Unexpecting the Expected

We now have some chickens. Which means soon we will have fresh eggs! Lok’s father arrived the other day from Pyutan (one of the western districts of Nepal, about a 14 hr bus ride away) along with the two of them in a small enclosed basket. He had to apologize to Pratik who had wanted a buffalo, but was able to blame the bus driver for not allowing him to bring one along. I don't think Lok knew he was coming until he called an hour away from the city, but surprises like this are starting to feel very normal to me. The chickens are just tied by the foot to our sink on the roof for now, but I think we’re planning to build a coop soon. With them and the large rice-covered mats up there, I have to do some awfully careful stepping if I’m ever out for a midnight pee. I’d hate to tread on something that I’ll later be expected to eat. This has often been a concern as on a given day there could be any number of vegetables spread out in the sun, but usually they’re cooked up for supper and not left out in the dark.

The presence of all the rice came after the entire family spent a day harvesting at the 2nd sister’s house about 5 mins away. This week has been a flurry of harvesting everywhere around Kirtipur, meaning a rapid disappearance of all the beautiful fields full of the tall green blades. It’s too bad, but I can’t complain much about the scenery now that the himalayas have a much more constant presence on the horizon.

I’m having a lot of fun speaking Nepali with strangers (shopkeepers, waiters, taxi drivers etc.), most of whom are extremely shocked (and seem very happy) to find out that some foreigner would think it’s worth the effort to learn a language that nobody speaks outside of this one tiny and in their minds globally insignificant country. I’ve been picking up a lot of hints about how to put Nepali words together by the way some of the locals speak to me English. For example, when speaking English, many Nepalis tend to throw the word “also” in a lot more often than is necessary... or come to think of it perhaps it’s only my 7 yr old little brother that does this... Regardless, I’ve started inserting the Nepali word for “also” (pani) into random parts of my sentences whether it seems like it belongs there or not. It’s hit or miss whether someone will compliment me on how great my Nepali is or stare at me in confusion and then back away in apparent concern for my sanity.

Despite all the joys of the great festival, I find I’m happy to be back at the school teaching again. I don’t have a fixed schedule (aside from the one math class), which at first I had been hoping for, but (amazingly) there’s never been any problem having classes to teach each period just by filling in for teachers who happen to be absent for one reason or another. And I enjoy getting to work with the whole range of students and the different rapport I’ve built up with the various ages. Lots of times teachers will be gone for a week or more at a time and I’ll be able to teach the same class back to back, which allows me to build off of previous lessons. I really enjoyed stepping through guided story writing with class 9 the past 6 days and hearing them answer all kinds of questions by the end of the week that they responded to with only blank stares at the beginning. Another highlight was reading the Three Little Pigs with class 6, one pig per day, and having the one student who used to pretend he had no book to avoid getting involved in lessons suddenly become the most active participant in the room. He’s still rather rambunctious, feeling the need to climb up the bars of the window to demonstrate that he understands what the verb means and that sort of thing, but at least now it’s a productive energy rather than disruptive as it had originally been.

So, essentially I'm very happy with how well everything has been going. My days are filled in a very different sense of the word busy than I was used to at home. What I mean by that is that it feels like there's always lots to do, but because nothing's scheduled in advance it feels much less like being busy with commitments and more like busy with whatever I most want to do at any given time. It's been a very rewarding way to live, like yesterday afternoon when I went on a whim to go visit another volunteer at her orphanage so that we could cook dinner for the children and give them a break from the usual daal bhat. Or the many times I've left the house without knowing exactly where I'm headed (just invited "somewhere" by someone I know here), but ending up at a sort of talent show with various song and dance performances or eventually at a Nepali wedding of my head teacher's friend's younger sister. No day seems to end up anywhere close to how I imagine it, but I've become very accustomed now to stepping off into the unknown and avoiding building expectations about what things will be like.

An Excess of Red Rice

Today, for the first time since arriving here in Kathmandu valley, I was able to see some himalayas! I was sitting on the neighbour's rooftop sipping on some ayla (a quite unneccessarily strong local hard liquor) and eating Newari snacks as the sun was going down, when there past all the familiar green hills to the north were some white peaks poking up behind the pink fluffy clouds. Hooray! A clear sign that the rainy season has come to an end and that the great sunny days are becoming a more permanent feature. The mountains looked much bigger and much closer than I would've thought possible after the last few months of clouds and haze hiding them from sight.

This comes at a perfect time as the days of Desain, Nepal's greatest festival of the year, are drawing to an end. For me, Desain has meant the past week off of teaching and a chance to get caught up in the electrified spirit of everyone looking to celebrate every day to the fullest extent possible. Beforehand, one friend explained Desain to me by saying it's the time of year when everyone wants to have money and spend lots of money and seek maximum enjoyment so that by the end nobody has any money left and must work for an entire year to recover enough money to enjoy the following Desain in the same way. At the time I found it mostly humourous, but now I see how well that summarized it.

