Two months in Nepal and plans for our next adventure

I’ve now been in Nepal for almost two months, and we’re about to start our month long holiday on Wednesday. I think the initial newness of being in Harpe and Nepal is now wearing off a little, so it’s starting to feel more like home. I have definitely found the last few weeks more difficult than maybe even when we first arrived because it’s sinking in that we’re here for a whole year. Even so, whenever things get hard here or when a day of teaching has been really draining, there’s almost always something that makes me feel better, or something that makes me smile. It’s always good to have something to look forward to here, and I’m really excited for the month long holiday. We’re setting off to Pyuthan to meet the six volunteers who are teachers in that area, so we’ll set of for the six hour walk at about 7am (with a guide) and stay there for a few days before heading to Pokhara. In Pokhara, we’re planning to meet the Jhimpa volunteers (they start their holiday a bit later) and then trek the Annapurna Circuit (only five of us want to do this, so we’ll meet the other volunteers later on). We’ll be with the other volunteers for Dashain but we all want to be back to our projects for Tihar (the Hindu festival at the end of the holiday) which is a three day festival with lots of dancing and eating nice food (apparently there is sweet roti!), so that should bring a great end to the month. It’s crazy that by the end of the holiday it’ll be almost mid November (Tihar starts on the 7th November), so we’ll return to our project when it has really started to get cold at nights and at school. 

Edit: we’re not going to Pyuthan anymore because I have two bug bites on my foot which have swollen and my ankle really aches, so we’re heading off to Burtibang and getting a bus from there to Pokhara at midday. This was actually really easy to organise thanks to our lovely headteacher Dinu; the new science teacher is also heading to Pokhara so he can go home to Rukumkot for the holidays so he’s going to meet us at 9am and we’ll walk with him. 

I’ve not mentioned teaching much so far, because there’s been so much else and I’ve still been settling into the routine; learning what works best and what really doesn’t. When we first arrived, I found that my lessons would go really well one day, then the next day I would feel exhausted and the day would feel really hard. In the last week I definitely think that the days here have been much more consistent and I feel a lot better about how my lessons have been going. We live next door to the school, and I teach classes 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 and Ashvi and I help with class 6 and 7 computer (we also teach half of the classes together). The age range is six to sixteen year olds and each lesson is 40 minutes long. At the start, I think the hardest thing was teaching from 10 to 1.30 with no break, but now we’ve got into the swing of things and have organised ourselves more (we used to get really hungry at lunchtime and the last lesson before lunch we would be light-headed because of lack of energy and then we would have no plans for food for lunch). I’m also getting there with names, but I definitely want to try and know them all by Christmas (it’s such an important thing with teaching to know the students names). 

I think the hardest week for me so far was last week, because we taught 6 days (we only get Friday afternoons and Saturday off here) and half the teachers were missing because they were doing teaching exams in Pokhara. This meant that there were only six teachers and then a few days into this week, one teacher had to take leave because her father had died. Traditionally, after a family death or a death of a father when you are unmarried, you spend thirteen days where you only eat rice and radish in the mornings and you can’t eat salt. You sit with no clothes under a blanket in a room and wash daily. The thirteen days of mourning for Bishnu meant that it ended up being five teachers to seven classes for the rest of the week so there was a lot of chaos (four year olds running around outside when I was meant to be teaching them, among other things). It was definitely a really hard week, because Ashvi and I usually share some of our classes with other teacher - class 2 I share with Mina and the students are always a lot quieter when she’s there (she also helps me translate words into Nepali on the board) and class 6 I usually share with Himala (this is a big class of 30 that I teach my myself if Himala isn’t there) and she helps massively with explaining grammar points and keeping them quiet. She was still at school that week, but because the other teachers weren’t there she had to teach the other classes that day. That meant that my unit 10 test failed, and everyone ended up cheating (when you have tests here it’s very hard to avoid students cheating, and all of them usually have their English books that they check and they look over at their friends work all the time). We got through the week, and in the end the afternoons were quite nice because we spent some time in Class 7 when there weren’t computer lessons (when there is no electricity we can’t teach computer practical), which was fun and they taught us some Nepali. This week was also difficult because the only teachers there were the younger teachers, and at lunchtimes they all speak in very fast Nepali, which Ashvi and I understand nothing of, so we sat at the side most lunchtimes confusedly. We were very glad to have a plan for that weekend; we had planned to go to Jhimpa (Oscar and Kieran’s project), so on Friday we happily walked off with our sleeping bags ready for a more relaxing weekend - it was getting quite difficult at the project, because we hadn’t left our house in almost a week and a half. 

