monsoon season and my 24 hour cat

I’ve had a 102 degree fever the past 2 days. Getting sick here sucks. Not that getting sick in America doesn’t suck, but I think you automatically become a hypochondriac here. In America, a fever means the flu probably. Here, as I rifle through my handy “Where There is no Doctor” book, I question myself Do I have malaria? Is this typhoid? HOLY SHIT DO I HAVE SCHISTOSOMIAS? But this actually is a possibility as I spent 5 hours planting rice the other day in knee deep water with a nearby woman’s agriculture group and it turned into a full on mud slinging affair which ended in me covered head to toe in mud with rice seedlings sticking out of my hair. I did get to drive a tractor around in the mud though, which was awesome. Anyways, preeeettty sure I don’t have schisto but as you can see the mind wanders here.  So the past 2 days I have barely left my bed.I’ve mostly been watching tv and movies on my computer as I cant focus enough to read because my head hurts too much.  As with any minor illness, the fam here thinks I’m dying but they’ve been very sweet about bringing me water or food and checking up on me throughout the day.

Oh I also celebrated my 23rd birthday on the 8th! In Nepali fashion, I gave everyone candy and they gave me a boatload of tikka on my forehead!

Hanging out with aamaa

This past week I had some excitement…I woke up at 1am thinking I was dreaming of a mewing kitten, and much to my surprise I peered out of my window onto my balcony into the pouring rain and saw a real life tiny kitten mewing for all it was worth. The thing could have fit into the palm of my hand. After cursing myself for being me and not being able to ignore a meowing helpless animal, I climbed out of bed with my headlamp and grabbed a tshirt and went outside and scooped up the tiny animal into my shirt. I then sat on a bed outside my room wondering what the hell I was going to do with this small creature, when I looked up and saw a black shape slithering away under the other bed. I shined my headlamp upon it and my worst fear was confirmed: somehow a snake had made its way up to the second story and now inhabited a space 5 feet from my bedroom. Logically I started screaming for my grandma which went along the lines of “AAMA, SARPA SARPA!!!” who then practically fell out of bed by the sounds of it. I was also sitting in my boxer shorts and a tanktop with a kitten poking its head out of my shirt, but this was no time for being culturally appropriate. There was a goddamn snake among the potatoes we store under the bed. My grandma grabbed a large stick. My job was to hold the flashlight in one hand and this tiny kitten swaddled in my tshirt in another, while she whacked away at the snake, squashing many potatoes in the process. Once we had disposed of the reptile, my grandma then told me to chuck the kitten back out the window into the rain. Obviously this was not going to happen, so I put the little nugget up in my attic for safekeeping, who still kept me up for another hour mewing. To my surprise, the next morning I woke and opened my door only to find 3 more kittens running around my bedroom door! My nugget kitty was reunited with its siblings and they had taken up a space under a bed with a box full of clothes. I went to check on them later and got down on my knees to peer under the bed and mama cat almost ripped my face off.

So after the whole cat debacle, a couple days later I went to the bathroom and much to my surprise a live kitten was sitting in the toilet hole, unable to get out. So for the third time this month, I stuck my hand into my toilet and rescued the tiny creature. I put it back up in the barn but the next morning it was sitting with the water buffalo, mommy cat nowhere in sight. So of course I rescued it and spent the next 24 hours playing mom. Throughout the day I kept looking for mom kitty and the other kittens but they were nowhere to be found. I fed it milk, gave it a bath, and cuddled it. In the morning it sat next to the fire while I read and drank tea. After an hour of kitten wailing and several escapes from its box I placed it in, the kitten spent the night with me in my bed in complete bliss, cuddled in the nook between my ear and shoulder. I went to town the next day to buy bug medicine and a plastic tray for a litter box and I hurried home, eager to play with my new little friend. I got home and was cuddling my kitty when all of a sudden I heard a big cat meow from the other room. Before I could do anything, my kitten jumped off my lap and ran into the other room, where it reunited with its mother. Then the two of them scampered off together. And just like that, I was left kittenless, sitting among the litterbox and milk tray and blankets. It was quite upsetting. My kitten now lives in the barn with its mommy and 3 of its siblings and is quite happy. If it had been a little older I would have stolen it back but it really does need its mommys milk. So, thank you to the 75 people who liked my photo of me on Facebook with my kitten (who I named Biraali), but I sadly have no kitten anymore.

