No Longer Traveling

A friend once said to me, "In Nepal, you do not plan your life. The situations and circumstances around you plan your life". I'm now coming to realize how true this is. Whether it's the buses without schedules that you may or may not catch, the coming and going of electricity that may change when things like phone & internet are possible, or the opening and closing of stores making it either easy or difficult to buy what you're looking for...it's hard to say with any certainty what you will be able to accomplish in any given day. But amazingly, most things seem to work out one way or another and it's refreshing not having details all planned out in advance. The Nepalis are not especially focused on time or schedules, which can be difficult when trying to figure out things like school calendars (most teachers aren't aware a holiday is approaching until just the day before), but now that I'm getting used to it I'm enjoying the increased focus on the present rather than future or past.

I've also become very much accustomed to eating with my hands. So much so, in fact, that I may have trouble re-adjusting again to my native utensil-using society, but I suppose I'll try to cross that bridge when I get to it. There's definite technique and a certain amount of skill involved, but it's starting to feel completely natural. There's the one method of sort of scooping together a ball of food on your fingers, holding it up to your mouth, and using your thumb sort of like a shovel. This is most common. But there's also the more challenging method of gathering together a handful of food, opening your mouth, and sort of tossing the food towards it from afar. The goal seems to be to leave as much space as possible from where your hand releases the food and where your mouth actually is. I've learned that this is best only attempted with dry items.

Everything at Vaishnavi School is also going very well. Much better than I could have expected actually. I had come here with the idea that a foreigner full of comments about how things are done "back in my country" and nothing but criticisms of any differences would not be well received. Actually, having written it like that, I think those are likely both still true. I've definitely tried to avoid giving off any impression that I think Canadian schools are far superior to what I see here in Nepal. But I was also expecting to meet a strong resistance to change. I was not expecting to be able to come here and change much at all about the way the school is managed. Instead I had set my goals on making connections with the students themselves and hopefully having a positive impact on some of them individually, having come in with a slightly different perspective than their other teachers. I'm very happy with how this side of it is going and enjoy the way the students have been responding, but I'm also very excited about the interest level of the head teacher (principal) and possibility of helping make some more significant changes at the school.

The head teacher likes to pepper me with questions about how schools work in Canada with everything from "do the textbooks have hard covers and get re-used from year to year?" to "is there sporting equipment available for students to sign out at break times?" and "how many students and teachers are there usually in one class?". He seems amazed by some of my answers that children have a whole period during the day for phys.ed and no, never does a teacher hit a child for discipline. He's been there for 22 years and watched class sizes drop smaller and smaller as the school's reputation came to be the very worst in the area, but for some reason just within the last 2 weeks has seemed to find a new motivation to turn it all around. After being hardly visible at the school in my first few weeks there, sometimes not showing up until the afternoon if at all, he's recently rearranged his desk to be more centrally located, instituted new rules whereby primary teachers must actually be in their classrooms during all periods instead of visiting each other or sitting in the staff room, photocopied a list of 80 strategies to create a child-friendly environment for every classroom, and is physically present throughout the entire school day. I'm not sure where the motivation came from all of a sudden, but can't help thinking my timing is perfect to be at a place energized by the spirit of change. It will be very interesting to see what can be done with the place!

All in all, I've been very happy here and amazed with how smoothly many things have gone. I no longer feel like I'm traveling, now I just feel like I'm living.