Holi

The 5^th March heralded one Nepal’s biggest, or at least most famous, festivals.  The bulk of my knowledge of Holi prior to arriving came from the Nikon advert.  The guidebook however filled a few gaps.  Holi is the Nepali festival of colours, celebrated by hurling handfuls of coloured powder at one another.

We decided that the best place to take part would be in the village of Jiwakhola in the neighbouring valley where we could meet up with the other 8 Project Trust volunteers.  We set off early, at about 6 am, and arrived in Jiwakhola already smeared with red powder- nothing like being a white boy on Holi...

Before anything Holi-related could start, we had to watch a long volleyball match along with 2000 other Nepalis who seemed to enjoy it far more than we did (they’re nuts for their volleyball, WWE and volleyball).  After the match had ended and the violent fight between Jiwakhola and Jijakhola had been broken up by the police, the main events of the day were able to kick off.  When a popstar from Kathmandu stepped up, you could tell that it was all really about to get going.  Sure enough, as she launched into her apparently well-known repertoire a violent mosh pit of dancing Nepalis appeared in the centre of the playground.  Playing the ‘white guys’ card, we bundled our way through to the middle and had a space cleared for us.

The scene that followed was a typically bizarre and fantastic one.  2000 people were crammed onto rooves and into windows all looking down into the playground where, like performers in an amphitheatre, the 10 of us plus 20 raucous Nepalis were dancing around in a cloud of purples, reds, blues, greens and yellows.  When things drew to a close and we were ushered out by the police, we were essentially unrecognisable, plastered head to feet in coloured powder.  As you can see from the photos, I look particularly frightening, like something out of Dr Who...

We had 4 days in Jiwakhola to wash, recuperate and relax before we headed home over the mountain (which is now a sheet of red thanks to the flowering of the Rhododendrons).  Since then we have completed the final 2 weeks of the school year as well as the end of year exams.  Invigilating for 3 hours a day has been a... long... experience and I will now always sympathise with the noble men and women who were invigilators when I sat my exams.

Last weekend we used the 4 days pre-exam leave to travel north to visit Dhorpatan.  We have woken up every morning to see its snow-capped peaks in the distance and have become used to hearing it discussed as the place to be when the weather gets hot.  We therefore, duly hiked 5 hours in the blazing sun last Friday on a continuously upward gradient, climbing over 1000 metres.  Arriving at the top though was not dissimilar from arriving at Shangri La...  We hiked up and up, through forests and clouds, all the while with the surroundings becoming more bleak and mountainous.  Suddenly, we emerged over a lip and, spread out below us, was a lush green plane, covered with grazing horses and blight blue rivers and surrounded by towering Himalayan peaks.

We spent a fantastic weekend exploring such wonders as: a huge Tibetan refugee camp and Buddhist Gompa, a tourist hunting resort laid out a little like Skirmish Paintball in Exeter and fantastic stone villages, like something from Medieval England.  The real highlight though was as many apples and potatoes as we could eat, Dhorpatan being famous for both.  If nothing else, that is definitely a reason to head back as soon as we can.

We now have a glorious 3 and a half weeks of holiday to enjoy.  Hopefully we should get through a mountain trek, an elephant-back safari, New Year’s festivities in Bhaktapur and even some white water rafting if we’re lucky...

(Posted one month late due to internet problems)

Last Wednesday Chris and I were invited to our first Nepali wedding, a concept in Nepal signifying 24 hours of eating, drinking and dancing.

We arrived at school in the morning to be presented with two glossy, scented leaflets, made out to ‘Shayam’ and ‘Krish’.  These, we were informed, were wedding invitations.  All the teachers were invited on account of the fact that the bride was in class 10.

We duly rocked up at the scene of the festivities after school.  It was not hard to find- the music and dancing had being going on all of the previous day and night...  On arrival, as usual, mutters went around at the prospect of the white boys dancing.  Before the ritual humiliation could commence though, we were ushered into a low, smokey kitchen where we found a circle of Nepalis eating and the bride and groom seated at one end of the room.  Before food, we had to pay our respects.  This involved handing over our present (some touristy fudge from Heathrow airport) and smearing tika (coloured powder) all over their foreheads.  Bearing in mind we were probably the 200^th people to do this, they were absolutely covered.

