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Celebrating 40 Years of Connection, Part 2

If it Were Easy: Navigating Business Half a World Away in 1987

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I used to say “if it were easy everybody would be doing it”, referring to the joys and challenges of starting a business and specifically to working in what at the time was considered the 4th poorest country in the world. This was 1987, the era before computers were widely used. There were no cell phones, fax machines, or internet. Denise did have an American Express card which allowed us to get mail at the Amex office in Kathmandu.  And, once a month with a passport and a personal check we could buy $1000 in travelers checks. Remember those? They just handed you the money. The ATM of the day!

Banking was a nightmare. There was one bank, the King’s bank, and no computers or electronic transfers-just walls of ledgers and often water overflowing from the toilets into the lobby. I remember going through the ledgers with a teller who kept telling me that the money hadn’t arrived. I kept saying yes it has, keep looking. It was a long and frustrating process. Also very few people we were working with had bank accounts, so as they say in Nepal “ke garne”, what to do! Mail was another impossibility. There was only one post office which was horribly  inefficient and corrupt. We would send mail that was never received, which sometimes would include money and our orders.

We had three choices for conducting business: mail (difficult at best), travel to Nepal–which one or both of us did twice a year on a regular basis but was expensive and exhausting, or phone calls made from the one and only international phone office. Our main contact was Nirmal, an Indian man, whom we had spent hours with in his little craft shop in KTM. He was a great guy– fun, well educated, honest and spoke perfect English. And he really enjoyed the handcraft business. So he would arrange shipping, and stay in touch with the various small shops about orders. But he had two main drawbacks. He was Indian, so had to have a Nepali partner (more on that later) and he never got the idea of the time difference between our two countries. So we would routinely get phone calls in the middle of the night. I remember how frustrating it was to be woken up at three o’clock in the morning to talk about orders.  I finally had to unplug the land line. 

Denise had started at the University of Washington law school the fall after we returned from our extended travel. But she was emphatic from the outset that during those three years she would take time off and return to Nepal, go trekking and continue the quest to find  women focused craft projects to work with. In the winter of ‘87 we arranged a trek with our erstwhile trekking guide Ram Karki, trekker at large.With one porter and Ram, we set off around the Annapurna circuit, a three week trek which involved the challenge of crossing the 17,769 foot Thorong La pass. It is one of the most spectacular walks in the world and, although not easy, is incredibly rewarding. There were very few roads into the Himalayas back then so the trail passed through remote villages. We slept in schools, peoples’ homes and tea houses. Ram would cook our nightly dinner of dal bhat, often with potatoes bought in the villages. We crossed Thorong La on a glorious morning, with two snow peaks reaching another 10,000 feet above us on either side. After a quick picture and  a cigarette break for the porter we descended to a more reasonable elevation,12,000 feet where it began to snow. The final week took us down the beautiful Kali Gandaki valley and into Nepal’s second city, Pokhara.

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 Denise, Ram & Ric at Thorong La Pass, 17,769 ft

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Our best experiences in Nepal have always been interacting with people from diverse tribes, cultures and backgrounds. In Pokhara we met a delightful Tibetan man, a refugee, who was selling beaded necklaces from a blanket on the side of the road. Thubten, a former monk, slightly crippled, had fled Tibet after the Chinese occupation. Whenever we were in Pokhara we would visit, drink tea, talk about his life and buy his jewelry.

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Thubten selling necklaces in Pokhara

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These sometimes fleeting interactions were experiences that expanded our world and were the beginnings of what became Ganesh Himal Trading.  Another example was buying bracelets from a street kid in Kathmandu named Neil. We always looked for him and his little stall. He supplied us with copper medicine bangles and tingshas for years until he grew up. We’ve stayed in touch with him over the  years and watched as he became a respected business person. He now sells beautiful thankas the world over and has built and supports an orphanage in the village where he grew up. 

Speaking of Kathmandu, when we got back from the trek, we discovered that Nirmal had returned to India, a family crisis, and would be gone for at least a month. He had left us in the less than capable hands of his Nepali partner. Often when traveling you run across people who just can’t be trusted. This was one of those times and it all could have ended there. But as you know, it didn’t. We were doing business with many of the small shop owners in the tourist enclave of Thamel. One which sold Tibetan bags, which we bought. The owner, Namgyal Lama,  had been sponsored by a Swiss couple to attend high school and college in India after they had fled Tibet. His father, Pa La, had been a trader in Tibet bringing salt down to Nepal on yaks and trading for rice and vegetables to take back.The bags they used were heavy colorful cotton duffels. These are the same Tibetan duffels that Ganesh Himal Trading still sells. Pa La had his own shop but spoke no English and mostly hung out with friends, chatting, drinking Tibetan tea and doing his daily prayers. Namgyal pretty much took care of business. We were talking to him about this problem partner of Nirmal’s, and his response was: “first, you can’t trust this guy and second, ok you need someone to do your shipping? I’ll do it.” “Have you ever done it before?” we asked. “No, but I’ll do it”. 

There are so many elements to this story, many of which will come out in future narratives. But let me just say that over the years Namgyal built this chance encounter into one of the largest shipping companies in Nepal, and was given an award by the Prime Minister for outstanding business leadership. His wife Pemala has been a wonderful partner of ours for over 35 years, turning a small craft shop into a sizable operation, while providing her workers benefits they would not have had elsewhere. Namgyal and Pemala raised and educated their three daughters who have all gone on to successful careers. One, Kesang, now has her own fair trade business, but more on her later. This was really the beginning of our experience in Fair Trade. Namgyal and Pema La have been more than partners in this journey, they became friends and family. Over the years much has transpired to cement this relationship and others.

