Nepal Now

Send us Fan Mail ( Listen to the first part of this report. ) I’d been wanting to return to Chimling Village in the hills of Sindhupalchowk district since soon after my first visit in March 2021. That’s when I accompanied health workers to find out the status of women who had given birth recently, but had delivered their babies at home. In particular, I was curious about their experiences with mis...

Send us Fan Mail Happy New Year and welcome to Nepal Now’s first episode of 2022. My name is Marty Logan. Please bear with the nostalgia that accompanies the new year: I still remember when the new millennia was a thing (and we all fretted about the impending cyber doom that would be delivered by the Y2K virus—until 12:01 am on January first 2000, when we sighed with relief after our computers boo...

Send us Fan Mail I first thought about interviewing today’s guest soon after I saw her Instagram channel when, I must say, I was shocked by some of its contents. We finally spoke last week, and I was certainly impressed by what I heard.  We’ll get to our chat in a minute, but first a quick word about this podcast. The feedback we’ve received about Nepal Now in the past 18 months has all been posit...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Nepal Now. My name is Marty Logan. Looking back on the early days of my relationship with Nepal, I see that it took me far too long to realise that this is a country of incredible diversity of cultures and peoples. Today I can understand why — the face of Nepal is very much upper-caste, Hindu, male and Nepali speaking. Yet roughly a third of the country’s nearly 30 mill...

Send us Fan Mail Before we start, a warning: This episode discusses rape and might be disturbing for some listeners. Kriti was raped regularly by her father and grandfather from the age of nine. When she was 15 she was finally able to report the violence at the police station in Dhulikhel, near Kathmandu. The legal term for rape in Nepali is a mouthful: ja-bar-jas-ti-ka-ra-ni. When a police office...

Send us Fan Mail I’ve lived in Nepal for over a decade now, and I’m still astonished to see where, and what, Nepalis worship. Temples and shrines are mostly obvious—sometimes because roads or sidewalks will curve sharply to avoid them—but as I’m walking through my neighbourhood I might spot a smudge of auspicious vermillion powder on a tree trunk, a tiny niche in a cement wall, or even on a sidewa...

Send us Fan Mail In less than a month COP26 will have begun. Because of the shocking and destructive fires, floods, droughts and other climate disasters worldwide in the past year, it’s a good guess that more people than ever will focus on the global climate meeting in the UK.  How much will the leaders of the richest and most polluting countries promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions that cause...

Send us Fan Mail Vaccines, vaccines, vaccines. This is what I’m talking and reading about these days when the subject is Covid-19. I’ve had my jab, and so has my wife, but my daughter, who’s under 18, has not, because Nepal hasn’t offered them to that age group yet, but she still has to go to school this week to take exams. My parents in Canada, who are over 80, have had two jabs, and now they’re...

Send us Fan Mail Unfortunately, Nepal’s universities do not, in general, enjoy good reputations. Politicization is a main reason for that. But a new institution, University of Nepal, plans to avoid that pitfall by establishing itself as a public university, governed by a board of trustees. More importantly, says today’s guest and member of the development board, Dovan Rai, UoN will offer a liberal...

Send us Fan Mail Hi. This is Marty Logan. I wanted to let you know that I’m hosting a new podcast for IPS News. It’s called Strive: Toward a more just, sustainable world . It’s about people everywhere who are taking action to address climate change, racism, inequality and many other challenges we all face today. One thing that I think makes Strive different is we’ll be discussing solutions, not ju...

Send us Fan Mail Nepalis are online. Full stop. We can no longer say that Nepalis in cities are online, or that educated Nepalis are online. In a 2020 survey, 89% of Nepalis said that they used Facebook. 62% of the mobile phones that people carried around were smartphones, and the figure was growing. The Covid-19 pandemic has surely caused it to rise further.  This has huge implications for many a...

Send us Fan Mail Room to Read works with more than 4,400 high school-age girls in three districts in Nepal. During the Covid-19 lockdown from April to July 2020, 53% of those girls were unsure about returning to their school when it reopened. They were scared about the pandemic, their families were feeling the economic crunch, and they had already missed months of school in their final years of ed...

