Simple Pleasures

 
The Murry Foundation English School is a sort of boarding school/orphanage serving about 90 kids who are more or less orphaned because at least one parent has been maimed or killed by a wild animal.  Most have aunts and uncles or other family that they go home to at festival time in the autumn, but some have no one at all.  There are a few adults who live there with them--cooks and people who mind their limited livestock--but not at a ratio that gives any of them the kind of attention or support most of us experience growing up.  Also present are a couple of cows and buffalo and a bunch of those lop-eared goats who wander around grazing, climbing anything they can climb and meandering the dining hall to nibble on food scraps, corn husks and table legs.  Besides the school (which also houses their severely overcrowded sleeping quarters,) there are outbuildings for toilets and showers and a large kitchen/dining hall.  From any point on the south side of their land, you can look across a broad field of rice paddies to the edge of the jungle that stretches all the way to India.

Besides midweek national holidays, the only day there is no school is Saturday.  Sometimes I stay home to get things done, but often I ride up to the orphanage just to spend some time with the kids outside of class, to play with them and to talk to the older students whose English is better and whom I don't get to teach during the week.

On rainy Saturdays, a lot of the kids pour into one end of the dining hall and watch bad Indian TV on a station I have heard is owned by Fox.  I think they have some movies and a DVD player too, but they don't have the basic patch cable to use it.  I usually try to bring something with me, like paper and crayons, but often it is the things I have with me all the time that they are most interested in, like sunglasses, an umbrella, or, of course, my camera.  They love taking pictures, and they love having their pictures taken, but there are always a few kids who snatch it away from the less powerful ones when I am not looking, or who weasel their way into four out of every five pictures taken.

Sometimes this job is extremely difficult.  It can be hard to motivate kids who have no parents to push them, to encourage them, to reward them or to discipline them.  It is difficult to teach in an environment where materials are so lacking and the things they do have are grossly inadequate.  I know they have more here than a lot of kids have--a roof over their heads, two meals a day, an education--but it is still so hard to see them go without.

At the end of the day, the most I can do is to give them my best effort in class and my time and attention out of class, where I can play chase games and tickle monster with the little ones and give them piggy-back rides and just scoop them up so they can sit on a lap and be bounced a bit.  It is amazing and endlessly inspiring to me how their little faces light up from these simple pleasures, their laughter echoing, amplified in a cavernous empty room.

 

Welcome to the Jungle

 
It has been nearly a month since I arrived in Bharatpur, in the southern-central part of Nepal.  When I was planning this trip, most people I told were under the impression I would be huddled in a thatch-roof hut in the Himalayas, scratching verb conjugations into blocks of ice for the benefit of orphaned Sherpa children.  The reality is quite the opposite.  As many people know, Nepal contains at least one slope of 8 of the 10 highest mountains in the world, but at its southern border, it's only a few hundred feet above sea level.  Here, it is a hot, humid, landlocked jungle.  Even when the monsoon brings days of rain, it is still warm.  I haven't worn socks and shoes in weeks.  Every day I must find a balance between the need to stay hydrated and the possibility of getting stuck in a situation where there is no place to relieve myself.

I am living with Anish (the director of Volnepal,) his sister, her 3-year-old son, and an ever-changing mix of other foreign volunteers on the ground floor of this lovely house. 

Every Sunday through Friday and some Saturdays, I ride a very upright, Indian-style bicycle about 15 minutes to the Murry Foundation English School.  I ride past homes varying from tiny huts with no plumbing or electricity to larger brick houses with small TVs flickering in the windows and motorcycles parked outside.  I ride past water buffalo and floppy-eared goats with knobby knees lazing in the shade or munching on whatever greenery is within their reach.  I ride past enormous rice paddies that whisper shhhhh when a light breeze finds them, past uniformed children who grin and shout, "Hi-Hello-How-are-you-I-am-fine-thank-you!" and men who just stare.  The women stare, too, but they are much more likely to return a smile.

Once at school, I help with homework and play word games until it is time for the kids to eat their first meal at 9:00, after which I teach English to classes 1, 2 and 3 (ages 5 to about 11.)  My favorite parts are when I can involve everyone, playing a game or getting them all working on a project.  The kids are mostly great--more about them in the next post. 

If you are curious about VolNepal, the Nepali NGO through which I am volunteering, you can see all their projects at volnepal.org.

 

Monkeys.

    
After a scenic but otherwise uneventful flight from Donegal to Dublin and a restless one from Dublin to Abu Dhabi, I spent the morning waiting for my final flight in a meticulously tiled chartreuse-and-purple terminal of Abu Dhabi’s mammoth airport. I had already taken a couple of photos when I saw the signs prohibiting it.

Donegal

At boarding time, I was bumped up to business class, probably due to someone shifting seats around in my original row. It was the fanciest, most comfortable flight I have ever taken. Still, I can’t imagine paying thousands extra to get that prime service on a four-hour flight.

Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu is a small brick building, architecturally reminiscent of a 1960’s-built community college back home. Low ceilings, exposed brick, tired employees. When I got through the visa-upon-entry line, I grabbed my bag, got waved past the x-ray conveyor belt without any kind of customs check at all and found myself out in the mid-afternoon heat, hounded on every side by touts and sketchy taxi drivers. But my welcome party was there to scoop me up and whisk me into the city in a taxi, an old Suzuki van the size of a Yugo, rattling down dusty roads packed with motorbikes carrying three people each and honking, honking, honking.

I spent two days in Thamel, the backpacker neighborhood of the city, adjusting to the pace and the time zone and the heat. I did make a couple of excursions to see things once I was somewhat familiar with the area, which of course is devoid of street signs. My favorite excursion by far was to Swayambhunath, the Monkey Temple. It sits at the top of a very large hill with at least a few hundred increasingly steep steps leading up. There are hundreds of macaques on the hill, running up and down the stairs, climbing all over the buildings of the temple and sitting in trees. I was warned not to make eye contact. There are several buildings at the top of the stairs, the largest of which is the central stupa, a hemispherical structure with a square bit and a sharp point on top. Around the stupa are several smaller temples to specific gods, with Mongolian-style architecture, square roofs with ski-jump corners. All round every temple building are prayer wheels, which are spun as people weave around the site in a clockwise direction. There are also dozens of people there to work out, running up and down the stairs and stretching or doing vigorous calisthenics at the top, with a view of the city below and the hills beyond.

The buildings and art were lovely, but I admit I found the monkeys more fascinating. I was sometimes surprised how human their gestures were, how dexterous their little fingers. There were so many people there for the sunrise--all locals--that I often felt in the way, so I’d find a little nook to sit in and watch the monkeys until I needed a new vantage point.

I have never been a religious person, but high on a hill overlooking the dusty, grimy, populous streets of Kathmandu, I certainly understood the calming power of a little Buddhism at daybreak.