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

a research assistant after school. We also recruited another young
Yakha school teacher, Bhim Bahadur, to come in the mornings. He gave us
Yakha language lessons and later helped with survey work, He was a very
intelligent young man and had been very helpful in negotiating the
rental of our house for us. While we lacked the constant domestic
exposure to everyday conversations in Nepali and Yakha which had been a
very positive feature of life with our family, the regular visits of
Kamala and Bhim Bahadur, for which we paid them 30 NRs an hour (about
60p - a fortune by village standards) meant we had more formal tuition
than had been the case before.
Living in a house on our own rather than in a compound with a family
also exposed us to less desirable elements in the community. It was
interesting that we were never asked for loans while we were living with
the pradh6n pa-c (except for one man who asked me for money during the
Dasai- festival, almost as a joke, so that he could go on playing
cards). Once we were living on our own we obviously came to be seen as
a more possible source of much needed cash. Loan giving and taking was
not simply an economic activity but was part of the web of social
relations in the community (see Chapter Five), However, we were not
always sure who were the genuinely needy cases and also did not feel
able to follow the normal conventions of the system, Without these
provisos there were no end of people to whom we could potentially give
loans, so we quickly decided that the only policy we could adopt was to
refuse all requests by saying that giving loans was not our custom. We
had heard many stories of bitterness and recriminations on both sides to
do with anthropologists and loans, and felt this was the best course to
take. We helped out some really needy women running households on their