April 1982 RAIN Page 11 ACCESS FOREIGN nepali aama, Portrait of a Nepalese Hill Woman, by Broughton Cobum, 1982,169 pp., $9.95 from: Ross-Erikson Publishers 629 State Street, Suite 207 Santa Barbara, CA 93101 Nepali aama (Nepalese mother) grumbles in the way old people often do; about the kids who have no respect, who smoke and gamble and throw stones; about the population growing too fast, "When I first moved up to this village there were only eight houses. Now there are eighteen. Everywhere you turn you run into someone;" and about the economy, "Interest rates for borrowing money have gone up from ten percent a year to ten percent every five months. When you need money you don't have any choice but to pay." Like most old people, she's full of advice; "We have a rule for health. First thing in the morning, even if you don't have to crap, you should at least go out to the field, squat, take a pull on a cigarette, fart and come back." And she can spout the sort of philosophy you have to live about a century to get away with, "They say if you work too hard you'll die early and if you sleep too much you'll die early. I do both too much and can't understand why I'm not dead yet." She can tell you the medicinal uses of rhinoceros horns and the importance of pierced ears to prevent deafness in women. She still climbs trees (when she can find any), farms her land, and goes on pilgrimages to stock up on spiritual security. Mr. Coburn wisely lets his candid photos and nepali aama's words speak for themselves, adding only a few historical and cultural details to link these together. His book is clearly an offering of love and respect to the woman who has adopted him into her home and will in turn be welcomed into yours. This is a very special book. —Carlotta Collette Villages, by Richard Critchfield, 1981, 388 pp., $17.95 hardcover from: Anchor Press/Doubleday 501 Franklin Avenue Garden City, NY 11530 "Our grandfathers were villagers," Richard Critchfield reminds us, "and so our grandchildren may become." Yet for many of us who invoke traditional village values like cooperation, self-reliance and sense of place in our efforts to make our own societies sustainable, the billions of our fellow human beings now living in villages are little more than population statistics or faces staring out From: nepali aama from newspaper photos of the latest Third World famine. Critchfield is uniquely qualified to help us overcome our cultural isolation. For the past dozen years he has lived in a dozen villages in Asia, Africa and Latin America and he introduces us to people he has known as friends and almost as family. Whether they speak Arabic or Portuguese, live in the tropics or the Himalayas, these villagers seem at first glance to have much more in common with each other than with us, but through Critchfield's eyes, we quickly recognize and relate to their hopes and fears, their wisdom and folly and their concern for their parents and children. "When you go to a village," the author observes, "you can't go too far wrong if you assume that everybody is just like you." Critchfield is optimistic about the future of the Third World. He notes dramatic changes taking place in the attitudes of his village friends toward family planning and scientific farming. His assertion that we in the more developed countries are prone to underestimate the common sense, ingenuity and tenacity of villagers is a point well taken, but his uncritical enthusiasm for Green Revolution agriculture (with its heavy dependence on fertilizers and pesticides) and his rather light attention to ecological constraints and to institutional barriers that hold back change should cause us to approach his optimism with considerable caution. Still, his wonderful, firsthand accounts of life among the world's rural poor majority lend considerable credence to his conclusion that the sum of countless decisions and actions now being taken in villages could well turn out to be "the greatest story of the late twentieth century." —John Ferrell HONEY VS. SUGAR The following was inadvertently left out of Nancy Cosper's "Good Cooks in Their Own Write" article, in our Feb./March issue. It is an argument of central importance to the "honey vs. sugar" issue and the way that issue relates to the politics of self-reliance. It is in the question "honey versus sugar" that the answer of local self-reliance appears the strongest. Sugar is a multi-national product produced from beets or cane grown largely in Third World countries, whose land could be put to better use growing food for its people. Unfortunately, honey has also become a big business, and much of the commercial honey in the U.S. is imported. However, it is possible to buy local honey from a small-scale producer. That choice is not possible with sugar.
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