News from Volunteers

Katharine Easteal writes about her experiences while volunteering in Nepal.

(1) My first two weeks in Nepal - 1-14th of February 2002

Well, I have completed my first week in Nepal and nothing major has befallen me apart from catching a cold. In a previous life, I worked in a London advertising agency before handing in my notice to travel around SE Asia which I have now been doing for the last 7 months. All that seems a very long time ago now though.

Upon arrival at Kathmandu airport I was taken by Assim and Anil (GVN's Partner) to the hotel where I was to spend the following 3 days. Coming from Thailand, I was totally unprepared for quite how cold it was going to be. Despite having speedily equipped myself with thermals, blanket, bobble hat, down jacket and sleeping bag, I am still shivering. We're not talking minus temperatures, but when you have no heating, no thick duvets, no hot water, no indoor bathroom and no handy biscuit supplies it is almost torturous!

A few days ago, I moved in with my first family in a village called Nepaltar which lies 25 minutes away on the outskirts of Kathmandu. My family consists of my Daai (elder brother), didi (elder sister), bhai (younger brother) and Lali the dog all of whom are incredibly welcoming, lovely people. The house is set in a tiny community which is surrounded by terraces of wheat, cabbage, bean fields and is overlooked by a huge mountain which glows pink in the sunset.

Every day I get up at 6.30am and am brought a cup of delicious chia by my sister. This provides me with the ammunition necessary for tackling the cold, stone bathroom.

Around 8.30am I walk 15 minutes to the bus stop and catch the number 23 into Thamel. My mornings are filled with language and cultural information classes. After 9 days, I have a book (if not quite a head) crammed full of useful vocabulary, phrases and frightening tables of verbs. I have been exhausting the locals practising my Nepali in an accent which I'm sure must sound like nails being scratched down a blackboard.

I have been happily spending my afternoons happily getting lost in Kathmadu's maze of identical looking streets, none of which helpfully have names.

Thamel, the main tourist drag in Kathmandu is predictably heaving with souvenir shops and street hawkers trying to sell you everything from tiger balm to miniature wooden guitars and flutes. A short 5 miute walk either side and it's a different story altogether - a tourist-free, amazingly colourful hive of activity. Locals tend to their everyday business - drinking chia, shouting at each other, haggling over the price of vegetables and washing clothes. They greet me with stares and friendly shouts of "hello, how are you!

Supper is dished up at 8 - we all sit in a row, cross-legged (a feat in itself) on the kitchen floor. The daily menu appears to be dalbhaat (rice with a rather insipid, yellow lentil broth) and a spicy vegetable dish. It is pretty tasty, but not so good for breakfast as you can probably imagine.

Yesterday, I visited the local school. On arrival, a textbook, some chalk and an eraser was thrust into my hands and I was sent off to teach forty 10 year olds.

It was the longest 45 mins of my life, but such good fun. The children are beautiful, very eager to learn and so well-behaved. I thoroughly exhausted myself prancing around the classroom buzzing like a bee, dancing, hopping like a rabbit and getting absolutely covered in chalk.

I have had a brilliant time with my family in Kathmandu, but am now sadly packing my bags in preparation for my journey to Amarapuri in the Nawalparasi District tomorrow.

(2) Weeks three and four

I have now been in my placement for 3 weeks and I can honestly say that I would never have imagined that I would enjoy it so much. Yes, there have been downs as well as ups, but these have been pretty insignificant and few and far between. Overall, it has been an amazingly rich experience. The Nepali people, and in particular, my family, are so incredibly welcoming, warm and generous.

Assim from (GVN's Partner) and I set off by bus from Kathmandu early in the morning and headed westwards for the Terai, winding our way up and down the mountains until we arrived in a busy town called Narayangarh in Nawalparasi District.

From Narayangarh, we squashed ourselves into a matchbox-sized jeep with around 18 other people and a huge assortment of luggage for a 40 minute drive to the tiny village of Amarapuri, my home for the next month.

After extracting ourselves (minus bone breakages thankfully) we walked a short distance across the grass where I was virtually wrestled to the ground amid a mass of around 15 hyperactive children all of whom were shouting excitedly in Nepali and trying to detach various limbs from the rest of my body.

I can honestly say that I am not often lost for words, but for the first time in my life I was rendered totally speechless. Forget speaking Nepali, I couldn't even remember any English! I sat seeking refuge in a cup of chia while I slipped rapidly into a state of shock.

