Medaka Family School

I just got back from ten days in Saping, a rural farming village up in the mountains. The people running the guesthouse I've been staying at come from the village and started a school there around ten years ago. They wanted to get more volunteers, so for the past few weeks I've been putting the school on some different volunteering websites, and we all went up to the village together with the first 'batch' of volunteers!

Sitting outside the school with some of the volunteers

The village is usually 2 hours bus-ride plus a 2 hour walk from where I'm staying, but because I couldn't do the walk, we hired a 4WD to take us up...there were 7 people in the dual-cab in the front and another 9 in the back...everyone was so happy not to have to walk two hours up the mountain to the village that we practically had a whole village in the truck with us!

I had to pay a bloody fortune for the truck because of the fuel shortage. It is just crazy here now...people in Kathmandu are having to chop down trees to get firewood for cooking, no medications are getting in, so the hospitals are desperate, and about 10% of the buses are running. Here's a photo of people piled on top of one of the buses, it's just so dangerous because the roads are very windy and not in good condition.

The village was just amazing, it was like stepping back in time 100 years. Most people survive on subsistance farming, and the views were great. This is the dawn view from my bedroom window...

I was there with a French artist, so we all helped do a little art project with the kids.

And I did a bit of embroidery with them. 

Then it was time for the Dashin Festival, which is the biggest Hindu celebration in Nepal. The other volunteers got up at 5am and walked up a mountain for 3 hours to see the ritual slaughter of hundreds of goats and buffalos...apparently it was very gory. They killed the animals over a large rock and then poured coconut milk over the blood as a sacrifice to one of the Hindu Gods. This is some of the guys carrying the goats back down...

Then we all went to a little ceremony to get these 'tikas' put on our foreheads to bring good luck for the next year...they were made of yoghurt and rice, a bit like having a rice crispy on your forehead!!

Over Dashain; the kids make these amazing swings from bamboo poles and rope and spend days lining up to swing on them.

After the other volunteers left I went on a few little walks around the valley with some of the relatives of the director of the school. The oldest boy in this photo used to go to the school but now has to walk three hours a day to get to and from his high school!! 

The school is the long rectangular building in the upper LH corner of the photo.

Lots of earthquake damage in the area, most people were sleeping or living in corrugated iron sheds.

The nearest thing to a piano they have!

Then it was time for school to start again. The school building is very basic, but given that so many of the children weren't even going to school before it started, it is giving these kids a good chance at at least knowing how to read and write.

Here are some photos of some pages from the textbooks...to give you an idea of what the standard of English teaching is like! 

The Himalayas!!

So here I am in rural Nepal, lying around waiting for the lights to come on. The government can't give the population electricity (because it's selling it to China), but it does generously publish a timetable (yes, there's an app for that) to tell them which 8 hours of the day they won't be able to do anything much....and then never sticks to the timetable!! 

I can see why so many international development campaigns focus on electricity, because it's just so hard to grow an economy without it.  Almost all the business' around here do things that don't need it; in the village I was staying in last month there was one shoe-maker and two tailors (all using the Singer treadle machines)...but the nearest internet cafe was 20 minutes away by bus! 

 I went to get some photos printed in Kathmandu last week and the owner of the store told me I could come back to pick them up in three hours, when the electricity came on! Imagine trying to run a business like that.

I spent a couple of weeks staying on the outskirts of Kathmandu and met some lovely people there. I ended up doing a visit to the local school with the girl in this photo and sitting in on a Nepali history class. It was all very raucaus; the class consisted of one student reading out loud from a textbook for 20 minutes while everyone else (including the teacher) talked over the top of her! 

After that, I went to stay for a few weeks at a homestay at the top of this hill and did some marketing for the owner.

The name of his guesthouse is pretty much a textbook example of what NOT to name your business when you have just a cold-water tap in the bathroom along with a very dirty bucket (like the one in this photo but much, much dirtier) which have to multitask as shower, toilet flusher, sink and toilet paper!! (Don't think too much about that last one.)

I think the Nepalese invented the concept of layering!

The name of the homestay is "Village Vil!a Chambre  d'Hote. I don't know what French nong came up with this ridiculous 5 star hotel name.  The last word, which you'd think would be "hotel" actually means breakfast in French! 

The homestay

I tried to explain to Dhruba, the owner, that apart from this being a name that no non-French speaker would ever remember, it was also misleading, because French words are used in English when we want to make a product sound luxurious. So, even though non-French-speakers wouldn't understand the words they were reading, it would signify "expensive," and turn off budget travellers! Unless he was going to call the place "Dirty Bucket Homestay" I actually can't think of a worse name.

With Karo, a volunteer from NZ

Anyway, as you can imagine, my suggestion to shorten the name to "Village Villa Homestay" was met with a lukewarm reception. Fair enough...it's a big ask, and I fully expected he would say no.  People are very attached to the name of their business, and also, he couldn't see what I was saying about French names being posh.

 So, no name shortening, but I did help out with bringing more volunteers to stay at his place. (They are helping on his farm and also in the village, which was affected by the earthquake). When I arrived the first time I was the only guest...and a few days ago he rang in a bit of a panic to say there were eleven people staying there (in three rooms!!). If I was still there I'd be holed up in one room like the neurotic sleep-Nazi I am, and 5.5 people would be in each of the other two, so I think he was pretty glad I was gone!

Here are a couple of village photos. 

View from the homestay

They are drying the corn to make flour from it.

The pace of life here probably hasn't changed much in hundreds of years. Apart from in the guest bathroom, there is no running water in the house; all the water is collected at the communal well, which also functions as a shower and laundry. There's no sink or even benches in the kitchen...all the cooking is done on the floor, and the dishes are done outside (with chickens taking advantage of the food scraps!).

