Last Sunday marked the one month anniversary of my arrival in Bobang. It has been an unbelievably intense time and I am not going to begin to try to describe everything now. Instead this can function as a concise summary of the 3 weeks since my last update.
The main focus has, of course, been teaching. Chris and I have settled into timetables with three morning and three afternoon lessons each. In the morning we have three classes each to prepare for the upcoming exams (March 26th possibly, though we seem to get different dates from everyone we ask, as is the Nepali way). This involves working our way through the textbooks from which the exam exercises are taken. Though at times frustrating, I have found that it is possible to branch out from the books every so often. Also, after the exams we should have far more freedom to do our own thing which is an exciting prospect! Of the 3 classes I teach solo, my largest is 80 kids (class 4, first lesson, definitely hard going) and my smallest is around 20.
In the afternoon, Chris and I teach classes 6,7 and 8 together. We have been given the freedom to teach whatever we want and are absolutely loving it. Class 6 have mastered the game ‘splat’ using past participles and ‘la bomba’ with fruits. We have used these sessions as a chance to just work on basic conversation skills. As a result, a walk across the playground at lunchtime involves answering the questions; “good morning sir, how are you?”, “where do you live?”, “how old are you?” etc about 50 times. It’s no different when we go for a stroll through Bobang in the evening or a run in the morning. Every house will have one of our students leaning out of the window screaming “good morning sir” at the top of their voices. It’s nice to know we’re making an impact. Next task, teaching the fact that ‘good morning’ does not apply at 7 in the evening...
After a month here, we are definitely starting to feel at home in Bobang. A useful habit we have developed is the tactical evening walk. A welcoming host offering a quick snack and a mug of chiya is rarely hard to come by. (Chiya- Nepali tea, made with black pepper, various spices, buffalo milk and hair-raising amounts of sugar- arguably the nicest thing in the world). It’s also a good chance to test our pretty weak Nepali. We are starting to be able to form useful sentences. I, for example, recently explained the rules of ‘spoons’ in faltering Nepali. Our listening however leaves a lot to be desired. I really struggle to pick out any meaning from the babble of words that is usually fired at me. I can almost write in Devanagari, if very slowly and normally full of errors. Whenever I write something, someone will be standing over me saying, “No, no, no, ‘ch’, not ‘ch’, hear the difference?”
Food- dhalbaat still... We are getting better now though. We now put potato in it. And sometimes we have bread. But that’s pretty much it...
This contrasts hugely with the tantalising snacks we get at other peoples’ houses, including such delights as; onion and chilli omelette, millet soup and ‘dukhigha’ stew (spelling very much a guess- it’s a spinach-esque vegetable that only grows on high mountains and that tastes distinctly like stewed meat). In terms of actual meat, we recently had the excitement of branching out into goat. It was a strange meal, the silence broken every so often by Chris and I discussing whether the piece of nameless chewy stuff we were eating was throat, foot or stomach.
One particularly exciting meal was on a day trip up a nearby mountain to the village of Marang. We were served popcorn as a starter before being led into a low ceilinged room with traditional mud walls and floor. Through the thick smoke we could see 3 elderly Nepalis eating a nameless dark green soup with donut style bread. We were sat down and given a large portion each of what turned out to be millet soup. In it were floating ominously large chunks of chilli. The whole experience, despite taking all feeling from my mouth for several hours, was fantastically Nepali and I look forward to more of the same in the next few months.
One thing we have learnt is that you eat rice, and you eat it every meal, non-negotiable. We discovered this when, one day last week, we decided to cook bread rather than rice for breakfast. It was a delicious breakfast that more than satisfied our hunger. Sadly however, we were spotted. Word got out fast. We arrived at school an hour later to a circle of muttering teachers with a set of scales laid out in front of them, assessing the damage caused by our rice deprivation. We have since been asked, every single morning, “baat canu baiyo??” – “You have eaten rice??” The wisest and easiest answer is always yes...
Other excitements include two separate meetings with fellow westerners. The first was a night in the next door valley of Jhimpa where there are 8 other Project Trust volunteers, ‘12 monthers’ rather than us pathetic ‘8 monthers’. The four hour walk up and over the mountain ridge was amazing, with a clear view of Dhaulagiri and Fish Tail mountains (2 of the 10 tallest in the world) as well as flowering rhododendrons at the top. It turns out that Jhimpa is like Bobang but with more readily available food, but less potatoes, who knew?
A final comment has to be made on dancing. It is fast becoming accepted that, when amusement is needed, the village turns to me and Chris and our amusingly bad dancing. Last Friday it was the school debating competition. In the half time break, with a crowd of 300 students and teachers gathered in a circle, we were pushed into the middle of the playground to cries of “dance, sir, dance!” I felt we performed admirably, however the uproarious laughter suggested otherwise... That evening though we were invited to a party where our dancing skills received the barrage of compliments I felt they deserved (whether or not the state of inebriation of our audience played a part in this we will never know). The technique is to shuffle/ bounce around, normally in half circles, doing wavey things with your hands, arms and, if you’re feeling ambitious, hips. We’re definitely better now than we were, so hopefully in 6 months’ time we’ll be something approaching passable.
All in all, it’s going pretty well here in Bobang. The teaching is becoming more manageable and consequently more enjoyable, as is the cooking. Every day we feel less and less like tourists as more and more faces and characters around the village become familiar. As our language gets better I hope to expand our conversations beyond food and weather, if only to keep the invitations for free food coming...
If anyone wants to send a letter (it would definitely make my day). Our address here in Bobang is:
Bobang VDC,
Ward No.2,
School Tole,
Bobang Village,
Post Office Bobang 8,
Baglung District,
Nepal
