Phew it has been a busy month since i last posted! Actually
the busiest I’ve been in Nepal. I celebrated 2 major Nepali festivals (Teej and
Dashain) with my family, traveled to Kathmandu for my Mid-Service Conference
with all the other 199ers and then went back to Sindulpalchowk district for 8
days to give nursery bed training to the new volunteers! Also this is going to
be a very long post, sorry.
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| my favorite hajuraama and I during Teej |
I celebrated Teej with all the women in my family about a
month back. This included me getting
stuffed into a sari again and getting gawked at in town, but the dance program
we went to was fun to watch. The sari was actually seriously painful…theres so
much fabric, half of it is stuffed down your stomach. My sari was bejeweled
with little sequins all over that repeatedly rubbed against my stomach for a
solid 5 hours. Fun stuff. The second day of Teej there was a big puja in my village with all the women. Giving tika
and flowers and fruit and candles to the various Hindu gods allowed the women who
were married to pray for good marriage in the years to come, and for the
non-married girls to pray for a good husband.
Map news: The map is going fantastically, I’d say we’re
about three-quarters done with painting. Of course since all my paints together
cost around 10 dollars, they aren’t exactly the best quality. This has led to
some repainting of countries…the nice bright green color I imagined turned out
to be a pea green color, and the yellow I was given may or may not be 5+ years
old and is more like goldenrod. Alas, I’ve gotta deal with my limited budget,
because I don’t have money to buy a new yellow. I was able to attain some
funding from the local power company for this, so Im only using a little of my
own money for all the supplies.
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| almost done! |
The first day of painting, excuse
my language, but the first day was a real shitshow. We did all the red
countries first, and there was red paint everywhere. I mean literally everywhere.
In countries that aren’t red, on their desks, the floor, on their clothes. This
is after I covered the floor and desks with newspaper too. These kids, though
they are 11-12 years old, have never really colored or painted before. After a
child accidentally painted over all of the great lakes around Michigan, I had
to teach them all to color within the lines. I do have to realize though,
although I know where countries meet and where lakes might be, these
kids do not. They don’t recognize Michigan when they see Michigan. So its been
a learning process, especially for me. My tendency to be anal and a
perfectionist have been kicked out the door on this project. It’s the kids
project, not mine, so its not going to be 100% perfect, and its been good for
me to watch them make their own mistakes and not try and fix it right away. Oh
also, I forgot to mention: all the paint we use is oil-based…which means me and
my twelve 7th graders are dousing our hands in gasoline each day.
It’s the only thing that removes the paint. I cant get the smell off me. Some
kid accidentally spilled half the bottle on my pants the other day, while
another liter or so went directly into the nearby stream. I also ran out of
cups the second day because I thought we would be able to wash and re-use them.
Nope. The gasoline ate right through the flimsy tea cups I had bought. So I
emptied some of my medicine bottles from home, and we’re using those right now.
This is also definitely a lesson for me in resourcefulness.
Each subsequent day of painting has
gotten better and its not quite so messy anymore. The paint is restricted to
the wall for the most part and the school staff has been stopping by
periodically and saying how good it looks.
My agriculture group and I finally
installed our micro-irrigation the other day as well! I think I wrote a blog
back in freakin April about how I was going to give my training soon. Well fast
forward 6 months and the day finally came. The night before I was about to
clean all the tubes and filters and make sure everything worked properly,
except that I couldn’t find the kit anywhere. I finally asked my grandma and
she told me she gave it away cause she didn’t know what it was. Sheesh.
Thank god she only gave it to my
uncle, who is fortunately in my ag group, but geez oh man what if she had given
it away to some rando? It cost about 1800 Rs, which is a lot of money in Nepal.
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| installing micro-irrigation |
I’d say the training was more of a refresher
course for my ag group (some of them had been trained in it a couple years
back), but it still went well. It started out rough, as I arrived at my meeting
and my ag president informed me we didn’t have 80 seedlings to plant. So like
the adult I am, I sulked in the back for a solid 15 minutes because this was
seriously the third time my training had been put off. But then magically my
sister and another lady came running back with 80 cauliflower seedlings and we
got to work! I don’t think it was my perfect vision of how a training should go
but I’d say they learned something, and now we have 80 cauliflower seedlings
planted. I’ve been checking on it each day after working at the school and it
seems to be functioning normally so wahoooooo.
