Nepali schoolchildren are frequently asked to write essays on "What I Would Do if I Were King". There are, of course, no right answers. Nepal is sloshing with foreign experts, all clamouring to offer their suggestions - and money - yet despite the efforts of the past five decades the country remains economically poor. Some say Nepal's underlying problems, and the inefficacy of foreign aid, will keep it forever backward. Others point to tangible improvements that have been made, such as improvements in child mortality and literacy. Still others claim that Nepal's problems have been vastly overstated by the government (to ensure continued aid) and development agencies (to justify their payrolls).

"Development" is a word like "progress": it means different things to different people, and all too often is assumed uncritically to be a desirable end in itself. Throughout the world - not only in Nepal - no one has yet worked out whether development is in fact a Good Thing, and if so what form it should take. But after spending time in the field, many aid workers conclude that Nepalis - who lead rich and elegantly simple lives, nearly self-sufficient and unencumbered by many modern problems - have more to teach the "developed" (some would say over developed) world than it has to teach them.

Pragmatists usually argue that development is going to come anyway, and communities should at least be given a fair choice as to what kind of development they want, rather than being forced to choose between development and non-development. But while no one advocates withholding aid or denying Nepalis' aspirations to certain material improvements, many in the development world reckon that Nepali schoolchildren are probably better able to solve their own problems than foreign experts, and that Nepalis ought to be the ones who decide what is appropriate development for Nepal.

Most people agree that Nepal's overarching problem ("challenge", in development parlance) is poverty , which can be traced to a number of factors: steep terrain, which makes farming inefficient and communications difficult; landlocked borders; few natural resources; a rigid social structure that entrenches the rich against the poor; ineffective national government; and a comparatively late start (the Nepalese government did essentially nothing for its people before 1951). Unable to do anything about these causes, most development organizations have devoted themselves to alleviating symptoms.

All too often, foreigners (and, it has to be said, some Nepalis) have tended to view Nepal's situation as a set of problems that could be identified, measured and solved in isolation. Trouble is, life isn't like that: tackling one problem often only succeeds in shifting it to another area. For example, better health and sanitation are obvious requirements, but providing them increases the rate of population growth, at least in the short term. Curbing population is no simple task, for it is rooted in poverty and the low status of women. In the meantime, agriculture has to be improved to feed the growing population, deforestation reversed to stop the fuelwood crisis, and industry developed to provide jobs. Irrigation projects, roads, hydroelectric diversions are needed a?¦ you get the idea. Even if you resolve that development should be left to Nepalis, education, or at least "awareness-raising" programmes, will be required to get the ball rolling, and that means not so much building schools as addressing the poverty that keeps children from attending classes.

Nepal, being a proverbial Third World "basket case", has afforded aid organizations and donor nations an opportunity to test a long list of development theories. One that seemed very promising in the 1980s and 1990s was the integrated rural development project (IRDP) , a more holistic approach in which various sub-projects are coordinated to complement each other. The Swiss IRDP at Jiri and the British one in Dhankuta, now both handed over to Nepali management, are prominent examples. Unfortunately, such projects run counter to the "small is beautiful" maxim: they're terribly expensive (and therefore unsustainable without foreign aid), prone to corruption and, in the end, limited to tiny geographic areas. Again, there are no easy, pat answers - only dilemmas.

We've only scratched the surface of complex issues in these pages, and made many simplifications. Some dilemmas are unique to Nepal, but many - if not most - are common to the entire "developing" world. The vast majority of people in the "developed" world are dangerously ignorant of the terrible pressures building in the poorer nations; travelling in Nepal offers a chance to witness the inequities firsthand and grapple with some of the dilemmas, which cannot help but make you re-examine your own lifestyle