Working in Nepal

As you might expect there are a great many people here who just eke out a living selling things from tiny kiosks, or acting as servant, porters, etc. Educated people though have occupations in the civil service, and private sector companies doing IT or engineering, or accounting, or law etc etc.
The work day starts at 10, and ends at 4. We work 6 days a week, taking Saturday off. They used to have a 5 day work week, but changed it a year ago or so. Nobody seemed to mind. The exterior of the building we work in looks quite dilapidated, but inside it is acceptable. The interior is clean, the ceilings are high, and there is adequate space for he people who work there. Lots of cubicles, with some offices on the outside walls. We occupy one of those.

Men do most of the administrative work. If a woman is there it is either to clean and serve tea, or as a senior professional. The ladies cleaning and serving tea do not have a taxing day. They sweep and dust around, and then twice a day bring tea and return to get the cups. In most offices it is men who do this work. Often very old men.

We have power most of the time in the office. There is a local area network that provides slow speed internet, but I am not hooked up to the LAN, and most of the time do not need internet.

You see all types of workers heading to work on motorbikes. Lots of people in suits with helmets. Several families with the babies in the front, no helmets. Women mostly wear saris or kurtas (a pants and mid thigh pants to match). Sometimes you see them in jeans or a western pant suit, but not often.

Today we went to one of the registry offices. It was remarkable that the deeds registry system works at all after seeing this office. The workflow has developed over years and has a lot of steps that could probably be done away with. The records are practically all paper, and a business has grown up of lekhandas – people who know how to write and how to move paper through the system. Around the office we visited were perhaps 40 offices of these lekhandas. Years ago we used to make copies of maps through a process of exposing the original on a large flat machine with a bright light and then putting the paper through an ammonia machine, but this as years and years ago. The Nepalis have this system too, except instead of exposing the paper on a large machine with a bright light, they expose it to the sun on the roof top. It was fascinating to see.

Tomorrow we are off to Simara. I might not be able to post from there