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I got yelled at for this (monkey temple in kathmandu)
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Finally attained my visa for India
(as those of you who have read my facebook updates this was quite a process)
right before my training started. Which was great timing, as PC now has my
passport to renew my Nepali visa for the upcoming year. Mid Service Training
was awesome…it wasn’t so much as a training as a reflection over the past year
and gearing up for the year ahead. They also put us in a swank hotel. My
roommate and I Voranan and I discovered American VH1 on the TV and proceeded to
spend most of our free time watching Miley Cyrus swing on a wrecking ball and
other weird music videos we have missed out on. During training, Peace Corps had us do an activity called
MyServicein6: we had to write about our past year in 6 words only. It was
really interesting see what everyone had to say. We also had an RPCV (returned
pcv) panel come and talk to us about their experiences. They had all finished
their service within the past 2 years or so and it was great to see how they
got to where they were today. Peace Corps also set up a “volunteer social” for
us with JICA, KOICA, and VSO, which are basically the Japanese, Korean, and
British versions of PC, respectively. We all got to mingle over French toast
(thank you hotel) and hear about what we were all doing in our sites and stuff.
It was good networking and I would love to partner with some of them in the
future.
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199ers and American staff at our Country Directors house for dinner!
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The morning after training I headed
up to Sindulpalchowk district with 2 other ag volunteers to give various
trainings to Group 200. It was a terribly nauseating ride because one of us
literally had to sit in the trunk area of the jeep at all times, and at one
point my friends entire container of Belgian nightcrawler worms fell all over
me but hey, it was free transportation. Over the next week I proceeded to teach
on the making of compost tea and how to construct 2 types of nursery beds. I
also got to see my old homestay family!!! It was so great. It was seriously
pure bliss up in Chautara and Chhap. I forgot how amazingly gorgeous it is up
there and how much I’ve missed mountains at my permanent site. I got to spend
some solo time walking around with my Ipod and just soaking in the scenery.
Also having all of Chhap tell me how good my Nepali was didn’t hurt either. It
was awesome to be able to communicate with my family and I spent 2 days with
them just hanging out. My sister gave me henna and I played with baby goats and
baby cows and ate saag, which is my favorite nepali vegetable, but it doesn’t
grow that well where I live now. I spent 1 night at my familys house but the
other time I was up at the training center with the staff hanging out and
helping out. I also was there for Group 200’s permanent site announcements!
They were so nervous and it reminded me exactly how I was over a year ago. It
was especially exciting because 4 of the new volunteers will get placed in our
districts. It was really fun to get to know them all over the course of the
week, and I’m sad that they are placed so far away! Most of their districts are
farther west than ours and there isn’t really a direct road that leads to them.
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Sunset in Chaap
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After training I had an unexpected
extra day in Kathmandu because all of the buses to Pokhara were full. Its full
on tourist season right now so Thamel and all the tourist areas of KTM are
extremely crowded. It was a day well spent though: I got a 14 dollar hour-long
massage and got to meet up with a friend from Nepal who went to Bucknell with
me! We actually didn’t know each other at school but we had a mutual friend in
common. It was fun to talk about
Bucknell and just random things about Nepal. And I got to eat a legitimate
Mexican quesadilla for dinner so yeah, good day.
I traveled from Kathmandu to my
site in 1 day which isn’t normally advisable because it is miserable but I had
to get back to celebrate Dashain with my family, the biggest Hindu holiday of
the year. I left KTM at 7am and got to my house at 6:30pm. Also something kept
biting me on the bus to Pokhara and so I had these massive itchy welts
everywhere and ended up having to take a Benadryl which didn’t go so well for
me later on. I switched buses in Pokhara and promptly passed out for 2 hours
and was extremely groggy the rest of the day. My fam was super excited to see
me when I got home (I had been gone 22 days!) so I kind of felt bad when I went
to bed at 8am but I couldn’t function that well. It reminded me of the time I
took Tylenol PM on an airplane on the way back from Nicaragua which was a
TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE. I felt like I was floating all over the place and just
needed to be horizontal.
I celebrated Dashain the past 2
days with my family here. Unfortunately it has been raining literally nonstop
for the past 2 days, so celebrations have been somewhat subdued. I wrote a
whole blog post last year about swinging on the giant swing in Chhaap over a
burning buffalo carcass but our ping isn’t even set up yet! Most of my extended family is here though, so
we all exchanged tikka and money. You only give tikka/money to people younger
than you, so little kids make bank during Dashain. We also played quite a bit
of card games and gambled with money, and in general just hung out. I spent about 4 hours this afternoon reading
in my sleeping bag, happy as a clam. Tihaar, the next huge Nepali holiday, is
in 2 weeks, so I’m kind of waiting for the festival season to be over to get
back to work on the map and other projects. The parents come in a month!
And now I will leave you with a
small snippet of a conversation with my grandma (aama) from earlier tonight:
Aama: My eye is burning, I think I
got hot pepper in it.
Me: Well did you have hot pepper on
your hands?
Aama: No, but it hurts.
Me: Go quickly and splash some
water in it.
Aama: I’m going to go put some
butter in it.
Me:…………………..
And then she went to the kitchen
and put straight butter in her eye.
-Alex
