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Nepalese villagers use high-altitude greenhouses to supplement centuries-old farming practices

Photographs and text by Judson Peck ’11

My plan was simple. The execution was tricky.

I would take a small plane into the Khumbu region of Nepal, then trek alone without guide or porter into Sagarmatha National Park, the highest mountain ecosystem in the world. Then I would settle into a village to research the plastic greenhouses used by Sherpa villagers to grow and harvest vegetables during the long, harsh winter.

My first challenge: Where the heck were these greenhouses? It’s not like they dot a Google map.

I had spent the previous few months in Kathmandu with the School for International Training, part of my Bates Junior Semester Abroad program. There, I learned about Nepal’s history, politics, culture, and development issues. Then I began my independent study project. This was last November.

I knew the greenhouses were up there — somewhere — deep in Sagarmatha National Park, which encompasses part of Mount Everest (“Sagarmatha” is the Nepali name for Everest).

And I knew that the greenhouses had been donated to villages within the park as part of a program that compensates villages for the fact that the area’s tightly restricted natural resources are off-limits. But no one had done much research on how they were being used and their effect on these tight-knit communities.

So I trekked around to different places like Namche, Khumjung, Khunde, and Thame. Then, at 12,000 feet, I discovered the village of Thamo, sitting on a plateau against the rocky mountainside, home to about 35 households and 10 donated greenhouses that were flown by helicopter from Kathmandu.

The growing season had ended by my November visit, and Thamo in November is much like Maine in late fall — on the brink of winter. But even in the coldest weather and climates, from the Arctic tundra to the high mountains of Khumbu, only the growing season is limited. As anyone who’s thrown an old bedsheet over tomato plants before a cold September night knows, you can extend the harvest season by creating a warm and protected microclimate.

The donated greenhouses that create this microclimate at 12,000 feet feature thick, clear plastic that has been UV-stabilized so it won’t disintegrate. To withstand the mountain winds, the plastic is firmly attached to metal poles.

At dawn I sometimes woke to the clanging of bells as yak caravans plodded beneath my window.

In Thamo, I stayed at a guesthouse of the sort typically used by trekkers. As the sole guest most of the time, I was treated like family. I chatted in Nepali with the children about their schoolwork and ate daal bhaat — a traditional dish of rice and a kind of lentil soup — with the mother in the kitchen (the father worked at a nearby hotel and was away much of the time).

At night, my bedroom went well below freezing; most evenings I’d snuggle into my sleeping bag, wearing my winter jacket, and do my reading, like Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman, who farms in Harborside, Maine.

One night I lay awake listening to the chants of four monks reverberate through the cold house as they blessed the family for the coming year. At dawn I sometimes woke to the clanging of bells as yak caravans plodded beneath my window carrying loads of woolens and knock-off North Face jackets from Tibet.

Every morning I trudged outside and broke the ice in the water bucket, then washed my face in freezing agony before the sun steamed it off my head. I didn’t bathe during my stay, partly because the bathing area was being used to hang drying meat and partly so I would fit in with daily life in the mountains.

I’d hoped to use my broken Nepali to interview the villagers but soon learned that they mostly speak Sherpa. I soon found a translator: Nawan, a trekking guide who has summited Everest himself.

As Nawan and I went from home to home, I learned that Sherpa culture demands that tea be served to visitors. Lots of tea meant many bathroom breaks but the tea-drinking sessions also fostered a relaxed setting for informal discussions.

On my last day in the village, a festival inaugurated the new village shrine. Among the rituals is placing yak butter on the men’s knives, khukuri, as a blessing and waving bamboo shafts with silk scarves attached. Four monks beat drums as the villagers chanted and drank raksi, a traditional and really strong distilled drink.

Afterward, there was dancing, then we staggered home over the rough terrain, knives in hand.

To New Heights

Some conclusions from my stay in Thamo, where high-altitude greenhouses have literally taken gardening to new heights:

• In the villagers’ traditional outdoor gardens and in the greenhouses, they grow mostly green leafy vegetables: lettuce, spinach, Chinese cabbage. During the June-September monsoon season, they grow everything from chilies and tomatoes to beans and squash.

• The greenhouses do save villagers money by producing inexpensive vegetables. But most of the food is eaten by families, so not enough is left over to sell in nearby Namche for income, as was hoped by the agencies that donated the greenhouses. (Still, it’s a big benefit to have year-round veggies.)

• My sense is that the greenhouses have not changed existing social or gender roles, as the women still do most of the gardening. The men often porter goods or guide trekkers, as Thamo is near the gateway to Mount Everest.

• Garden pests are a problem during the monsoon season. To combat pests, growers should improve the soil, since pests feast on weak plants. The growers already sweeten the acidic soil with wood ash, eggshells, and bone meal, but should also spread more compost and introduce “green manure”: plants that protect the soil and add nitrogen.