This ritual completed, we were handed a towering pile of sel rotis (chewy savoury donuts), curried potatoes and mutton.  We absolutely stuffed ourselves as the food kept on coming.  This turned out to be a huge mistake as, by the end of the evening, we had been handed 3 more full meals and then another 4 over the following morning and afternoon.  In fact, after 24 hours we had consumed 8 full meals, each one twice the size of what I would generally consider a healthy dinner...

Between eating, the main order of the day was dancing.  I honestly think we were quite good this time (we’ve done it so many times we have to be getting better now).  One particularly odd dance involved a slightly boisterous woman of 40 stalking Chris and me round the dance floor (former vegetable patch) to uproarious laughter from the 100 strong crowd of onlookers.  This was unnerving to say the least, bordering on traumatic.

The final essential component of this, and every other, Nepali wedding was Raksi (home brewed rice or millet spirit, cheap as it is disgusting).  Every meal involved at least 2 full glasses.  At one point, when it was clear saying “enough” was not going to have any effect, I put my hand over my mug.  To my dismay, the Raksi was poured over my hand and through my fingers.  Later on, when I was feeling pretty grim, dehydrated and generally unhappy, some of the teachers spotted me and shouted, “Samsir, eta, cheesho pani, cheesho pani!” (here, cold water, cold water).  I gratefully lifted up the jug and started drinking.  I was two gulps down when I noticed the laughter and realised I was in fact drinking yet more Raksi.  It is genuinely harder to find water than alcohol at these events...

The whole affair lasted late into the Wednesday night, into Thursday morning, afternoon and night.  We of course had to teach lessons on Thursday so didn’t quite manage a full night.  We did however spend all of our free periods and lunch time eating and dancing.  By the end we were pretty well beaten.  I passed a grim night on Thursday and Chris was out of action for the whole of Saturday.  The effects of sleep deprivation, alcohol consumption and major over-eating took a heavy toll, but even so, bring on the next one...

 

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 26^th 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?

The second encounter was of a more unexpected nature.  It came in the form of a visit to our school, Shree Gyanodaya, from a VSO volunteer from Canada called Eva Zaleski.  It was a great surprise to emerge from my class 3 lesson and realise that the whispers of ‘gora’ (white person) were no longer directed at either me or Chris.  She chaired a discussion group on how to improve attendance figures which we sat in on.  We then cooked her our specialty dhalbaat and enjoyed an hour or two speaking in English.  That made three white people in Bobang, or, as one of our teachers pronounced, “too many”.

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

 

2 weeks in

Right, post number 1!

Chris and I have now been in Nepal for nearly two weeks!  In that time I have filled up 49 diary pages so it may be hard to condense that into one post.  I'll title and summarise our first day in Kathmandu with the words: 'curries and their consequences' and leave it at that.

24 hours of straight travel, minibus then hair-raising jeep ride, got us to Burtiban where we met 4 of the 12 month volunteers in the neighbouring valley.  They filled us with comforting stories of the world we were about to be plunged into before waving goodbye the following morning.

We headed off soon after and, another traumatic jeep ride later, we were at our project in Bobang (or is it Boban, that seems to be a contentious issue).  We were welcomed with the traditional coloured powder on the forehead (tika) and garland of marigolds and were introduced to the school staff.  At this point all eyes in the village were on us.  They have since not left us as the staring continues where ever we go.  I'm sure they'll get used to us soon...

We were soon left with our host family and the jeep headed off back to civilisation.  Getting to know our new family has been a real joy.  Briefly, we have Yam as headmaster of the school and house patriarch.  He is obsessed with dancing and we have recently, to his delight, introduced him to Chase and Status.  Hypest Hype is his particular favourite.  He and his wife have, we think, 5 children, two of which are educated outside the valley.  We have got to know particularly well the youngest son, Ashan, and daughter, Manju who have taken great pleasure in examining every wonderful item we brought from England, before settling upon the bouncy ball as their favourite.  These two are proving very helpful in our efforts to learn Nepali.

Teaching began two days after arrival and has been mad and yet enjoyable.  We found ourselves pushed into a class of expectant faced Nepali kids and told to teach.  I have now secured a timetable and am getting to know classes 3 and 4 well.  I have found that whatever I say will be repeated, annoying when teaching, but potentially hilarious...  After about 5 days worth of teaching I feel like we are at last settling into a routine and maybe, just maybe, these children might learn something.  For the moment though, it is predominantly carnage.

