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“...The Maintenance of Virtue Over Time: Notes on
Changing Household Lives in Post-Disaster Nepal
Andrew Haxby
Although it is banal to say the series of
earthquakes that hit Nepal in Spring 2015 will
radically change the country, what this change
will consist of still remains undetermined.
As many earthquake victims learn to make
do in broken houses, tents, or corrugated tin
structures, post-earthquake Nepal seems held
within a frustrating stasis, wherein temporary
hardship is often impossible to distinguish from
lasting consequence. Yet this sense of stasis
is in part misleading. While the act of building
remains slow, households who lost their homes
have been scramblingto rethink their financial
futures in order to afford reconstruction.
In doing so, many earthquake victims have
begun to enact changes in their households,
accelerating divisions and unearthing tensions
that had hitherto been allowed to lie dormant.
Revitalizing Meyer Fortes' classic discussions
of amity and the development...”
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Page 10
“...dieko chaina” (They haven’t given us anything). According
to both her and her neighbors who were also living in this
temporary shelter, her relationship with her husband had
been strained from before the earthquake, with him often
spending long periods in Dholaka despite no immediate
need to do so. Indeed, the ‘us’ in the above quote seemed to
refer to her and her daughter only.
Even more than Sanjay and Lhakpa, Sapana’s finances
were extremely limited. She worked at a small phone shop,
though not her own, earning NRs 5-6,000 a month, while
her husband did not seem to contribute any financial help
to her household. Several years before the earthquake she
had a job working as a seamstress for a local cooperative,
but had to quit that job when her mother became sick with
cancer. Her mother died before the earthquake, by which
point Sapana’s finances were depleted. Now she had only
NRs 5,000 in an account at a cooperative. Her daughter had
a volunteer job at an NGO dedicated to women’s economic...”
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Page 11
“...my focus has been on all the small
tears the earthquake has made in Nepali society, and how
they might change the fabric as a whole. Though in many
ways much less “knowable” than government initiatives,
I believe it is at the household level where we get closest
to the destruction, to the actual event of the earthquake.
Yet here too time is a factor. Though the earthquake has
changed the balance between legal documentation and
other elements of household construction, this might
very well be temporary, the balance slowly easing back
to where it was as the material structures of home are
built and lived in. Several officials I talked to in both the
Authority and in related NGOs said they believed that the
earthquake would result in more robust and powerful
bureaucratic practices, a positive effect in their view, and
part of Nepal’s official mission to ‘build back better’ since
the earthquake. Yet, counteracting this, there seems to be
a real desire to reconstruct amity, to bring this destruc-...”
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