Nepal – Women Survivors of an Isolated Village in a Remote Himalayan Region of Nepal

Poverty, climate change, underdevelopment, migration, loss of identity and history, women left behind — all the realities Nepal’s corner people face seemed distilled in the life, and slow death, of one village.

By Tulsi Rauniyan – Autumn 2022

I passed through its wired gates and wandered its cracked, cobbled lanes. Dhye was built more than 400 years ago, and little has changed: thatched mud houses with whitewashed walls, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, surrounding lands so arid and bleak they’re almost lunar. It seemed as if time had stood still.

Today, virtually every household in the village is composed of a single woman. Family members arrive in summer to help harvest the few crops that still struggle to life here: barley, wheat, buckwheat, and potatoes. But they leave before the bitter winter sets in.

“There is no school, no electricity, and no connectivity here,” Kancho says. She adds that even before the drought, “yak herders were struggling to find grazing patches for their animals, and our men couldn’t provide for our children. Once the drought hit, the children were crying, newborns were dying — they were screaming — and everyone felt like they had failed.

Smoke billowed from several chimneys, indicating clay hearths inside a handful of homes. But most houses were silent and covered in thick dust. Some looked like they’d been left in haste. Peering through empty window frames, I glimpsed snapshots of lives lived — and households abruptly left.

Smashed crockery, broken chairs. A blanket made from a yak pelt. A corroded baby’s bottle on the floor. Shreds of prayer flags like strips of skin. A dirt-stiffened blouse on a counter, threaded with strips of turquoise and pink.

Why did they leave so hastily? I wondered. What happened here?

A few hours later, as the sun was setting, a round-faced woman opened her front door and welcomed me into her house. Inside, the two-story structure shook with every step I took.

Kancho Dolkar’s long black hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. Her fingers were encircled by a heavy set of polished beads. Though only 52, she looked far older — a sun-creased study in exhaustion.

I wanted to hear their stories. And honor their lives.

Speaking hoarsely and deliberately in broken Nepali, with a heavy Tibetan accent, Kancho told me how everything fell apart.

How 25 years ago an upstream glacier — the villagers’ only source of freshwater — melted faster than anyone could have reckoned. (The glacier, which sat about eight miles north of Dhye, had no official name, but the locals referred to it as “Fuchhme.”) How fields were ruined. How livestock with bloated bellies littered the ground.

When households were forced to share a single pond, there wasn’t nearly enough water to irrigate the land. And as temperatures rose, further water scarcity loomed. The Nepalese government seemed unlikely to intervene. Day-to-day life in the village collapsed.

The village elders decided that everyone should migrate 30 miles west, to the banks of the Kali Gandaki River. Over the next five years most of the village cleared out. Residents strapped clothing and food to their horses and hiked to the chosen site, where they built a new village and named it Dhye Khola (for that stretch of the river).

Yet a dozen or so residents decided to stay in Dhye, among the gray, eerie ruins — the silent streets and empty houses with incongruously locked gates.

WUNRN

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