No rest for the wicked though. I was then escorted by a huge entourage of what seemed like the whole village across the road to Shree Laxmi Secondary School to meet the teachers and students. What a welcome! The students placed beautiful malas (flower necklaces) over my head and handed me a huge assortment of flowers, leaves and twigs. I think I am now in a position to know what the Queen feels like on her official visits.

The rest of the afternoon / evening was a flurry of visits by curious villagers who just wanted to come and have a look at me and of children gallivanting around singing and dancing. All rather unnerving, but I realized that I was going to have to get used to feeling like an exhibit in a museum pretty quickly if I was to stand any chance of survival!

That night I slept in a room in the top of the barn along with 5 of the children and one of the mothers.

Home is a very old, stone farmhouse which has 3 buildings (a kitchen, the barn and another living area with 2 rooms) all of which are placed around A stone courtyard where most of the household's activity seems to take place. Behind the house, there are a couple of fields where mace and a huge variety of vegetables and herbs - peas, beans, spinach, cauliflower, onions, cabbage, garlic, coriander are grown.

I have just about which worked out which child belongs to which household, no mean feat when everyone calls each other brother and sister! But, I can say with utter conviction that my family consists of 7 children, 4 adults, 4 goats, 1 cow and a buffalo with a dodgy leg.

Subekshya (14), Samikshya (13), Sarikshya (11), Partickshya (8) are all sisters and their mother is Menuka. The fifth girl, Asmita (8) and her 2 brothers Ashok (7) and Akash (2) belong to Shoba. Both fathers are working abroad in Iran and Saudi Arabia for the next 4 years which seems to be pretty commonplace in the village. The remaining 2 adults are the grandfather and grandmother (who is toothless and scares the living daylights out of me!).

The morning starts at around 6am when the mothers begin fetching water, cleaning the courtyard, feeding the livestock, picking vegetables and sifting through the rice in preparation for the 9 o'clock feed. The hungry hoards (myself included) drag themselves out of bed at 6.30am and eagerly await their cup of steaming chia and 2 rotis.

My morning ablutions are performed very hastily as the water is so cold I am convinced that I will cut off my circulation. Hair-washing days are not eagerly awaited occasions.

Then it's homework, lesson plans and if I'm lucky, a trip to a neighbour's house to watch the Nepali News in English which is more amusing than it is informative!

We return to the ranch at 9am for a huge plate of bhaat (rice), tarkari (vegetables) and gundruck (soup) which, now that I have got used to eating rice in the mornings, is always remarkably welcome and tasty.

Every morning, we argue over what I will wear that day. Since arriving, I have had 2 kurta survals (long tunics with trousers) made which are the Nepali dress for unmarried women. I am adorned with a teeka in the middle of my forehead and shoved out of the door to meet the 8 or so children waiting to escort me to school.

There is absolutely no privacy here - I don't think I have had more than 5 minutes to myself in 3 weeks. You can bet that whatever you do, there are at least 5 pairs of inquisitive eyes following your every move.

The children are fascinated by my white skin and weighing up the relative merits of the colour of theirs and mine has become part of the daily routine. My hair, once brown, has now been dyed black as that is apparently much more beautiful (I beg to differ). They are disappointed with my very curly hair and it has been agonisingly (for me that is) combed to within an inch of its life. I have now put my foot firmly down and refuse to have any more conversations involving the words "comb" and "hair". School starts at 10am and finishes at 4pm, but that's another chapter in itself!

After school, our return is greeted with a snack, usually of freshly cooked chapatis and homemade chutney or fried rice with onion and the ubiquitous cup of chia. The children change out of their uniforms and race off to "tuition" at 4.30pm.

I relish this time as I have a bit of peace and quiet! I teach one extra English class, prepare my lessons for the following day and sit around the courtyard with the women chatting and shelling peas or stringing beans for the evening meal.

At 7pm, we have supper (rice again) which is cooked over a tiny fire in the small, very cosy clay kitchen. We all cram in and sit on the floor around the fire. It's a very cheerful, noisy and messy affair and is often undertaken in darkness when one of the regular power failures occur. Then, it's more homework, "visiting", gossiping (both favourite village pastimes) or an unpalatable dose of a bizarre Hindi TV serial.

(3) Weeks five and six

I can hardly believe that another 2 weeks have passed. When I realized that my time here in Amarapuri was rapidly drawing to a close, I decided to extend my stay for another month. The more time I spend here, the more difficult it will be to tear myself away.

The last two weeks have been witness to a number of memorable dramas. The first was a downpour of torrential rain and hailstones the size of marbles which steadily streamed through the roof and resulted in a river the size of the Thames flowing through our bedroom. The second was an outbreak of a nasty fever amongst all the children in the household. Then, the youngest boy in the family had a couple of fits in the night which resulted in a number of visits by someone whom I can only assume is the local witch-doctor. During all this excitement, I have been occupied with an increasingly bad stomach. Happily, I can report that there have been no major casualties and all is quiet on the western front (for the time being anyway).

