A day with Didi

Didi’ s real name is Kalpana, which means imagination. I know, all Nepalese have so beautiful names! At the office she is the one cleaning, cooking, serving beverages, always with a beautiful smile. I thought I would show you what her day is like.

Kalpana wakes up at 5 am. After bathing she cleans her house. And makes morning rituals by worshipping all the Hindu gods and goddesses. It is also a morning ritual for her to put the tika, the red dot, on her forehead, which tells that she is a married woman. Her parents arranged her marriage 18 years ago. Though love marriages have become popular nowadays, especially in the cities, arranged marriages are an option as well. Nepalese believe, that parents might be better in choosing a spouse for you, because of their life experience. Divorces are rare, and bit of a taboo.

Before Kalpana leaves to do some fieldwork, she makes tea for her family. She has one son and three daughters. Her son, the eldest, is seventeen-years-old and on his ninth grade. Her two daughters, aged seven and fourteen go also to school, but youngest is only four, so she stays at home. Kalpanas husband doesn’t have a job, so he looks after the youngest daughter during the day. Sometimes he might work at someone else’s field earning a bit of money. But most of the time he doesn’t do anything, because the community is quite old fashioned and thinks it’s the woman’s job to do the housework and work on the field.

Kalpana returns from the field around 8 am to prepare food for the family. After this she leaves for the office. Work starts at 9.30. She has been working for Loo Niva for almost a year now. She got to know Loo Niva and Loo Niva her because her son is one of the sponsor children of Loo Niva. Two of our office workers, Gyan and Krishna, visited her house and learned about her life. Short time after this Loo Niva needed a didi for the office and thought of Kalpana. She cried of joy when she heard the news and is very grateful and proud of her job. It is also a very important add to her family’s income.

At the office, she starts her day by cleaning. She dusts the desks, gets newspapers for us to read, and cleans the floor and yard. If I have left my desk in a messy state, when I left from work, my papers are in a nice pile when I come back. She goes around asking what would we like to drink: coffee, juice, tea, always with a smile on her face. Sometimes she comes to our room for a small chitchat, unfortunately we don’t have a joint language, and so I can only communicate with her through others. I would love to understand what she has to say! And then she cooks our lunch, noodles, beaten rice with sauce, roti-bread with sauce – depending on the day. And I think she is an excellent cook, I’m always waiting forward for the time of the day when she comes to my room saying “khaja khane”, meaning lunch.

Kalpana doesn’t eat with us. But serves us our lunch and is eager to put a bit of extra on our plates, so we surely have our bellies full. Sometimes she is sneaky about it and puts an extra portion on your plate when you are not looking, getting people to cry out “pugnu” – “it’s enough”! After we have finished she takes her lunch and cleans all the dishes. Then she serves us drinks again and it’s almost her time to go home, because it’s 3.30 pm.

At home she might clean again or do the dishes, if her daughter hasn’t had the time to do so. She also has to cut some grass for the cow.  And of course she needs to prepare dinner for her family. She doesn’t have a stove, so everything is made on the fire, which means that she also spends a lot of time collecting firewood. To make life a bit easier she buys some electricity from her neighbor, because there is no direct line of electricity to her house. The house is very simple one, with only one room, but they are thinking building other rooms for it as well. But there have been problems; her father-in-law owns the land the house is on, so her husband and brother-in-laws have a disagreement whether her family has the right to live there. This year also a storm took the roof of her house, but luckily some of her neighbors helped her and took her family in for a while.

When I try to ask what she does on her free time, she doesn’t understand the question. But she tells me, that during weekends, when she is not working at the office, she might work on some neighbor’s field, to earn a bit of extra money. It seems, that free time, just to kick back and lay around, doesn’t exist as such to this brave and positive 36-year-old woman.