We’ve realised that the best way to keep happy and keep calm is to make sure to do different things and get away from the project sometimes. This is because we live so close to the school, so sometimes it feels a bit claustrophobic because we stay at our house and students and people come to our door - it feels much better to walk around and sit near the main row of shops (3 shops but still) and sit and look out on the view or wander round the village after school for an hour or so. We’ve also decided to try and get out most weekends so we can explore and take a bit of a break; when we visited Kieran and Oscar’s house in Jhimpa last weekend, it was honestly one of the best decisions we’ve made. It’s so interesting to see the differences in the projects, and also the differences in the way that we’re choosing to live and spend our time here. Oscar and Kieran’s project sits by the river in the valley. It’s the same altitude as our project but it’s three hour walk up a very gently sloping road, so the hills around it look smaller, but it’s actually the same height. Jhimpa is quite a bit bigger than Harpe; when we first got there we could see a much more gently sloping hill, and the houses were a lot more spaced out. The people who live in Jhimpa are of a higher caste and therefore more wealthy (higher castes tend to live further down and in the valley because there is more fertile land and water access is easier - Jhimpa is right by the river that winds along the valley bottom). It was so lovely to stay at Jhimpa, and it was really relaxing. They’d just been to Dhorpatan Hunting Reserve as they’d had that week off because of the teacher exams, so I think (according to Kieran’s strava) he’d walked and run something like 90km that week. When we arrived they’d only just got back from the mammoth walk back from the hunting reserve (which is over 2500m, altitude wise) so they were pretty exhausted which meant we spent the Friday afternoon and the whole of Saturday chatting, reading and looking out on the great view they have from their house. Kieran and Oscar don’t have a host family, or a family at their project since they’re staying at Shanta’s house (the country coordinator), meaning they’re getting quite a different experience to us. Their house also looks out onto views, and is less of a pathway to other houses, so they get a lot more quiet than us. They aren’t given as much vegetables and ingredients to make food (oil, sugar, salt, spices etc) as our project, which means they’re spending a lot more money than us. The shops are also better stocked and there are little places to eat that sell momos and samosas, so we really enjoyed the little holiday in terms of food as well - I probably ate over ten bananas in two days because I love and miss fruit and the bananas tasted so good (we did actually return to our project to find out they were selling bananas as a one off too so I got to eat them when we got back as well!!). It was really nice to just have a little break and have peace for the whole day, and I finished off “And the Mountains Echoed” (by Khaled Hosseini), which I was really enjoying. Oscar also has five films downloaded on his laptop (they’ve apparently started rewatching them), so both evenings we ate food that they cooked for us whilst watching “The Martian” on Oscar’s laptop with the portable speaker playing the sound. Those few days I felt like I was on a camping holiday in France. One thing I really love about living in rural Nepal is that you spend so much time outside. Even when you’re in your room, you’re still effectively partly outside, because you’re living in a little mud hut with wooden windows which open out into fresh air. It does mean it’s starting to get really cold and that I’ve started to wear jumpers in bed as well as sleeping in my sleeping bag, but it’s definitely worth it. Ashvi and I often sit on our front steps to read and relax, which can be really lovely because everyone who walks by greets us with a “Namaste”, and we get some Nepali practise in (I’ve definitely improved in the past week in terms of reading, writing and speaking). 