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Namgyl, Pema La and young Kesang

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 Making connections and if it were easy – part two. 

More than any particular business prowess on our part, the success of GHT involved chance meetings with people of integrity and insight. Hospitality is an honored tradition in Nepal. Nepalis and Tibetans love their cultures and enjoy sharing the myriad stories revolving around customs, religious traditions and crafts. We took every opportunity to sit in the shops, drink Nepali tea and listen to stories. We didn’t exactly get a lot done during the day, but we learned so much, made great friends and expanded our horizons. 

However, with some investigation we reached out to a couple small development projects we’d heard about. One was Bhaktapur Craft Printers (BCP) whom we were introduced to by a Spanish woman who worked with UNICEF. BCP was located in the city of Bhaktapur, one of the three  ancient cities in the Kathmandu valley, now a world heritage site. The people who worked there were trained by UNICEF in the art of making paper products, specifically cards. Many were women who had no education, no background in business and little contact with life outside of their village. UNICEF was in the process of scaling back their involvement in Nepal and wanted to find other buyers for BCP paper products, that’s where we came in. The workers were invested and wanted to continue on; they had a manager who wanted to see BCP succeed, a nice facility, and access to traditional Nepali paper which we’d seen being made in some of the villages we had trekked through. What they lacked at this point were buyers other than UNICEF.  Thus began another long term relationship. We worked with BCP for years until UNICEF eventually pulled out causing the larger organization to fold. But with the help of Ganesh Himal a group of the least educated women workers were able to organize and start their own small business so they wouldn’t lose their income. We continue to support and buy from them to this day. Through their determination and hard work they have been able to provide education for their daughters all the way through college. One woman, Kamala Giri, who leads Bhaktapur Women’s Craft Paper has 3 daughters, one a nurse, one a pharmacist and another a dental assistant. Kamala is amazingly tenacious and resolved early on that her daughters would not suffer what she had suffered as an uneducated woman. She is now a representative for her district in Bhaktapur and has been re-elected with more than 90% of the vote for another 5 year term. Her main campaign message was empowering women. It is always such an honor to meet with them and visit Bhaktapur, and to experience their amazing culture and hospitality.

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BCP Making Paper

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At the same time we encountered BCP we discovered another project, led by one of the most dedicated women we have ever worked with, Meera Bhatteri. Meera founded the Association for Craft Producers (ACP) around 1986 with the aim of providing training and employment for women who came from marginalized backgrounds and to put money directly into their hands. At the time, ACP had an American man, Mike, working with them to design craft products and develop skills. They had a vision of building a space where women could learn new skills like spinning, dying, and knitting, or make money directly from their traditional work like block printing, weaving, woodwork, and ceramics. For most of the women this pay was the first time they had held money in their own hands. Meera told us how empowering this was and how one of the women weavers, Laxmi, wept as she realized the power she held in her hand. Laxmi went on to organize 40 other women weavers in her village to weave with ACP which transformed their community. We are so fortunate to have been involved with ACP over the years. It is truly another lesson in humility, watching the women and this project grow. Mike had to return to the states some time later but Meera continued to lead ACP and became a mentor to us. Last year, after years of dedicated service, she turned over the reins to Revita, another incredibly capable woman who has worked beside her for 25 years. Over the decades ACP has grown into a project that has impacted thousands of women across Nepal. They provide daily lunches for women working in the facility, which are a feast (as we can attest),  employment for women throughout  Nepal which once again has allowed women with little education to send their daughters to school and given them the financial ability to be equal partners in their families. We’ll share more about ACP in the future.

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Denise with ACP founder, Meera Bhatteri

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This, along with so many other relationships, has been the joy and the reward of working in Nepal for the last forty years. But like I said at the beginning “if it were easy”…  Once  again we hit a snag, one that shows the difficulties of small scale international trade. So after we had established these wonderful connections and had begun to get crafts here relatively efficiently, the US government stepped in, slapping quota and visa requirements on products coming from Nepal. This was because India was transhipping cotton goods through Nepal to avoid Indian quotas. It so happened that a large and expensive shipment of ours had left Nepal before the requirements were put in place but arrived after they were in force. The goods in the shipment had no visas and so could not legally clear customs and enter the US. Our shipment was held at customs and was due to be destroyed. Denise went to work talking to everybody from the Nepal Desk at the State Department (who knew!) to the Nepali Ambassador, explaining that these were handcrafts made by cottage industries and women’s projects. She was finally able to convince the Ambassador that the State Department would not hold it against Nepal if they provided the documentation to release our shipment. Again it could have all come to an ignoble end here, but it didn’t.  Denise spent the last part of law school writing her thesis discussing the impact of  multinational corporations tran-shipping through or mass-producing in small, underdeveloped countries, like Nepal.  Multinationals “shop” for favorable quota regulations in countries like Nepal, using their favorable import status into the US until the US imposes visa and quota regulations, then leaving once these regulations are imposed. This practice leaves small countries, and especially small scale craft producers, with draconian requirements and a system that is unable to accommodate them. She argued that handicraft products should be exempt from these kinds of import regulations, which in some instances has happened with Nepal.

From the beginning, we were committed to the small producers and Nepal. The fact that we’ve done this for forty years still amazes us. The trials and tribulations, not to mention the treks, have been a lifetime of learning. We have been incredibly fortunate to have had this experience, and look forward to sharing more of these adventures about Fair Trade and Nepal.  

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