It is getting hotter everyday and swarms of mosquitoes are attacking my seemingly tasty legs with increasing voracity.

Shree Laxmi Secondary School Where to start?

I think the best way of describing it is chaos!!! The school is basically built around a small field with 3 single storey classroom blocks at the top end. It is miniscule, but is amazingly attended by nearly 1000 students ranging in age from 5 to 18 years.

I think the teachers number around 30, but it is difficult to tell as some of them don't bother turning up. A number of them seem to be incredibly hard-working, attend all of their lessons and generally keep the school from falling apart at the seams; while others spend their time snoring heartily on the benches in the office.

The Mahendra Highway runs past the school and carries all traffic from one end of the Terai to the other. It is a hecticly dangerous road of Enormous speeding trucks and buses, the drivers of which appear to have no road sense whatsoever. Weekly, the students are distracted by trucks careering off the road into the school ground or a cow, a goat or worse still, a child being knocked over.

School doesn't start until 10am and finishes at 4pm due to the amount of daily household chores that have to be completed. These include fetching milk and rice (done by the children riding bikes that are 10 times too big for them), feeding the livestock, clothes washing (not easy, I can tell you with experience!!!), organising younger brothers and sisters, endless hours of sweeping courtyards and rice sifting and cooking. Some children also have tuition every morning and evening. One girl gets up at 3.30am, goes to tuition until 6am and has to stay up reading until 11.30pm. A pretty hard existence.

Weekends are only Friday afternoons and Saturdays. However, there is a holiday of the religious or patriotic variety nearly every week. Surprisingly, on Education Day, the school was shut. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to teach much in the first couple of weeks due to school finishing early for year 10 exams and the involvement of the whole school in the clearing of the field. This wasn't as easy as it sounds! Children were dispatched with hoes to make flower gardens, axes to chop down trees and spades to dig rubbish pits. Others formed lines and crawled on the ground picking up every stone.

School begins with "assembly" in the field. This is a strange ritual where the students line up haphazardly and perform a couple of bizarre Exercises such as stretching and touching the person in front of them on the shoulder and stomping their feet. This is followed by a slightly off-key rendition of the National Anthem before they charge like buffaloes into their classrooms.

The classrooms are basic to say the least. There are no windows, no lights and none of the usual paraphernalia associated with classrooms such as pictures, drawings, equipment etc. The students are squashed together 4 or 5 to a row on nursery-sized wooden benches; girls on one side of the classroom, boys on the other.

In each class, there are between 45 and 60 students and their ability varies enormously. Every day I teach 4 periods of English to the 2 sets of years 7 and 8 (14-16 year olds) and am often called upon to teach year 9 or any other class whose teacher has gone walkabout.

I am working my way through their textbooks, which are at times, incomprehensible even to me and riddled with mistakes. I have found myself in the enviable position of having to explain how a power station works using ridiculously technical terminology, what to do if someone has epilepsy and Chinese history. Not exactly a piece of cake!! Still, I amuse the students and myself greatly by falling off the stage about 15 times every lesson, bellowing incomprehensible Nepali at them and gesticulating wildly in an effort to explain something.

"Tiffin" or lunch is at 1.15pm and involves a trip to the school canteen, a tiny hut at the bottom of the field, for a samosa, chowchow (noodles) and a couple of jeris (fried batter containing a sugary syrup) all for the princely sum of 8 rupees (8 English pence). The kids spend their break playing volleyball which they are surprisingly good at, playing chungi (a version of hackysack but with rubber bands tied together) and generally causing mayhem.

After school and at weekends, life saunters along happily. The villagers and I communicate via a hybrid language of Nepali interspersed with Pidgin English, which seems to work very well! I have a constant stream of visitors.

The adults come to stare, screech amicably at me, enquire after my eating habits, my age, marital status and to make sure that they are up-to-date with what I have been up to every second.

The children come in great crowds, yelling and singing at the tops of their voices and bearing flowers, which have been unceremoniously ripped, from every garden in the village. They sometimes bring nail polish in hideously garish colours which I am forced to paint on my nails (left hand only), a sweet that they have been saving or a crab apple.

I have been taken on a tour of every temple in the area and have been to several pujas (blessings) where everyone sits on the ground chanting and eating sel roti, puri and fruit out of bowls made from leaves.

