I jhuto'd the peanut butter

While doing research for my soon-to-be-neglected-in-a-dusty-file Nepal Health Report I came across a pyramid chart showing the caste hierarchy of Nepal, which was nominally outlawed in 1963 but is apparently doing just fine without legal sanction as this story shows. Last week, I was lovingly hugging my ever present jar of crunchy peanut butter, also know as my dietary salvation, when the grandmother of our house start yelling at me, pointing at it, and yelling "Jhuto!" which means ritually impure. Without noticing I had put the butter knife that I had just used to make a sandwich back into the jar, rendering the entire thing 'contaminated' so that I had to keep it in my room instead of on the shelf lest it contaminate the rest of the food there. This was strange because as I had understood it, Jhuto was something like a theological edict against double-dipping, which I hadn't done, and I had just seen the little son of our house do the same exact thing with a jelly jar that morning. Than I saw the chart. Foreigners are exactly adjacent to the Dalit, or 'Untouchable' castes, and are under the 'impure' section of the pyramid meaning that no Hindu Nepali can accept food or water that we offer without becoming tainted.
This also explained the extreme lengths they had gone to to separate our water from theirs, something I had thought was an attempt to keep us from being exposed to kathandu's bowel-disintegrating tap water. Guess not.

(just found it again, we're 'Impure but touchable', and also 'Enslavable', but since no one here eats more that 900 calories a day, I doubt they have the strength or energy to subdue us)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_caste_system

Anyway, there are only 9 days left for Daniel and I here assuming our flight isn't delayed which is quite possible. We're kind of broke because Bank of America has apparently been deducting $5 from our bank account, without permission or notification, for every atm transaction. So we're out about 3500 rupees which sucks because we have to pay exactly that much in airport taxes when we fly out of here next Wednesday.

On a better note, yesterday I made a necklace out of some wooden prayer beads and a medallion that a tibetan lady conned me into buying in Pokhara. I asked our house mother if I could have it blessed by a priest so that it wards off hippies and she said she'd see what she can do. that's about it for now.