World Without Warning

Tsering Kunzes and I climb onto the bus heading back to the village from Chautara. It had been four days of sleeping at during the day and staying awake at night to finish the website as internet connection only works at night. I’m a little dazed and sit down next to a young boy. He has beautiful big light brown eyes, I use the little Nepali I know to ask him his name. “Saroj Bogarti.” If the children here don’t go to private schools, they are usually very shy to speak with me especially the girls. This boy smiles but doesn’t say anything more. School children begin filing onto the bus, some climb up the windows from the outside to get onto the roof. And before we know it, it’s crowded as usual. The little girls have pigtails with green or red bows and wear plaid skirts and pressed shirts – definitely coming from the local private school. I drop my book and before I can even turn to see where it went, the boy quickly reaches down to pick up the book using both hands when passing it to me.

A few minutes later, he slips his small hand into his pocket and takes out a cigarette. Lights it up and draws a big inhalation like he’s been doing it forever. I look around at the adults and children with no one takes notice.I ask him in Nepali how old he is and his reply,"Bara Barsako." Twelve Years Old. Across from us, Kunzes takes uses her camera to take a snapshop and then he continues to pose for her.



Here in Kathmandu I take a closer look at the cigarette ads. There are more advertisements for cigarettes than there are for any other single product in this country. Coke might be comparable. Advertisements for adventure travel with paragliders smoking in the air. Walk into any tea stall or general shop, these ads plaster the wall. For the first time in a month I am with someone who is totally literate in both Nepali and English. I finally ask the question that has been on my mind since first taking notice a while ago of the large amount of cigarette advertisements. “Deepish, do you see and do you understand this health warning in English at the bottom of this poster?” He nods and then I ask him, “Can you tell me what this entire Nepali script saying is?”

He moves his finger over the script throughout the poster. “It is saying how tasty and good these cigarettes are.” And then I ask him, “Does it say anything that relates to the health warning in English, how it is injurious to health.”
“No, it says nothing about that.”

I look around at the people smoking in the tea shop, at the owner looking at Kunzes taking a photograph of one of the advertisements. None of these people know. That is why in the villages, mothers and fathers will puff smoke into their babies faces. That is why the children have smokers cough. That is why our grandmother coughs up black tar in her spit throughout the nights. It’s a country where the majority of the population is being fed these cigarettes with no notion of what will happen to them. The warning is in English, a language they can’t understand.

I think to myself, our country went through this mistake forty years ago and these people are beginning to follow. We live in a time where people have already been through this mistake. Why haven't we warned the rest of the world?