, no one had snuck away to the corner of a couch, scrolling in some mindless, unquenchable compulsion. They were here, with me, with Yashoda, at the fire, chatting, kicking a soccer ball, playing with each other, just down the road from everyone they knew.
Interrupting that thought, Yashoda flipped over the last roti and told us to wash our hands for dinner. I kept returning to this idea of a simpler, more family and community-focused life though, trying to pinpoint what exactly it was about this place that made it feel so much more socially connected and welcoming than cities in the US.
The next morning, a rooster woke up me up.
I exited the house and walked into the barn, where Yashoda and her mother-in-law were already kneeling at the utters of a buffalo. They let me try, and I got one good squirt in the pail before the buffalo decided that I had had enough fun. We rewarded ourselves with masala tea and our buffalo milk by the fire, followed by a breakfast of veg dal bhat before it was time to walk across the road to school. Before I left, Yashoda tugged at my braid, which was messy from dancing and milking buffalos and a sound sleep. She patted at a plastic chair by the haystack and waved her comb at me, so I took my seat under her hands. Though such a simple act, as Yashoda parted my hair and weaved the pieces into place, I was filled with the sweetness and warmth of feeling welcome, and how incredibly grateful I was for these people.
After school, Shiv Raj drove me back to the girls’ home, where the girls were busy doing their homework. As usual, I journalled while they studied, which eventually turned into me (begrudgingly) singing their favorite Justin Bieber songs for them, and they showed me their choreographed dances. This night, they even tried to include me in their choreography. It was in these evenings, mornings too, during which I had the absolute pleasure of getting to know each of their bright personalities.
When the weekend came, the older girls and I passed the afternoon on a blanket in the grassy patch next to the house, keeping the clothesline of hand-washed sheets between us and the sun. Rathana braided my hair while Sarswoti, Aloo, and I swirled barley around a woven pan, like the aunties I had seen on the ride to school. We were preparing barley for dinner, a process that required us to hand-pick individual barley grains from the chaff. In this otherwise tedious task, we entertained each other. The girls asked me which caste I belong to, and I told them that we didn’t have castes in America, not in the sense that they did, anyway. They each told me about theirs with a sense of pride, but noted that castes did not really matter anymore, not since the government declared the caste system to be unconstitutional in 1951.
As I pinched each grain of barley between my fingertips, dropping them one by one into the growing pile, I thought about how boring this task would be by myself. But that was just it. I was not by myself. Nor were the aunties that I saw on the way to school every day. And there it lay, so plain and simple and surprising, like finding a $10 bill on the sidewalk, the secret to this community's happiness: it was in the barley. I was not just crossing off a line on a list of mundane chores. I was building relationships with these girls.
As the days passed, I watched my idea of 'a modernized society' corrode into something far less shiny, far less admirable. Around the sudsy buckets of laundry, while the girls scrubbed and I rinsed, I thought about washing machines and the conversations that they would've robbed me of having. At the dinner table, as I scooped veg dal bhat from my plate by hand, the girls taught me about their ethnicities and favorite K-pop bands and career goals. I thought about the microwaves dinners I had during grad school, dinners that I was hardly conscious of having because I was multitasking to meet a deadline. Where was the connection to people in that? The connection to my food?
The pace of life here was a stark contrast to what I was familiar with in the U.S., where we are encouraged to optimize our days to become our best, most productive selves. At home, the focus, the goal, is always on productivity—a trait we view as necessary and beneficial to meet the financial demands of an American lifestyle. I don’t disagree; optimizing, being productive, and overworking, even, are highly rewarded. But here, I was witnessing what happens when a society is not oriented around that very capitalist, very individualistic framework. Instead, their focus was on connection with community.
Now, I would be remiss to glamorize this style of living without acknowledging the very real hardships that these types of communities face, like issues of food insecurity, which happened earlier in the year when heavy rains flooded the river and damaged the crops. I also acknowledge that coming to rural Nepal for a few weeks, especially as a person with a certain amount of privilege, and hailing this way of life as the pinnacle of good, happy living might seem out-of-touch with reality. Most people in Khairiphanca have little choice in their lifestyle, often pursuing agriculture or following in their parent's footsteps out of necessity and tradition. (That is not to say that pursuing passions was impossible here, though: I met a PhD candidate at the local college whose dissertation was a critique on the use of human rationality and anthropocentrism in the depiction of human-animal relations, which is not exactly what I would label as a traditional career choice.) On the other hand, while we Westerners might be spooked by this paucity of career options, here, it seemed to inspire a great sense of job satisfaction: it was a textbook example of the paradox of choice.
For example, take the tea man in the town square. He lived above his tea shop in a weathered building, its mud exterior cracking around the beams. The shop looked out into the town square, which was centered around the peepal tree where his patrons had been gathering for over 30 years. On one of our daily excursions to the tea shop, I asked Kapil to translate my questions for the tea man: Are you happy? He was. Do you enjoy making tea? He did. What will you do when you retire? He said he was not sure that he would retire. He took pride in his craft and enjoyed the social connections that blossomed from an afternoon tea in the square. For the tea maker, there was never any question to take up another job. It was his vocation. I admired his certainty, the deep sense of purpose that he found in something as sweet and simple as the act of making tea.
Conversely, I will concede that subsistence farming and this slow pace of life is not a choice available to the majority of Americans, largely due to the economic and geographic setup of our metropolitan societies, but also because we have grown fond of our conveniences. Odds are you won't find me washing my socks in a bucket of sudsy water on my apartment balcony. And I would way rather order an El Camion burrito the size of newborn baby than hand-pick my barley for two hours after a long day of work.
But, that being said, I think if anything can be taken away from this experience, it is that community and family lie at the core of human fulfillment, satisfaction, and that sappy, soul-filling happiness that we are all hoping for. And perhaps if you, dear reader, find yourself with some extra time, grab a friend and go get yourself a sheaf of barley.
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