Send us Fan Mail It’s monsoon season here in Nepal. And every time it pours rain, as it’s doing now, I start worrying about flooding. It can happen here in Kathmandu but usually the worst occurs in the southern Madhesh region, when swollen rivers spill over their banks and inundate villages, or in Nepal’s hill districts, when incessant rain dislodges fragile slopes and landslides demolish building...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Nepal Now. My name is Marty Logan. As we’re recording this, there is news that landslides and flooding have battered some of Nepal’s hill districts. Our hearts go out to the people who have suffered the loss of lives and their homes. This is a bad sign as the monsoon has just started and will continue for months. Today’s episode is also about nature, and also concerns t...

Send us Fan Mail As you've likely heard, Nepal is in the throes of a second wave of Covid-19. This has raised fears that, just like during and after the lockdown of 2020, women will be using reproductive, maternal and child health services much less than usual, or as necessary. One result is likely to be more births taking place in risky home settings. Today, we’re going on the road to visit...

Send us Fan Mail I just checked two popular online fundraising platforms and very quickly found more than 130 campaigns raising money for Covid-19 relief in Nepal. Nepalis and non-Nepalis alike are rallying to gather donations for oxygen, isolation centres, food and other daily needs, and much more to fight the devastating second wave, which is slowly seeping into villages.  Leading the way is a g...

Send us Fan Mail These are terrible, painful days for many people in Nepal, and so I hesitated to post this episode. But then I thought, in the midst of the devastation and death caused by Covid-19 it is important to hear something positive and, in this case, not something cheery just for the sake of diverting our attention, like cat videos on social media.  Rather, in today’s episode we’re talkin...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Nepal Now. I’m Marty Logan. Today is Thursday, April 29th. A few hours ago we started a second lockdown here in the Kathmandu Valley in response to a frightening rise in the number of Covid-19 cases. I’ve read reports that the intensive care units of many hospitals are full and projections that the number of cases in Nepal is growing faster than in neighbouring India, w...

Send us Fan Mail In a country where mental health is often talked about in whispers — if it’s discussed at all — I was surprised, and happy, to recently see a photo of a new counselling room set up in a high school. It is one of two rooms established in schools in Melamchi, close to Kathmandu.  Other rooms should be completed in coming months in Baglung District, says my guest on today’s episode,...

Send us Fan Mail Santosh Shah is a household name in Nepal after finishing runner-up on MasterChef. Sanjog Thakuri’s father was cooking the daily meals for his family decades ago, so it was natural for the son to grow up helping in the kitchen. But as a teenager, when he wanted to talk about cooking while his friends teased local girls he himself became a target for not being macho enough.  Today,...

Send us Fan Mail How do Nepalis put up with this government; they’re too patient! is a statement I’ve repeated regularly in the 15 years that I’ve been linked to this country. In fact, in 1990 and 2006 the people had had enough and launched movements, or revolutions, that contributed to dramatic redesigns of the country: in 1990, the return to democracy and in 2006, the creation of a republic that...

Send us Fan Mail Building back better. The green recovery. Sustainable transformation. It seems I’ve been reading those phrases time and again during the past pandemic year. And sometimes I wonder if they’re just attempts to find a bright spot amid the devastation of Covid-19. Or are they a sincere recognition that something fundamental must change if we humans want to continue living life on this...

Send us Fan Mail When I first moved to Nepal 16 years ago every few years I would read a report in the daily newspaper about the road network reaching a remote village. The driver and passengers would have garlands of marigolds draped around their necks, red tika pressed to their foreheads, and a celebration would follow. The reason was simple: most people were confident that more roads would brin...

Send us Fan Mail Nearly 200 countries, Nepal included, are scheduled to meet in Scotland in November to discuss how to respond to climate change. One of the items on the agenda will be how much money wealthier countries will commit to transferring to so-called developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change and to ‘green’ their own economies. Notably, rich countries haven’t come any...

Send us Fan Mail Advocates for women were excited last year when they heard that changes were coming to Nepal’s rape law, which has long been criticized as ineffective. On this show we spoke to youth activists who had met with the attorney general and other lawmakers and were energized and excited by the process. But when the ordinance containing the revisions was signed by the president, not all...