After spending Saturday evening and sleeping over at Oscar and Kieran’s house that night, we set off for Burtibang on Sunday morning. We’d asked Dinu for the day off, because we needed to get some money out from the ATM in Burtibang (the closest ATM is in Burtibang, so an hour and a half walk away) and we’d also been really struggling that week with the lack of teachers since there were only going to be five of us again that Sunday. Dinu said this was fine, so we set off walking about 10am (when Oscar and Kieran were off to school) and after 10 minutes or so of walking, the 10am bus caught up with us so we got on that which took us all the way to Burtibang. We were very glad to get on this bus because it was already starting to get quite hot and we didn’t really fancy the three and a half hour walk in strong sunlight. On the bus ride, we enjoyed the Nepali radio along with an old man’s dancing (he was dancing to the music for a good while). I want to mention again the fact that here when things go wrong, or times are stressful, they always seem to be rectified by something or someone. We got out of the bus in Burtibang, feeling hot, sweaty and with our big backpacks on our back (making us stand out very obviously). We wanted to buy some clothes and some other things and it started to become quite stressful, because in the shops in Burtibang you can’t really just browse, and when we sat down to look at different kurtas we didn’t really know how to say no. After a bit of a stressful walk with lots of staring, we decided to sit down at the quieter part of the town, to think about what else we needed to buy and figure out what to do without being stared at. We were sitting quite close to the steep slope down to the river, when someone told us to sit at their house front on a chair, rather than on the floor. We were offered tea at the house, and a man who apparently picks and sells medicine for the government started talking to us. He then took us around Burtibang and helped us with our shopping and directed us to a working ATM machine (we went to two with him before finding one that actually worked). He seemed to know and have lots of relatives in Burtibang - everywhere we went he was greeted by other people who he would later say were his brother’s wife or another relative. We managed to get our plug adapter and money among other things, and afterwards we went to eat momos with his sister and her friend (I think it was his sister but I can’t remember - she was the same age as us). 

There were two specific things that happened that day in/walking back from Burtibang that will guarantee that Ashvi laughs: 

1. When we first got to Burtibang, we were just walking along when we heard someone calling Olaaa (I like my name to be Ola here because if it’s not said like that it’s said with a roll of the r). We then proceeded to look up above, and there Pulmathi was, looking over the balcony - for those who don’t know, Pulmathi is the woman who shares our house, who comes into our room and drunkenly shows us her dancing. She has recently taken her son Milan to Burtibang so he can go to the school there, so I’m assuming that’s why we saw her calling from the balcony - she and Milan will be back for the holidays. It was just so unexpected that it was really funny (I’m not sure if I’m describing this to make it sound as funny as it was but it just made us laugh a lot). 
2. After Jhimpa, we felt inspired by all the fruit the boys have been eating (and I love fruit a lot), so we bought pomegranates in Burtibang as well as some more bananas. On the way back from Burtibang I was feeling like eating the pomegranate so I ate it whilst we were walking. Since you have to peel the skin off, and sort of dig the pomegranate seeds out, I managed to get red juice all over my face and hands. We walked past a boy who looked directly at my hands covered in red juice and he gave my hands and face a really strange look. I then decided to go and wash them off in the river (mistake). I walked down the gritty slope to the river (the big river that follows the main road up the valley), and then tried to splash my face with some water. In the process of doing this, I slipped on a rock and fell in - I was then completely submerged by water and soaking wet. When I walked back up, I was getting more strange looks from passers by, and Ashvi told me (whilst laughing) that it looked like I had deliberately got into the river. Ashvi tells me to remind her of this moment often, and when I do she always laughs loudly. Luckily, I did have a change of clothes because we’d been at Jhimpa before, so I tried to discreetly change into them when there didn’t appear to be anyone nearby.

Ashvi and I are definitely getting better at walking and we’re finding it a lot easier - in about a week we walked to Jhimpa (a three and a half hour walk), then back from Burtibang (we got a bus there), to Bishnu’s father’s house (two big hills), to Devisthan (to get Ashvi’s parcels and my birthday postcard from my mum) and then to Takura one morning. Since we live at the top of a big hill and to get up it requires you to walk up steps for at least half an hour, we’ve definitely been getting fitter - also after reading about the Annapurna and the Thorung Pass which is over 5000m high and the fact that the Lonely Planet calls this trek medium to hard, I’m quite glad we’ve been doing so much walking this past week. 

