96 Hours Living With a Nepalese Family🇳🇵

Four days in Barang, 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
• Country: Nepal
• Person: Harry’s dad