Namaste Collection Day

It was early, around 7 a.m., when we arrived in Lahachowk — a rural village northwest of Pokhara, Nepal. Several women were carefully bagging and weighing beans and other vegetables, but they stopped to greet us with broad grins, giving us small bouquets of just-picked posies and cream-colored ceremonial scarves, and placing red tika blessings on our foreheads. With each heartfelt greeting of “Namaste,” they made us feel like royalty.

We soon discovered that it was collection day. Days like this only happen a couple times a year, and the air was tinged with a certain excitement. Bag after bag of vegetables were weighed, then set aside to load into a vehicle bound for a nearby city. On collection day, the year’s production takes one step closer to its final destination: kitchens of not-so-distant cooks, while the farmers take one step closer to reaping financial reward for their efforts.

The women of Lahachowk belong to a Heifer International project. Heifer uses its proven Passing on the Gift® model to empower families across the globe to eliminate hunger and poverty from their lives. Through Heifer projects, families learn how to take the best possible care of their animals, making them healthy and productive. Through training, members are taught organic methods of growing food crops, including how to turn livestock manure into the best fertilizer and even cooking fuel.

As if tikas, flowers, scarves and home tours weren’t enough, before we started our bumpy descent to Pokhara, Sita found one last opportunity to be a gracious host and offered us crisp cucumber wedges and cups of piping hot milk tea, a Nepali specialty.