The resilience and fitness of people here continues to amaze me; it turned out that we had a few more days off after visiting Jhimpa that we were told about in the morning (a common theme here - Ashvi and I never seem to know what’s going on) so the first day we walked for four hours to visit Bishnu’s house to pay our respects to her father who died just a week before and the second day we helped Anita with farming and mudded our floor and walls (apparently we’re meant to mud the floor once a week but we haven’t mudded it once yet - we didn’t really realise but the floor did look a lot better afterwards). On the morning of the walk to and from Bishnu’s house we also didn’t realise that all the teachers were going there (again the common theme of never knowing what’s happening), so after an hour of washing clothes (actually quite tiring considering that it’s hand washing and you have to wring the clothes out a lot or they never dry) we were met at our door by the other teachers ready and dressed, asking if we wanted to come. They were dressed in nice clothes, and we then proceeded to walk for two hours up and down hills and none of them blinked an eyelid or even gave the suggestion that the walk was tiring. When we helped Anita with the weeding on the farm and cutting grass for the buffalo to eat the next day, she told us to take a break for a few hours (we thought she was too). We came back to help her at 3pm, and she’d kept going all that time, pulling out pumpkin stalks and grass in the midday sun. The people in our village are so strong and it’s amazing how much work they do. Anita described work on the farm and Nepali manual labour in general as hard work and little money, which is definitely true. I did quite enjoy helping out that morning, but I think I would struggle to do this sort of work every day like Anita does.

Going to Takura on Saturday morning was definitely a highlight of the last few weeks. I am definitely a changed person in some respects since arriving to Nepal, and to Harpe. When we went to Takura we woke up at 4.30am (which I would never have done back home - I used to be the worst at mornings). We walked up to the same viewpoint we went to for my birthday and watched the sunrise which was so, so beautiful. When my alarm woke us up this morning I was almost at the point of going back to sleep, but Ashvi said she was still up for walking so I agreed and we powered up the hill. Ashvi did some sketching and we sat there for a few hours reading and enjoying the array of different orangey pink colours appearing on the horizon, until the first rays of orange sunlight fell on our faces. It was actually a lot colder than I expected; the winter chill is definitely arriving in Harpe. I’m so glad we went out that morning because later on it started raining, so if we hadn’t gone I feel like it would’ve been another day hanging around our room too much. Instead, we had our little adventure, so we could later sit and relax whilst the rain pattered down onto the metal roof of the school feeling like we’d accomplished something. I will attach some photos of the sunset to the blog. 

When you go for a wander in Nepal you never know what can happen. We had another surprise day off on Sunday (the day after the walk to see the sunrise), so we wandered over to Rajkut on the pretence of getting recharge cards for my phone, but actually we just wanted to wander (it’s best to have a reason because you’re always questioned about where you’re going). Rajkut also has some shops with really nice coconut biscuits that aren’t sold in Harpe which we discovered on our way back from our sunrise viewing so that was another reason we fancied going to Rajkut in particular. In the end, we were spotted by students at our school; some six year olds ran to us smiling and gave us flowers (very cute), and the headteacher at our school called Dinu invited us round for tea, cucumber, corn and TV watching. Ashvi and I happily agreed and proceeded to sit in her kitchen for another few hours watching Animal Planet (Animal Planet and Discovery Channel are the only English channels really) and then some Hindi films. We were going to head back after, but Dinu said we should stay the night, and since we’d already done our lesson plans and unit tests for the following school day because we had the surprise day off, we spent the rest of the afternoon chilling at her house and I read some more of “The God of Small Things” on my kindle. I really want to get the same bedding that Dinu has at her house, because the bed was so warm and comfortable - when I woke up I proclaimed to Ashvi that I didn’t want to leave the bed. Rajkut is also a really beautiful village, and only 20 minutes down the road from school, and it was so lovely to sit out in the morning and watch everyone go about their daily activities; tending to the chickens and goats, making things out of wood and all with the early morning yellowy sunshine lighting up the green hills and little houses in the surrounding area. I sat with a baby chick on my arm for a while and Ashvi took some photos (she’s very fond of chickens and goats) so I will probably upload those photos at some point.  

I think the overall feeling in this blog, and that I’m feeling at the moment (especially with the fact that mental health week is here), is that even if I’m stressed or feeling down, the best thing to do is focus on relaxing, and remember what a beautiful place Harpe is, and how beautiful the people are here too. One stressful day at school, a teacher helped me out with some Nepali writing which was lovely and one day after school we went to sit out and watch the view but then ended up spending the rest of the afternoon playing clapping games with the children who live here and watching some volleyball (at the volleyball court that we’ve only just realised is there). There’s always more to explore and find out and although the language barrier can be a challenge and life can feel difficult sometimes, the beauty of the people and landscape in Nepal is always there to cheer us up. 

This blog is a personal blog written by Orla Fawcett, therefore the views expressed in this blog are those of Orla Fawcett and not those of Project Trust.