Some main features of the festival include children flying kites, friends gathering together to win each other's money in various card games, visits to all elder family member's houses to receive tikka (the red clumps of rice placed on the forehead), goat sacrifices, the closure of almost all shops, an absence of vehicles on the roads and a whole lot of dancing and singing. I happily took part in all of this and had been thinking there couldn't possibly be a better time to be in Nepal. As it turns out I may be wrong about that as Tihar, the festival of lights, approaches in just a few weeks and is said to be in a lot of ways even more fun. Because Desain is the biggest festival, it's the time when everyone will go to be with their families if possible. This means over half the population of Kathmandu vacates the valley for their home villages. But by Tihar, everyone will have returned back to town and it sounds like will involve bigger celebrations rather than individual family and friend gatherings.

The 10th day of Desain is when the tikka is given. This can be quite a long procedure given the size of most families here. I went with my adopted parents to Buwaa's elder brother's house. When we arrived there were about 12 assorted uncles, cousins, sisters and other relatives there. First the youngest girl in the family, who is considered "Kumari" (living goddess) and in this case was a very cute 2 year old granddaughter, gives tikka to the eldest. Tikka consists of the red rice clump as well as some oat grass strands put in the hair or behind an ear and usually a gift of a banana or apple along with perhaps 10 rupees. The eldest can then procede to give tikka to all the other family members in order of oldest to youngest. This is then followed by the 2nd eldest giving tikka to all those younger than him. This continues down the line so that tikka is received from everyone who is older than you and results in a rather massive globule of rice on a person's forehead (particularly one as extremely young and youthful as myself). This of course was followed by eating much goat meat and other delicious foods and was essentially all repeated later on when many more family members arrived.

Imagine

Just wanted to share this video below that the grade 9 class wanted to enter into a contest my volunteer organization was having. The contest was to celebrate United Planet Day, which was on the fall equinox when the sun shines on every place on earth for the same amount of time. Because of the deadline we didn't have a whole lot of time to put it together, but still thought some might be interested to see it. The students had so much fun learning the song. Enjoy!

Rohit, Luzia, and the Orphans

Leaving the school this afternoon, I had possibly the best moment a teacher can have. Rohit, a boy in the grade 5 math class I've just recently started teaching, saw me coming, pulled away from the group of friends he was with, and whipped out his notebook to ask about the homework I'd given him. What's fantastic about this is that 2 weeks ago, Rohit would spend his time in math class energetically distracting, entertaining or hitting his classmates as they tried to work, but not doing a scrap of work himself. I was told by his previous teachers that never once had he completed any homework (though I have trouble placing much blame on him for this given that his parents can't afford the textbook from which most homework questions are given...as a side note, the textbook costs 210 Rs or about $3). Basically, he's so far behind the rest of the class that none of the explanations make sense to him and he would stare at questions without any hint of understanding about what he should be doing with them. He has trouble with the simple multiplication his classmates can all do easily by now and I think had essentially written off math as too far out of his range of abilities to even attempt. Today, after school, I only had to get about 6 words out before he remembered what I'd shown in class him about turning fractions into decimals, and he snatched his noteback back grinning and nodding with excited understanding. I've started writing separate homework questions for him since he has no book to get them from and today as I was giving them to him he said "melai dherai dinu!" (Give me lots!). It's unbelievably cool to see him so eager to do problems now that he's realized he actually can. Each day when I sit down with him and start showing him new, more difficult problems, he gets a concerned look on his face and asks for problems just like the old ones that he already knows how to do. But then I show him how he can work out the answers for himself and he enthusiastically starts to go through them.

Another volunteer has arrived in Kirtipur now. We found out she was coming about an hour before she showed up at the house and managed to move the prayer room up to the attic and arrange a bed for her just in time. She's from Switzerland and is here for 2 more months at this point. It's been highly entertaining watching her confused reactions to all the questions in Nepali that get thrown at her every day (and very reminiscent of some of my own feelings in the early days), but I've been enjoying my new role as translator. Especially when she first arrived, she had endless questions for me about "how does this work?" and "why do they do things this way?". I'm happy to answer them and feel much the same as I did the first time I ever had a summer student at work...it's the feeling of sudden realization of just how much I'd learned in a very short time since my own days of mass confusion. Being able to answer questions that had all at one point in time run through my own head can be pretty gratifying. It also made me think just how different my experience would have been if I'd had an interpretor and guide helping me every step of the way. I've decided I'm quite glad I didn't. Luzia, though, seems to have not expected Nepal to be as extremely different from home as it is and is finding the transition somewhat rough. She's expressed a lot of relief to have another foreigner here for support. I think she'll settle in just fine though once the initial shock wears off.

I managed to catch up with all the other long-term volunteers, many of whom I hadn't seen since our first two weeks together, yesterday at a fundraising event we had for Aishworya orphanage. The range of project situations is vast. For example, it's hard to hear about Jim's village orphanage where the children are forced to work at all times either on their school work, around the house or in the fields with not a moment for play and are regularly beaten for even the most minor of slip-ups. Jim finds it very wearing being there, but I think he knows his presence is a good thing. He remains determined to get through to the woman who runs it even though he's had no luck so far. On the other hand, there's the Aishworya Children's Home in Kathmandu where 2 volunteers are helping the one woman take care of 40 children in one of the happiest environments I've ever seen. Apparently, the children never fight with each other and when I went to visit on a Saturday, they were fully enjoying their day off school with a massive dance party in the main room. I'll try to get a couple pictures of it up when I can find a bit faster internet connection.

Namaste!