Water Wars and Wicket Watching

Well, I'm down to my final two months here in Nepal, and thus the end is starting to come within sight. I'm glad that I've been able to be here as long as I have because up until recently I hadn't been thinking much at all about the time when I'll be leaving. It's allowed me to feel settled here, almost as if this is indeed my own country, and has given me the chance to understand the culture a whole lot more deeply. It seems to me that when I first arrived I thought this place was very different from home. But then after a short time I began thinking maybe it was not all that different after all. Much of the initial shock wore off quickly and I started to think life here was basically very similar. It's only within the last couple months that I've come to realize all the subtle differences that I never could've picked up on in the beginning, but these have been the most interesting to me and seem to give the country it's great uniqueness. Much more so than the obvious initial surface observations. It is indeed a very different place, but not at all because of the reasons that I first thought it was. If I was a better writer, or felt it possible to take up thousands of pages of internet space while still retaining anyone's attention at all, I might attempt to cover off all of these subtle intricacies here. With neither of those being true, I'll have to settle for just as many tidbits as I can manage to describe in not too many words. The rest I'm sure will come out sooner or later once I'm back home and find myself unable to have any normal conversation without excessive use of the phrase "Back in Nepal..." when I'll surely manage to annoy anyone who has to spend much time with me by describing details that will likely be interesting only to myself. Sorry in advance.

Last weekend I discovered my absolute favourite of all festivals. Holi, the festival of colour. People will tell you stories about an ancient miraculous escape of the young Prahlad from one of the Hindu goddesses (or demonesses rather) involving much fire and triumph and that sort of thing. This is the official reason for a day of "worship" on this particular religious holiday. But really when it comes down to it, the whole day seems like just an excuse to attack all your neighbours with as much coloured water as you can muster. It's essentially a nationwide water fight that lasts the entire day. You might think it's only young kids that take part in such an event, but this is not at all the case. The hardest water balloon I took in the face was thrown by a woman who could've been no less than 87 years old. Packs of people of all ages would take to the streets with their pockets full of coloured powder and small plastic baggies to fill with water. At the same time other people will head up to their rooftops with friends and family to launch attacks from above. The people with the tallest roofs have a distinct advantage. Ours is relatively low, so we were easy targets for water bombs from every which way. But, despite being open for attacks from all kinds of unexpected directions, we had strength in numbers and put up a good fight. It was a lot of fun launching water balloons (or sometimes entire buckets of water) at people on other rooftops or down on the street below. Some of the braver boys from the street came running up our stairway at one point to smear the coloured powder all over our faces and hair. Most of the day, we remained united as a household in our pursuit of drenching as many surrounding people as we possibly could. But if there was a lull in streetwalkers for long enough (generally any more than 5 minutes), we quickly turned on each other with our buckets and balloons and thus got soaked to the bone many times over. For the life of me, I can't think why every country doesn't do this at least once a year.

The school year has come to a close now. The students were all happy to be finished their exams and have a couple weeks off to regroup before classes start back up again. They will receive their results this Sunday and in the meantime we've been meeting as teachers to prepare for the start of a new year. We haven't found out yet how class 10 did on their School Leaving Certificate exams (they all went to be graded at the central education office and results will first be published in the newspaper before sent to us directly), but I was proud of the progress many of the students made since their 2nd term exams back in December. The end of the year felt quite successful, and we've got some exciting ideas to lead into the year 2068, so I continue to be very happy working at Vaishnavi School.

In other news, the Cricket World Cup has had any streetside shop with a TV positively overflowing with college kids trying to watch the games. Today's match in particular drew large crowds everywhere (Pakistan vs. India in the semi-finals), but unfortunately the power cut out just at half time so most will have to wait until the morning to hear the result. Being Canadian, of course I knew nothing about the game before coming here. But I find I'm a big fan of any sort of world sporting event where countries are passionately competing against each other, so I've gotten myself right wrapped up in the excitement. I was therefore crushed, but not at all surprised, when Canada was eliminated easily during the round robin, and have already looked up the load-shedding schedule for Saturday's final match so that I can move from our house to a friend's house in another district at the appropriate time to catch almost the entire game. The plan is likely to backfire, as Nepal's electricity providers view their own schedule as no more than mere guidelines and certainly can't be counted on. But, you never know, it might work out. Today's power cut was off by about an hour, which had us all hopefully believing they might've worked in some extra power to keep us going throughout the whole match. Alas, no such luck.