---
type: Video
title: "96 Hours Living With a Nepalese Family🇳🇵"
description: Four days in a Himalayan foothill village of 80 families — milking buffalo at dawn, churning butter that keeps a year, and a daily 40-minute climb to cut fodder that Harry cannot keep up with.
tags: [nepal, village-life, homestay, farming, buffalo, community, himalayas]
timestamp: 2026-08-05T12:00:00Z
resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J-52niA_TQ
video_id: -J-52niA_TQ
upload_date: 2023-04-20
duration: 3567
---

# 96 Hours Living With a Nepalese Family🇳🇵

Four days in [Barang](/places/barang.md), a village in the foothills of the
Himalayas — 1,500 metres up, fifteen kilometres from the nearest city, about
eighty families — staying with a host family through a homestay Harry links in
the description. He does not name the village in this video; it is named in
the one filmed a few days later. He follows
one household's day from six in the morning, and the video's argument is made
entirely by how much has been done before nine.

Two things stay with him. The first is the work: by 9am the aunt has fed and
milked the buffalo, cleaned the house, taken the goats out, and cooked lunch,
and the afternoon is a forty-minute climb into the forest to cut fodder and
carry it back on a head strap — which Harry tries and describes as harder work
than he has done in a year. The second is the sharing: any of the eighty
households can take another family's surplus corn or chillies without asking,
because everyone has a surplus of something different. He contrasts it with
what he calls the individualism of the West and doesn't pretend to be neutral
about which he prefers.

The complication he lets the family state themselves: would they move to the
city? Yes, if it offered better infrastructure. His host's summary is that it
is a hard life and a happy one, and that they are happier than he is.

## Key moments

- [00:33] Six in the morning, following the aunt out.
- [01:11] The buffalo are given warm water, heated overnight and topped up in
  the morning.
- [02:17] They will never eat this buffalo, and not for religious reasons — the
  family have become attached to an animal they feed and milk daily. Harry
  notes it makes no financial sense and says so approvingly.
- [03:52] The goats, all of whom have names.
- [06:07] Harry tries the milking. He is not good at it and improves over the
  four days.
- [08:13] Two litres, which goes into the day's tea.
- [08:45] Incense carried round the house, then a tika from the aunt for luck.
- [10:34] He is given the potatoes to cut and is comprehensively outclassed.
- [11:16] The school bus announces itself with a horn that doubles as the
  village alarm clock.
- [12:54] Masala made from scratch — garlic, chilli and spice crushed on a stone
  by hand, with no blender anywhere.
- [16:18] Butter. Buffalo milk is warmed, cooled, and left to become yoghurt by
  the next day.
- [17:19] Then churned with a rope-and-pulley churn for over half an hour.
  Harry manages about two minutes and is sweating.
- [21:39] The yoghurt is drained solid, then boiled down into a clarified butter
  that keeps for a year — the butter poured over dal bhat.
- [23:50] The grandmother, 92, waiting for lunch.
- [24:27] It is nine in the morning and lunch is cooked, the goats fed, the
  buffalo milked and the butter made.
- [25:31] Dal bhat with rice, potato, carrot and spinach, everything grown on
  the plot they're sitting on.
- [27:30] The afternoon job: a forty-minute climb to cut fodder for the animals,
  done every day.
- [28:21] The sharing arrangement — any of the eighty households may take
  another's surplus corn or chillies without asking, because the surpluses are
  in different things.
- [30:13] Sickles sharpened on a stone at a communal spot on the way up.
- [32:24] Asked whether they'd move to the city: yes, for better infrastructure.
  But his host insists they are happier than he or Harry is — a hard life, not
  an unhappy one — and that once you've had the comfortable version it's hard
  to come back.
- [34:57] Leopards take dogs and young goats out of the village. One took the
  family's dog about eighteen months earlier, during lockdown. No people, yet.
- [36:03] Harry tries to cut a branch and is told he has the angle wrong.
- [39:23] The branches are stripped to twigs so a whole tree's leaves become one
  carryable load.
- [39:54] Amala, which the aunt digs up and hands him for dehydration.
- [41:04] Cinnamon bark taken straight off the tree, used for masala and tea.
  His host has been collecting it since childhood.
- [41:47] A leech, removed with a leaf.
- [43:34] Carrying the load down on a head strap. His neck gives out; the women
  do it daily.
- [45:48] His verdict, stated twice: they have worked harder in one day than he
  has in a year, and none of them stops in their fifties.
- [54:51] The evening — neighbours and extended family on the porch for folk
  songs and dancing, with Harry and his dad pulled up to join in.
- [58:56] He admits he'd normally need a drink to dance, and nobody here drinks
  at all.

## Extracted pages

- Place: [Barang](/places/barang.md)
- Country: [Nepal](/countries/nepal.md)
- Person: [Harry's dad](/people/harrys-dad.md)