Sunday, November 14, 2010

Creating Others and Closing My Mouth

I wanted to start a blog in order to tell stories about living in Nepal. Photos are great and emails are nice but I thought I could put stories and pictures together here and not feel bad about spamming email inboxes. When I look at my pitiful few entries, they're mostly about festivals here. Festivals are great and a really important part of life here but as I read about them and look through my photos, I realize that I've done a great job of creating an "other" for people who don't live here. I've had some interesting discussions lately with a few of my friends about the way that we portray our lives here to people who aren't with us. I've run into a few excellent blogs from people who either talk about this idea (and many other really cool ideas) or who do a great job of writing about development work or time abroad. I've also found a few blogs that make me really sad because of the way that they inaccurately describe a culture or portray a country without any real idea of what's going on and why. Until I feel like I can do a better job of this, I think I'll keep my mouth closed (or my fingers still, I suppose.) Before I completely stop, I'll just say that I've finished (very basic) language study and am now working full time on the food security project. So far I really enjoy the work and am hoping that someday the learning curve feels a little less steep.

I'm still posting photos here and gladly respond to emails at claire audrey (at) gmail dot com.