Going "eklai" or alone is not customary, so wherever I go I am escorted by at least 3 other girls which is sometimes a little tiring! They find my weekly trips into Narayangarh for emailing purposes very curious and I'm sure they are convinced that I'm up to something more sinister!

That's all for now as I'm off "visiting" again, this time my headmaster's family....

(4) Week Seven

Another week fly's by and I have not been idle! Apart from school, there have been pleasant visits to Beldia, a tiny village with a Friday market to buy vegetables and to Sora Number Chowk, the next village along from Amarapuri to repair a pair of broken flip-flops (everything can be mended and reused here).

I have been escorted by half the village on a walk to Narayani River which flows across the Terai and separates the village from Chitwan National Park. Despite being rather dry with pools of murky water and swarms of mosquitoes, it is considered to be the local beauty spot. Needless to say, I did not join the rest of them in taking a dip. The villagers took great delight in pointing out heaps of dung made by roving Rhinos which creep into the village at night to feast on the local wheat crops.

Everyone, including the family calls me "Miss" as they find Katharine impossible to say. They are desperately seeking an appropriate Nepali name for me, but I have so far been less than impressed with the suggestions of Sabina and Prasumila (neither of which exactly suit me!).

The locals have become incredibly protective of me and are always very concerned that I do not pay tourist prices for things, that I am getting enough to eat, that I get a seat on the bus and that the driver knows exactly where I am going. Yesterday, one of the villagers even paid for my bus fare into town and another almost came to blows with a greedy conductor who charged me an inflated price.

The family really treats like royalty which makes me feel quite uncomfortable. Despite constant battles about not receiving preferential treatment, I am always given the largest portion of rice, the juciest satsuma, the biggest roti, the most sweets and am treated to chapatis with ghee, a precious commodity. It's incredible how little they have and yet they are so generous both in material things and in spirit, unbelievably accepting, kind, honest and genuine. Since I have been here, I have never heard anyone complain or say "no".

The women in the village work incredibly hard and are responsible for undertaking all the household chores while the men folk appear to do very little. Despite keeping the household ticking over, the women really occupy a secondary position in it. They greet their husbands by touching their forehead to their legs and feet and their general demeanour is one of deference. The men hold the purse-strings tightly and every morning, the women even have to ask the men for the 5 rupees necessary to buy the family rotis.

During their period of menstruation, women are often banished from the household altogether as they are considered "jutho" or polluted. They cannot touch the males in the family, nor are they permitted to enter the kitchen or touch any food or eating utensils that may be used by another family member. The women I have spoken to consider this practice archaic, but they have resigned themselves to this routine referring to it as the "Nepali system".

One of the men in the houses opposite enjoys frittering what little money he has on raksi, the local home brew made from rice rather than looking after the needs of his wife and 3 young daughters.

Subekshya and Samikshya, the older girls in my household, take great pleasure in surprising me by washing my clothes and blankets. They are always falling over each other trying to help me with the tiniest of tasks such as carrying my soap to the bathroom and holding the hose for me while I clean my teeth. Ashok, the oldest boy, innundates me with paper boats and drawings of flowers and birds. He loves coming home from school and knocking a papaya from the tree with a big stick for me to eat.

The children have no toys, games or books other than their school text books. They have very few possessions of their own and hide their precious things such as nail varnish, chungis, marbles and pencils under the mats on their beds. They absolutely love postcards of Hindi film stars and Nepali "heros and heroines" which they have pasted over the walls of our bedroom with buffalo dung or "boisi toilet" as we call it.

I am now officially on holiday for 3 weeks while the students and teachers busy themselves sitting and marking exam papers.

The majority of the teachers have not been educated to degree level let alone teacher raining standard. There are 3 other women teachers but they all teach the junior classes. Holes in the teaching staff are plugged by 18 year old student teachers from the nearby campus.

The school is apparently government funded, although evidence of this is scarce. Only 18 of the school's teachers are actually paid by the government, the rest are remunerated by the wealthier families in the village. Officially, it is a non-fee paying school, however some students pay a minimal amount a month depending upon their financial status.

I have had a particularly busy week teaching as once again, there has been a fair demonstration of absenteeism by some of the teachers. As soon as I sit down for 5 minutes in the office, there are cries of "Miss, Miss come teach us" or "Miss, Miss, come play volleyball". Of course, I prefer the first request as leaping around like an elephant in my kurta sural is really not a pretty sight. The student's enthusiasm to learn is admirable given the lack of interest demonstrated by some of the teachers.

I am now off gallivanting for 3 weeks in Lumbini, Chitwan National Park and Pokhara in an effort to replenish my rapidly decreasing energy supplies!