The upcoming elections are causing problems. Not just for
me, but for everybody. The politics are extremely complicated and I don’t really
understand it that well but the skinny of it is that Nepal has no constitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Nepal
explains this better than I can.
These elections (to take place on November 19) will
hopefully give the country a shot at developing a constitution for themselves.
Although how Nepal will all of a sudden elect a leader and develop this within
the next couple years is beyond me. Moving on….I believe in other blogs I have
mentioned that Nepal loves its bandhs. For those that forget, these are
transportation strikes that can shut down certain roads/areas of the country or
the entire country. Well for the elections, there are TEN DAYS of entire
country wide bandhs. This literally means no transportation. At all. No
buses, cars ,motorcycles, rickshaws, pony-carts, nuthin. From November 11-21st,
the entire country is essentially shut down. This also means that all Nepal PC
volunteers are on standfast, which basically means don’t leave village (not
that we would have any way of getting anywhere anyways) and that all other PC
country travel to Nepal is restricted. Additionally I might have mentioned in
my last blog that my parents were supposed to come to Nepal right smack dab in
the middle of the elctions? That’s right, they were supposed to arrive
in country on November 15th, a day when no transportation is running
and I had no way of meeting them anywhere, unless I wanted to walk to Pokhara,
which I guess would take me 3 solid days. Thank the lord almighty they changed
their travel plans but I had a sad 3 couple days where I thought I wouldn’t see
them until March. I guess it sounds a little ridiculous looking back, but I had
my heart set on seeing them middle of November
and then to all of a sudden have their entire trip cancelled was just
really sad. Its still going to be extremely iffy, as they are now coming on the
22nd, the day after the bandhs are finished. Hopefully.
Otherwise I need to rent a horse or something and get my self to Pokhara
somehow. I got off my bus from Pokhara the other day into a 400 person Maoist
rally in my bazaar town and the police are everywhere. Its gunna get a little
rowdy in the larger towns I think. Additionally, the new volunteers are
supposed to get sworn in during elections, so Peace Corps has been working
around that as well.
Other things I’ve been doing at site: Map names are all
done! Somehow we missed 5 countries in the process of painting so we had to go
back today and add those and tomorrow we will write those names. Its almost
doneeeeee. Need to border the whole thing and then paint a clear finish on top
to set it all.
My cat came back! Biraalo is now around 4 months old I think
but he’s super friendly and now I have a little cuddle buddy. I tried to find
him cat food in Pokhara last time I went but had no success, so he eats a lot
of milk and roti and daal bhat and the occasional spider. He actually somehow
climbed up into my ceiling the other day and ate a dead rat, so hes being
useful and I haven’t heard the rats since.
My neighbor had her baby! He just got named today. In Nepali
culture the baby doesn’t have a name for the first 11 days and on the 11th
day it receives a name, usually from an elder in the community. They named him
Pranjul (which kind of reminds me of pringle). Hes adorable though and I’ve
spent a lot of time recently at my neighbors house holding him. We had him at
our house last night to rub cooking oil all over him….Apparently this makes the
baby strong and a hard worker later in life. So baby got covered in cooking
oil. They had a puja for the baby naming ceremony and we had snacks afterward:
some goat meat and a vegetable dish. I swear to god if I had known the sorts of
meat/meat parts I would in eat in Nepal a year ago, I wouldn’t have believed
it. Well mostly I eat the meat because I have very little protein in my diet
but sometimes I actually really like it.
Other random things: Got offered a whole pineapple on my run the
other day. Allergies are still out of control, accidentally took a nighttime
cold medicine this morning, so was out of commission for a couple hours.
Watched part of Pirates of Caribbean on my Nepali TV the other day which was a
nice treat. Started a small oil fire in my kitchen the other day and almost
blew it up. I fell backwards off my tiny wooden stool which was good otherwise
I think my face would have gotten blown off.
Happy Halloween!
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| Biraalo and I |
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| Just climbing into my ceiling |
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| Aamaa and biraalo take a nap |
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| Cooking oil covered baby! |
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| Baby Pranjul and I in my kitchen |
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| tail end of saarpa! |
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| ....and we have names! |
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