Who Makes Our Workday Possible? A Story from the Daayitwa’s Kitchen
When I walked into the Daayitwa office to begin my fellowship, I was already a week late. While the rest of the cohort had spent the past seven days bonding, navigating the workspace, and settling into their research rhythms, I felt like I was playing catchup.
Rakshya Baral,7th July,2026,
When I walked into the Daayitwa office to begin my fellowship, I was already a week late. While the rest of the cohort had spent the past seven days bonding, navigating the workspace, and settling into their research rhythms, I felt like I was playing catchup. On my first day I expected to come in quietly, find my space, and figure things out on my own. Instead, I was greeted by a cheerful voice behind me "Rakshya!". It was Manju didi, our office chef. We had never met. I hadn't introduced myself and I still don't know how she knew my name, maybe someone mentioned it in passing, maybe she just remembers everything anyone tells her, but she welcomed me with a warmth that instantly dissolved my first-day anxieties.
It's been about twenty days since that morning, and what I've learned in that time is that this wasn't a one-time thing. Manju didi knows everyone's name. She knows who skips rice, who needs extra achaar, who drinks sugar free tea, or who's been quietly stressed for a week and could use a slightly bigger portion of dal. It's easy to miss how much this matters, because it's designed to be invisible in the offices as well as in our home. Nobody puts people's food preferences or doing all the household chores on a resume. Nobody measures it in a quarterly report. But by 12 PM every day, the office runs on it. People who haven't spoken all morning end up discussing the world at the same table. And every single day, the plates come back empty, not because anyone was polite, but because someone in that kitchen paid enough attention to make food that people actually wanted to finish.
This part of any institution, or household is what makes every day functioning for each and every working people, and people who are not able to take care of themselves. This is care economy, in its most literal form, and, as it happens, is my own research topic at Daayitwa. Manju didi’s role at Daayitwa is a microcosm of a much larger societal reality. The care economy is the foundation upon which all other productive economies rests. We are able to go to work everyday because someone at home has all of our daily necessities figured out. It is the work that makes all other work possible.
As I draft my fellowship research on how to better integrate and value the care economy within our legal and policy frameworks, I don't have to look far for inspiration. I just have to look toward the kitchen of our office. Manju didi is a daily reminder about how important care work is. It deserves our recognition, our respect, and most importantly, our structural support. This is just a story of our office but these types of stories lie invisible in each and every household of Nepal and around the world, and a better integration and support is what is needed in order to respect those people who make our daily life possible.