Days in Bhada, a small Tharu village in Kailali, are unhurried. Far away from the hubbub of a city, Bhada is your quintessential Tarai village: acres of yellow mustard fields, bullock carts and bicycles on the streets, and one-storey mud homes. And its people live life at their own quiet pace.

 

I reached Bhada late in the evening, just as an amber-gold sun was setting across the horizon, lighting up the entire sky. Children were cycling on the streets, women and men were returning from the fields, and smoke was rising from chimneys. Almost 200 homes make the village, but the place is quaint. As evening sets in, besides the light chatter of people, all you hear is the hum of crickets and foxes crying from the nearby community forest.

 

The village of Bhada was selected as a model for a community homestay back in 2010 by the government of Nepal in an effort to promote tourism in the far western plains of Nepal. Government officials and non-profit organisations came to the village to train the locals on operating homestays. After that, the people took it upon themselves. In the decade since, Bhada has transformed itself into a popular homestay destination in Kailali, with 20 homestays currently in operation.

 

“When government officials came to our village to do their research, we did not know anything about homestays,” said Laxmi Narayan Chaudhary, chairperson of the Bhada Homestay Committee, which oversees all the 20 homestays. “A majority of the people here are farmers and it took us a lot of time to learn how to run a homestay and make that shift from being farmers to tourism entrepreneurs,” he added.