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Come to think of it, it’s hard to know how the people of Bigu survive. Perched 3,000 metres up the side of a mountain in remote northern Nepal – one day’s walk and two frightening days’ bus ride from Kathmandu – the village is home to nearly 2,000 souls, none of whom have ready access to electricity, showers, or the MTR. As you might guess, it’s a pungent place with a reliance on candles and a complete ignorance of what it really means to “please stand back from the door”.

The disjuncture between our lives in Hong Kong and the lives of the villagers of Bigu is so pronounced as to be absurd. For a start, these people breathe air that isn’t actually killing them (providing they’re outside of their homes, which are filled with smoke when it comes time to cook dinner on the open fires). But on the flip side, they have to go to extreme lengths to provide for themselves entertainment that doesn’t revolve around a 100-megabytes-per-second broadband connection, portable PlayStation, or a Wan Chai bar.

So it was somewhat jarring to arrive at the village and find a group of eight girls gathered at the village’s community centre – a simple lodge built by an Austrian NGO 15 years ago – singing. Strangely, this was done without the aid of scrolling lyrics or video montages of lovers by lakes. In fact, the teenagers were belting out traditional folk songs from the village. One especially poignant number lamented the exodus of young men from Bigu to foreign countries – Dubai, Qatar, Malaysia, Korea, and, um, Hong Kong – to find work in the construction or hospitality industries.

Soon, a crowd had gathered at the lodge and, aided by sufficient quantities of the potent home-made rice wine, rakshi, everyone was up and dancing, including us visitors from Hong Kong who hadn’t been seen sober dancing since before puberty (we abstained from the local tipple). As well-trained tourists, my girlfriend and I whipped out our digital cameras and set to work crafting portrait after portrait as the villagers clamoured to get a piece of our newfangled devices.

The crowd, dressed in faded T-shirts, pilled track suits, and rubber sandals, danced the night away – well, until 7pm at least, when it was time to drive their cows, buffalo and oxen back home, picking off leeches along the way, and settle down for dinner: always potato curry and lentils with rice piled as high as the Himalayas, which stand just around the corner.

In the morning, a few families returned to the lodge to use the village’s only phone – a satellite phone – to call their sons in distant countries. This happens every day.
Ostensibly, we were here on a volunteering trip – to teach English, to interview the leaders, the teachers, and the people at the next-door nunnery – but in all honesty the people of Bigu left us with more than we left them.

Okay, so now a few young nuns know how to correctly pronounce “yellow”, and the village boys are hopefully still enjoying cricket games with firewood bats and balls made up of rolled-up trash with potatoes stuffed inside (naturally, I kicked their puny asses in those games). The girls clearly enjoyed the coloured pencils we brought them, and our hosts were amused when one night, in an effort to diversify our dinner fare, we made mashed potatoes instead of curry.

But at the end of our week in Bigu, we headed out wishing we could do more and resolving to come back soon. The draw to return is strong, despite the thirsty leeches and the bed bugs. At the very least, we learned that life is possible without the internet and air-conditioning. All you need is a little rakshi.

Hamish McKenzie

Want to volunteer in Bigu, or other needy Nepal villages? Visit www.volunteernepal.com to find out how.