Foodwise- dhal baat (lentils and rice).  Every meal.  Genuinely.  Every meal.  We are getting quite good though, this may be the only dish I ever truly master in my whole life.

I have to be careful not to ramble on here, nobody wants to read a long blog post, no matter how fascinating.  I'll end with a selection of my favourite moments from the trip so far:

1/ Sitting cross legged on the floor of a villager's house eating potatoes so spicy my tongue went numb for a day.

2/ Washing clothes by the river in front of 15 local women, all laughing.

3/ Teaching Manju and Ashan the words to 500 Miles.

4/ Witnessing the kukri decapitation and instant butchery of: a goat, a chicken and a buffalo.

5/ Trying and failing to convince a child that 'green' is not pronounced 'dwoin'.  He can say 'ga', he can say 'reen', why not 'green'??

6/ Uproarious discussions with the teachers at break time.

7/ Every night dancing with our host family.  We look forward to many more of the same over the next 7 months!

It has been a bizarre and intense 2 weeks, filled with strange events and hard work.  I can only say that I can't wait for the next 28!

Till next time (probably in 3 weeks), Namaste!

Training

On the 1st December, I headed up to the Isle of Coll in the Hebrides for my second visit, this time for training, where I met my partner Chris who will suffer alongside me for the next 8 months. 

This intense week involved lessons from 8:30 till 7 every day.  As well as this we each had to teach our fellow volunteers two lessons, one 10 minutes the other 20 minutes.  It was hard, exhausting and stressful, yet training has filled me with excitement for my departure, which now feels very real , as opposed to just a thing I can bore people about over dinner.

More importantly though, training gave me all the details about the project I will be working on which I will now relay, so if you I have subjected you to these already, feel free to stop reading.

Chris and I leave on the 11th January and arrive in Kathmandu on the 12th.  From there we travel to Pokhara, and on to Baglung, then on to Burtibang, a 90 km journey that reputedly takes 9 hours by jeep...  Finally we walk from Burtibang to Bobang where we will be teaching.  Our living facilities are positively luxurious, made from breezeblocks as opposed to dung and featuring two whole rooms!  The school is a two minute walk away and, thanks to funding from a New Zealand charity, has a suite of computers.  Class sizes range dramatically, going up to 60 at the largest and age groups between 5 and 15.  My task is to teach English and basic IT over my 8 months out there.

Here are two photos of Bobang, more will follow when I get there!

Nearly there...

I have shamefully neglected this blog in the past two months so here's an update...

I finished my mountain climbing in early November in the Brecon Beacons in Wales.  I climbed two peaks, the second being the highest in South Wales, Pen y Fan.  That means that I finished at exactly 8,848 metres (who knew it would work out so well?)

My final fundraising push came on the 29th November when I cooked Nepalese curry for 55 people in Worlington parish hall.  I served 4 different dishes which went down, or at least seemed to, rather well.  I must thank the Ghurka Kitchen in Exeter who took me in, gave me a free meal and taught me everything they knew about making Nepalese curry.  I would highly recommend the restaurant, then food is honestly amazing!

With these endeavours completed, as of last Friday, I have finished my fundraising.  Thank you so much to everyone who sponsored me or who came to my curry night.  Special thanks go to the Viscount Amory Trust who kindly gave £500 and to the Exeter branch of the English Speaking Union who gave £400. 

Not long to go now!

A few Munros

After a long day's walking in Scotland, I've chalked up 4 Munros (mountains over 3000 feet).  I climbed Creag Leach (987m), then the highest, Glas Maol (1068m), followed by Cairn of Claise (1064) and Carn an Tuirc (1019m).  Despite the rain/hail/fog, there were (intermittently) some incredible views.  A few days before I climbed Dunkery Beacon on Exmoor, giving me another 520 metres.  I am therefore now on 7,371 metres, 1477 to go!

                                                          View along the Creag Leach ridge at 9 in the morning...

 Peak of Creag Leach

 View from Glas Maol

 A windswept Glas Maol cairn

 Carn an Tuirc

 Carn an Tuirc from the road

View from Cairn of Claise