Last Days in Nepal

Several weeks after returning to Ireland, I looked through the photos in my camera and found there were a bunch of pictures I meant to put in a final Nepal post that never made it online.  Two months after my departure, here are the last couple weeks I spent there.



This is Rupam, the three-year-old nephew of VolNepal's director.  He and his mother lived in the house with us and he spent a lot of time in our bedroom, eating, investigating our belongings and playing with my hand-crank rechargable flashlight.



The kids played a game sort of like jacks, with a bunch of pebbles on the floor and one in hand.  Rather than bouncing a ball, you toss your pebble in the air, swipe as many as you can from the floor, and catch your pebble again.



For the last two and a half weeks of my trip, I was stuck in the house with some sort of horrible jungle flu that I probably caught from the kids.  My co-volunteer, Mike, had the same thing.  It was awful.  Our hosts supplied me with the above products, and subjected me to a battery of local remedies.



Mike's birthday passed while we were home sick.  Rupam was definitely more excited than anyone else about this event. 

The Festival of Women happened around this time as well and the ladies of the house were happy to include all visiting women in the festivities, which involved henna tattoos on our palms, bangles for our wrists and a long religious ceremony (complete with holy cow brought by a neighbor) on the porch outside out bedroom window. 

I still hadn't recovered by the time I was due to leave, but I mustered the energy to go and say goodbye to the kids (whom I hadn't seen for two weeks already.)  This was a very sad occasion.

This is Anish, the director of VolNepal and one of the only motorcyclists in Nepal to wear a helmet.

Because of my illness, I couldn't do the post-volunteering traveling I had planned.  I was sorely disappointed.  As consolation, I accompanied the new batch of volunteers on their trip to Sauraha, though just for the elephant trek and one night's sleep.  To get there this time, we combined a local bus ride and a pony trap, which was a bumpy but more or less enjoyable ride.  The second elephant trek was similar to the first one but we did take a different route through the jungle and were able to spot some deer, peacocks, an alligator and a mama rhino bathing with her two-month-old baby.  Pretty cute.



I liberated these from the hotel in Sauraha.

I didn't fully recover from my illness until I'd been back in Ireland for about a week, at which point I gradually gained back the weight I lost from several weeks of dal bhat followed by two and a half weeks of eating almost nothing at all.  The henna faded, the string around my wrist from a previous holiday finally broke off.  But the experiences I had in Nepal stayed with me and I still think about them every day.

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.