I'd like to talk about Mrs Thapa, who runs a small momo restaurant near my office in Lalitpur, in Nepal. I eat lunch there three or four times a week, so I've got to know her quite well over the last two years.
She's a widow in her fifties, and the restaurant is basically a one-woman business. She has one young helper in the kitchen and her teenage son helps after school, but she does almost everything else herself: the shopping, the cooking, serving and cleaning.
You can see how hard she works from the hours alone. She's at the vegetable market by six, and by eight she's already folding hundreds of dumplings by hand. The restaurant opens at eleven and doesn't close until nine at night, and she's on her feet almost the whole time. She takes one day off a month. Despite all that, the quality never drops. The dumplings are always freshly made, the tables are always clean, and she remembers what regular customers like. She knows I always want extra chilli sauce, and she brings it without me asking.
What do I think about it? I've got a huge amount of respect for her. She's managed to put her son through a good school and pay off the debts her husband left, all from a tiny restaurant. But I also feel a bit uncomfortable when I compare it with my own job in IT, where I earn more for far less physical effort. I sometimes think we don't value this kind of hard work enough. People complain if a plate of momos costs a few rupees more, without thinking about the hours behind it.