Life Now
After a few years in America I was of the age to marry. Back home religion is very important, everywhere you go you see Buddhist and Hindu temples. While many people in Nepal are technology Hindi we also go to Buddhist temple. My mother would always tell me that it is important to go to both, that you can have both a spiritual and religious following the two do not have to be one in the same. In fact most people in Nepal worship both. During the week they will go to one temple and on the weekend they will visit the other. I do not do as well about going to worship now that I live in America, maybe it is because back home it is hard to not go. Everywhere you look there is a temple of some kind, it is impossible to avoid. Here I have to drive out of my way if I want to go and pray. The point I was getting to here though is that it is still very much a part of my families’ customs back home to do arranged marriages. So around the time that I was considered ready for marriage I talked to my parents back home and told them I was ready to start looking for a wife.
In Nepal around 90% of all weddings are still arranged by their families. The wedding is set up by the families. The average age of people suitable for marriage is between 20-25. Originally the couple to marry would have little say in the wetting often times meeting for the first time on the day of the wedding. Modern weddings however, allow for the couples to meet and the soon to be married couple is often times able to even able to reject the possible bride or groom to be.
The parents set everything up, they talked amongst their friends who had daughters that were of the age to get married and would eventually get back to you with someone that they thought you should marry. They eventually came back to me a few weeks later with someone that they thought I should meet, they gave me her information and we began to talk. I think we only talked for about two to three weeks before we decided that marriage would be something that we were interested in. After that I just let my parents know, I would like to marry her if that is still what you would like to do, and they set up everything. It is a lot like an Indian wedding you invite everyone who shares the same last name as you, everyone from your family is invited in the most distant of relatives. However, unlike Indian weddings the celebration is only a day where theirs can last several days to even as long as a week. At my wedding there must have been around 700 people there. It was a relatively small wedding compared to some that take place in Nepal.
My wife now lives with me in the United States, I have also gotten a job working in Arizona, people told me that I would love coming to Phoenix because it is in a valley and there would be mountains all around me. When my wife and I got here we could not figure out for the life of us what mountains they were referring to. I had to ask one of my coworkers one day, “hey everyone told me there would be a bunch of mountains here in Phoenix can you tell me where they are?” he looked out the window of our office and pointed at Camelback Mountain. I was shocked that THAT could pass for a mountain. That was at best a tall hill, but after living here for a few years now I have come to appreciate the city. You have the outdoors life if you want, you can mountain bike, hike, go up north and be in a forest region. I like it here and would like to stay here, in fact I plan to live here for as long as I can. I still go home and visit when I can to see the family but this has become my home now. I am working on getting my parents an extended stay visa so that they can live with me in America for a few months to decide if they would like to live here permanently with me. I do not know if they will like it though, in Katmandu they have never had to work a day in their life because they make all their money from renting land. The money that they make off that would not be able to sustain them here so they would have to work if they did move here. I don’t know what will happen but this is now my home and that is my story.
