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!