Random topic: My life here in Nepal is largely black and white. Anytime I meet a stranger and speak a little Nepali, the first question they ask is ”So you understand ALL Nepali?” Well no, I don’t. I understand a lot, but not all. Which is what I usually say to people, but its almost ridiculous how much I get asked that question. Here, you either understand all Nepali, or you understand nothing. Another example: a fellow PCV is coming to visit me at my site in a couple days. While talking with my family about what she liked to eat, my grandma asks “Is she fat or thin?” As far as I have learned, theres not really a word in Nepali to mean average or medium sized, in terms of weight. Here, you are either fat or thin. The response I told them was "Tik” which means “ok.” It is not at all offending to call someone fat to their face (as I have learned…), or ask them about physical differences. I came down from my room the other day to a stranger sitting on the porch with my family, drinking tea and talking. I had never met her and when I sat down she just started at me. And stared. And kept on staring. Then, she proceeded to start a five minute monoluge analyzying all of my physical aspects. Her hair isn’t black. She is fat. Her face is red. Her eyebrows are good. Why is her face red. She has very white skin. I like her earrings. All the while, I am sitting there, fully comprehending every word coming out of her mouth and wanting to leave. So that’s what I did. I straight up jumped up, dumped my tea in the sink, and ran off into the cornfields (in retrospect not the best idea as that is where all the snakes live).

                Enough of my emotional ranting. As for good news, the map project is coming along fantastically, and the kids are so excited. We’ve been working on the grid method lately. To draw the map (ours is going to be 6 ft x 12 ft) on a wall, everything has to be accurate and proportional. To do this, we use a grid. You divide the world into 18 sections and draw the map section by section, square by square. I printed out worksheets for the kids to practice drawing things larger while still keeping proportions the same. Over the past 2 weeks they’ve started from drawing a rabbit to a small section of the Alaskan coastline to six countries in South America, and a couple of days ago we “broke ground” so to speak, and started to physically draw on the school wall! I very much underestimated how painstakingly slow it would be to draw a 6x12 foot map into 6.5cm squares. Also we drew all of these lines with a 12 inch ruler. I supervised 2 groups of kids drawing grid lines who worked on either end of the map, and not surprisingly, the lines didn’t meet up in the middle. Problem.  The lines appeared straight, but over the course of 12 feet the lines deviated from each other. Also because the Hindu gods love me, school is now on a 40 day summer vacation so map progress is halted for the time being. BUT, the good thing is that the school finally realizes what I am doing. I think. The teachers all kept coming by and staring and the vice principal even got up and helped me brainstorm a new idea to draw the gridlines once school is back in session. I think once they physically saw the grid on the wall they understood how the students would go about drawing the map.

After my latest teaching session I stopped by a lady’s house who is in my agriculture group and I showed her all my materials and my plan for the map. I cant even explain how nice it was to hear from her that she thought what I was doing was great because it involved art and geography, something the kids don’t really learn a lot about in school. Tiny comments like that can lift me up for days on end.

My agriculture group is making a hot pepper nursery bed this upcoming week, and in 3 weeks when the seedlings are large enough, we’re going to transplant them to a larger area and I am going to give my training on micro-irrigation. I’m really crossing my fingers for no rain, as we haven’t had a meeting in 2 weeks due to monsoon. I couldn’t leave my house for 3 days straight as it rained so hard (going to the bathroom also sucked as it involved putting on a rainjacket to make a mad dash across the slippery courtyard and up the mud stairs to the toilet). The road from my village to the main paved road is completely washed out. There were 3 different landslides and a massive tree is blocking all passage on the road, so only motorcycles are able to get to town. The Terai, which is the southern part of Nepal that borders India, has had massive flooding and whole towns and houses were completely swept away in the rivers. I can see the Kali Gandaki from my house (the river near me) and thank gosh I live uphill from it. Its so swollen and muddy and I can see its already overtaken some residences alongside its banks. Last week I watched 5 TED talks, 2 full-length documentaries, and The Hobbit in one day. Monsoon season really needs to end if any productivity is going to happen.. However, the rains have also brought a proliferation of mangos on the tree outside my house, as well are these small fruits called litchis which I eat by the dozen. The corn fields are all above my head now, and we had roasted corn the other night for dinner. I didn’t even know how to control myself since we weren’t eating rice. Then I ate 5 ears of corn in a row and soon found out that does nothing good for the intestinal tract.