(Heads up – blog posts will be infrequent and unreliable due to Nepal’s distinct lack of 3G and you can forget about the vlogs. I’ll add photos when I can.)
We left Kathmandu on Saturday morning and enjoyed a 14 hour *real-life-mario-kart* jeep journey. There’s nothing quite like the adrenaline rush of being woken up by smashing into the front seat as we swerve to avoid the van with the goat on the roof (who then pulled us over to beef driver). Eventually we didn’t reach Neta, instead we stayed the night at Thulabesi (the largest ‘town’ from us) with a random Nepali family. With 2 single beds between 4 of us, the night was cosy. Following a cheeky 4 hour hike (*climb) on Sunday, we made it here by lunch time – only 2 days behind schedule (Nepali time for you.).
Selin and I share a 4 square foot room off our lovely host Pahrvati’s house. We have 2 gas rings to cook on but we have no idea how we’ll finish the enormous bag of rice they’ve given us within the year (especially as it’s probably meant to last a week). Thankfully we are not a 6 hour walk from school (as promised by Project Trust) rather school is 10m from our beds. *PrOJecT tRuSt liEs*
The week’s been interesting…
We immediately began teaching Monday without a curriculum or lesson plans. We have both already learnt a lot – especially in our afternoon classes (Selin has 2 hours with 3-4 year olds and I have it with 5-6 year olds). There is a very fine balance between keeping kids engaged, not too hyper, not throwing bags at each other, not climbing the rafters, not pulling our trousers down and actually in the classroom – let alone teaching them any English (when some don’t speak Nepali). Our morning classes are better as the kids are a bit older and can engage more easily with the work. The whole community’s extremely friendly (we had about 6 people at one point trying to help us make our sim cards work to contact home).
Extended family is all the rage here. On Wednesday night we went for dinner at one of our teachers homes (as Pahrvati was out) and found he lived with half the kids from school and half the adults we’d already met. The foods amazing however locals laugh at us using our hands and we can only eat about 1/4 of the portions of rice but we’ll learn (rice belly pending). That being said, it would be fair to say the food is not totally agreeing with us and this has definitely been a form of partner bonding…
A Year in Nepal 