THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

None of these potent ial sources of income were particularly
lucrative or reliable for the time and effort they required. The only
regular and relatively well-paid jobs in Tamaphok were as school
teachers, yet of the seventeen teachers at Sri Chamunde High School,
only four were Yakha (see Chapter Eight), It was difficult to be
certain, but it seemed to us that (as Macfarlane has observed amongst
the Gurung - see Chapter Two> there was a homogenization of poverty in
Tamaphok, with only a few of the richest households maintaining and
perhaps improving their position vis-8-vis the rest. Most of the
wealthiest had made their money from successf ul migrations outside
Tamaphok, the options for which will be discussed in Chapter Seven,
Everyone else lived on something of a knife-edge quite close to poverty.
Things that were likely to send them 'over the edge' were expenses
connected with illness, education, food shortage, the calling in of
previously incurred debts, weddings and funerals.
The costs of wedding celebrations and funeral observances were
increasing alarmingly. While we were in Tamaphok news came that a woman
whose husband was away working in Saudi Arabia had died, She was poor
(and heavily indebted to pay for her husband's going off to work) but
the barkhi was still said to have cost around 3,000 NRs (about £60). The
amount of sunauli (bridewea!th) characteristically expected had also
risen alarmingly. According to one old woman, only ten years previously
the norm had been to give the bride's father a few gold items (which
were quite often given back to his daughter), Now, considerable amounts
of money (up to 10,000 NRs - about £200 - was quoted to us) were ! ikely
to change hands.
An interesting development in the previous ten years therefore had