Archive - April 14, 2015

“What I learned in Nepalganj” in the Peace Corps, “has kept me alive in situations when I might have gotten killed.” By T.D. Allman National Geographic April 12, 2015 NEPALGANJ Nepal-I met my first untouchables in Nepalganj, a writhing market town on the Indian border where living gods and human feces are scattered all over the place. I also became acquainted with my first prince there. He and his wife received me in their small palace, a whitewash-streaked ersatz-Palladian structure with a tin roof. Over tea we discussed defecation. It was a perplexing and important topic for a cleanliness-obsessed young American like me. For the first time in my life, I was living in a place where almost everyone was not white, and not prosperous, and not one person in a thousand had ever used toilet paper. My house had no toilet, only a circular cement hole in the floor. Daily-and . . .