Raising a child in small diaspora

All human being wants their offspring to succeed in their fundamental cultural and social values. However, the global-migration has settled diaspora communities around the globe, where the migrants face difficulties in practice and succeed in their social, religious and cultural principles to their children. This is a story of Nepalese Hindus. Although this is a story of a Nepalese, I assume every immigrant has similar stories, while trying to inherit cultural and social values to their children.

We Nepalese people in Dunedin, New Zealand is increasing very slowly.  But we are still way below the critical mass to practice our culture effectively. Today, I am sharing my own experience with the challenges of raising a child. For readers to make their view about our culture - majority Nepalese (like me) believe in Hinduism. We share our religious rituals with global Hindus, but we practice localized (Nepal specific) culture and social festivities. We have our own language, and developed own-way to celebrate different festivals over the course of time. Nepal, being one of the uncolonized countries in the world, we have retained and passed our values for generations (for more than twenty centuries).

We always talk in our mother tongue- Nepali, at our house to help our son understand and practice the language. One morning we were having breakfast, and my wife used a typical phrase in the Nepali language during some casual conversation. Instantly, our son started laughing. We asked him why? He said mum just told – Put that in your head. Oh! He had just translated that phrase and laughed. Although, when translated in English that phrase means “put that in your head”. But, the real meaning of the phrase was– We are giving more than necessary importance. We both laughed at that moment but that’s where the difficulties start. We have tried to help him keep up with the language, but this is not being transferred in a proper way. 

One of the similar incidences happened a few weeks later. we had a Nepali cultural festival – “Teej” - where women and girls wear traditional red Shari/outfits, keep fasting, sing and dance the whole day, and visit “Shiva - God” temple to worship. It is a celebration of spiritual bonding between husband and wife. Every year in small or big cities, and even small villages in Nepal, in that day, all the cities and villages turn into red, all the “Shiva-God” temples are occupied with the girls and women singing and dancing. The queue in the temples is the longest on that day. In Kathmandu, all the traffics is diverted from the temple areas and thousands of volunteers are mobilized to manage the traffic. The things are not the same here in Dunedin, we could not organize the festival the same day and have organized in the weekend. So, of course, no one was fasting and visiting temples that day. However, women were wearing a red outfit and singing and dancing. My son, when we reached the program venue – asked me the question “why all the women are in the red outfit?” I just told him the details of the festival but I am still wondering how far can he retain all those knowledge and values of that celebration.

We have our two big festivals- Dashain and Tihar - during September and October. The schools, colleges, and even government offices and the business close in those times and people celebrate with their families, food, visiting elderly peoples and temples, playing with lights and cards, and so many activities. I just can’t do all those activities here as the whole social system is planned differently. Although, we try to practice some of those activities, how far will my son take that and transfer when his turn comes to transfer that to his offspring.

I faced another challenge on the first day of our biggest festival “Dashain”. That particular day has its many religious and cultural significance. One of the significant cultural importance of the day is planting grains of maize and/or barley inside the house- in the place of our worship. In Nepal, these planted grains grow to 10-20 cms in length in 10 days’ time- the final day of the festival. These plant sprouts are used to offer blessings from the god on that final day. But here in Dunedin, the weather and soil condition are not the same, these grains could not grow in 10 days’ time.  However, I took my son with me to collect soil from the neighbors’ garden, took him to the supermarket to buy barley and maize seed and show him how to keep those plantation pods inside the house in the area of our worship. In addition, I also showed him his photos of the festival celebration while he was there. I keep up with what I could do, but of course, the story is different here.

There are many more topics to discuss from the list - the ethos of holidays and vacation, food habits, differential greeting to the elderly and juniors, social ambiance, but this would take a quite long time to complete today in this short story episode. I will be continuing to write and help readers understand our culture in the days to come. Goodbye for today.

This was written originally for a radio podcast which is also available at https://oar.org.nz/event/basement-writers/-  Series 2, Episode 3.