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

primary level teacher at the Tamaphok School, and she was keen to teach
us both more Nepali and Yakha, her mother tongue, in exchange for
English lessons (since she had failed her general English first year
Certificate level exam in Dhankuta campus and planned to retake it a
third time). Allen (1978:240) spoke of how hard it was to find people
"willing, persistent and knowledgeable" to help in his fieldwork
endeavours amongst the Thulunge Rai, but in our case Kamala was
interested and, with her teaching background, reflective enough to make
an excellent teacher of both Nepali and Yakha. Living with our adopted
family thus promised to be an almost ideal learning situation at that
stage of our fieldwork,
After a few days in Tamaphok we walked on over the Tinjure Danda
ridge and down to Basantapur, the roadhead town four hours' walk from
Tamaphok where we took a bus down to the 'K3' project headquarters in
Dhankuta. On the way to Basantapur we learnt about the start of the
'trade and transit' dispute with India. A treaty with India had
guaranteed special trade and transit arrangements for landlocked Nepal,
but this had come up for renewal. The Indian government had used the
opportunity to flex some political muscle, in retaliation for Nepal
buying arms from China. Sugar, kerosene and other essential commodities
were in increasingly short supply.
Exiting from a bus crammed with Nepalese travellers and their
animals and arriving a few minutes later in the newly appointed 'K3 Rest
House' in Dhankuta, one had the distinct impression one was moving
between two worlds. I had wanted to study the KHCFP and the situation
in Tamaphok as part of an interconnected development picture, but in
fact the connections were somewhat tenuous, It was notable that on most