Environmental studies major Judson Peck is from Topsham, Vt. For his senior thesis in 2010–11, he will try to determine the political and environmental factors that create food scarcity in Nepal.

Those activities have waned, and now, thanks to a tourism boom, the place attracts a lot more people. There’s world-class mountain biking, whitewater rafting on the Colorado River, two national parks, and, as a result, an ever-increasing number of coffee shops and Mexican restaurants. Still, the nearest mall and big-box stores are 90-plus minutes away, and first-run movies take a month to find our tiny three-screen theater. The local newspaper is just a weekly.

In this amazing landscape (lots of films have been shot around here), accented by a quirky, tight-knit community of locals, I’ve found my home. But living here has its tradeoffs, the most apparent of which is a disconnection from part of my identity — my Bates identity. Where I live, folks don’t just ask, “Where’s Bates College?” but “Where’s Maine?”

Bates itself is 2,000 miles away, and my closest college friends live in the Pacific Northwest or New England. Attending Bates weddings and visiting other friends during my travels helps me get a fix on my Bates identity, as do the e-mail BatesNews updates. A Bates calendar hangs in my home office.

Even as I’m feeling cut off from the place and people that helped form part of my self, my work here is all about place. My job with the Bioregional Outdoor Education Project helps rural schoolteachers instill in their students a stronger sense of place. The idea is that students who have a relationship with their outdoor place will become better citizens, more inclined to protect and interact with their environment.

On one summer trip to train teachers in outdoor education, I met a woman about my age. As we camped in the bean fields of eastern Utah and talked about our backgrounds, I learned that she was from New England. I peppered her with questions: What part? Was she familiar with the New England colleges?

Well, she wasn’t just familiar with the New England colleges. She was a Bates alumna — Sarah Merrill Strouthopoulos, Class of 1996.

My class. But we never knew one another as students.

It seemed impossible. But as she and I recreated our Bates years, we realized that we had led parallel and separate Bates lives. Sarah was an art history major; I toiled in the geology labs. She lived off campus; I was a happy Frye Street resident. She spent her junior year abroad in Nepal, while I spent a semester in Ecuador. She was a varsity skier, and I played rugby.

After that surprise mini-reunion, Sarah and I continued to work together during the school year. She is an elementary school teacher in Durango, Colo., about three hours from my home office in Moab. Every other week, I traveled to her classroom to work with her and her students. We set up compass courses in her schoolyard, conducted “Animal Olympics” with her students and their parents, and planned field trips throughout the year.

Sarah and I spent a rich school year reliving our time at Bates, but we also created a new chapter: us working together on outdoor and place-based education projects, while her students’ wide eyes told us we were accomplishing our goals. To our shared stories of Bates — we laughed about the housing lottery and recalled our graduation speaker — we added new ones, like her students’ highly amusing oral reports on Colorado eco-zones.

The teacher certification program culminates with an extended backcountry rafting trip on the San Juan River. Winding through southern Utah and the northern Navajo Reservation, Sarah and I realized that we had discovered a new sense of place, but not in strict geographical terms. Instead, it’s more like a deep awareness, one that was planted and grown in each of us during our Bates years, when we learned to take risks, challenge ourselves, and meet new people.

Separately, Sarah and I put down roots here in the West, drawn by a love of the landscape, the environment, and the people. But she and I are connected, and we are connected to others, across miles, across years, and across differences.

By Erika Jones ’96, Illustration by Marty Braun

Ayers is the force behind Porters’ Progress, a non-profit organization that provides empowering education and apparel suitable to harsh Himalyan conditions to mountain porters in Nepal. Bates is one stop on a U.S.-Canadian tour that Ayers is making with his 90-minute presentation, which includes a slide show and the award-winning BBC documentary Carrying the Burden, a 2001 Banff Mountain Film Festival selection.

A creative writing major at Bates, Ayers spent a junior semester in Nepal. In that country known for stunning natural beauty and harsh poverty, he started working with the porters who accompany tourist treks in the Himalayas. Moved by the hardships that these hardy and hardworking people endure, he founded Porters’ Progress after graduation.

Not to be confused with the Sherpas famed for their role in newsmaking mountain climbs, the porters that Ayers supports are typically lowland farmers who augment a subsistence living by carrying luggage for tourist treks. In thin clothes and flimsy shoes, they spend weeks at high altitudes carrying up to 250 pounds. Their cargo baskets are strapped to their foreheads with a cord that distributes weight to the spine.

“There’s a certain brilliance to them,” Ayers says, “that I was amazed at in the face of such hardship.”

Ayers’ presentation is sponsored by the New World Coalition, the Anti-Sweatshop Coalition and Amnesty International.