This is Minuka, Dhruba's wife, using this cool curved knife that you hold down with your foot. 

Minuka with curved foot-knife

I went to a puja with the women of the family. A puja is kind of a Hindu gathering and this one was to celebrate the end of Taaj, a festival where women fast and pray for three days for a long life...for their husband!! (Insert feminist side-eye emoji).

About two weeks agoI left that village and came to a town called Dhulikel, which is 2 hours from Kathmandu, and famous for its vistas of the Himalayas. They are really stunning, but difficult to capture in a photo. Sometimes you only see the tops of the mountains, and they look like they are floating across the sky above the clouds. Some photos from here: 

View from my room in the first place I stayed in here.

I really like the place I'm at now. The people who run the guesthouse are from a village about 3 hours from here (1.5 hours by bus and 1.5 hours walking). They have a school there which was set up to educate girls for free, because they often weren't being sent to school. (There's a traditional here of not educating girls, because once they marry they belong to the husband's family so won't be of any economic benefit to their parents.) 

Nani getting me ready for winter!!

Nani, who used to teach at the school and now runs my guesthouse, want more volunteers, so I've been putting the on different volunteering websites. They've only been on them for a few days, and we've already had four queries from people interested in coming, so that's a good sign. The village was affected terribly by the earthquake; about 70% of people are living in corrugated iron shelters, waiting for rebuilding of houses to start. There's one US volunteer who wants to come who is a structural engineer, which would be really handy. 

I'm hoping to go up to the village next week, but India is pissed off with Nepal at the moment so is blocking all imports  at the border...so there is no petrol available, and I might not be going anywhere (along with the rest of the country). 

Check out this home-made dog collar...it is to stop leopards attacking the dog!!

Bonus crazy goat photo!!

Nepal -Kathmandu and Changu Narayan

Hi all, 

So, three weeks ago I went from this:

To this: 

And after a few hours of disorientation, I can say I vastly prefer Nepal to Thailand. About the only interesting thing that happened in Thailand was learning that cacao has replaced kale as the new superfood of the yoga set. I kept hearing about the amazing, pure, healing energy that you get from this exotic substance (pronounced 'kakao') and wondering what exactly it was. Well, it's cocoa! Just plain ol' chocolate. I guess it does taste better than kale...but I'm not sure it will be curing cancer. 

My Nepal disorientation started on the plane from Kuala Lumpur, where I was about one of five tourists surrounded by around 300 Nepalese country-boys all in their early 20's. I spent the whole flight trying to figure out who they were (and wondering if deodorant had made it to Nepal yet). I found out when I arrived that they were all guest workers who had been on two or three year contracts to countries like Qatar. There were a lot of flat-screen TVs coming out on the luggage carousel and not much luggage! 

This is Kathmandu from the air. It's very green because we are a the end of the monsoon season. 

I was talking to someone last week whose brother is working in Qatar. He told me labourers here get around $10 a day. I asked what they got in Qatar: "Oh, so much more! Twenty dollars a day!"  That didn't seem like so much more to me, especially if you take into account that more than 400 Indian and Nepalese workers have died in Qatar in the past year.

Talking of OH&S compliant workplaces, these are some photos of the school demolition opposite the hotel I stayed in in Karhmandu. Most schools in Nepal are really old and so were disproportionately affected by the earthquake. Here is a guy, with a straight 3-floor drop behind him, hacking at the pillar underneath him WITH NO SHOES ON! 

Check out the guy sitting on the almost-demolished door frame. 

I was staying right near the old part of Kathmandu city and it is just amazing...narrow roads of temples, crumbling old house, and markets. It is absolutely chaotic, but so beautiful. I will let the photos speak for themselves. I can't believe that so many of these old brick buildings (which just have mud as concrete between the bricks) are still standing! I was staying in a more modern area of town, and I counted four buildings that had collapsed within about 100 metres from my hotel. 

I was using a rickshaw to get around the old part of town. I experienced high levels of white-person guilt using them, but I tried to pay well. Anyway, the chain came off the guy's bicycle, so I snapped this photo while we were waiting for the RACV to arrive.

Had bird poo everywhere after taking this photo:

A couple of very hard-working bicycles:

The people here are great, I would say they're a combination of Indonesian friendliness and Afghani toughness.  I quite literally had more conversations within a week of arriving here than I did in 5 months in Cambodia and Thailand. People are really open and friendly, and I think it helps that English is spoken much more here. 

I had my camera with me yesterday in a restaurant I go to, and one of the staff went through every single photo on it --I think there were about 300! He though the farm was "so beautiful" but the photo that had everyone in the cafe transfixed was this one (which I think Henry took) ... 

It's the half-eaten Christmas ham from last year!! Everyone was gathered around the camera just fascinated...they are so into their food here. If I don't order daahl baaht (the national dish) for lunch, the woman who runs the cafe pretty much starts crying with disappointment. 

I went out to the country for a couple of days last week and stayed at a very basic rural homestay. Boy, was it a shock! Electricity cuts for 8 or 9 hours every single day! 

Most people in the village live with no running water, no fridge, and just the local well for a bathroom. I am going back to do some volunteer work for the owner. I'll build a basic website, get his Facebook page functioning etc... just basic marketing. I'll write more about it in the next post. 

Here are a couple of photos from there. 

The owner's wife cooking chapatis for breakfast: 

View from the balcony: 

View back over Kathmandu:

Dhruba (the owner) and moi:

Daal baaht, the national dish. They eat this twice a day in the countryside for lunch and dinner. Every.single.day.