3, or is it 30, Cups of Tea

Sorry for the lull in my blog, but all of a sudden things are picking up speed here… I have recently discovered that my duhdchiiya (milk tea) intake increases proportionally with my stress level, and these days I’m drinking 10+ cups a day.

Today is Friday – and in a few hours we have a pretty substantial paper due on a development topic of our choice. Rather than work any more on mine I will have more fun, and write this. My paper focused on Nepal’s education system, which is perhaps the country’s most glaring developmental weakness and a very interesting topic to spend some time examining, especially after being educated in the states. I ended up conducting a few interviews – one with the director of Rata Bangala, one of Nepal’s most well respected boarding schools, and one with a Harvard educated Nepali man who is the director of the Open Learning Exchange NGO that is currently working in conjunction with the One Laptop Per Child initiative that I’m sure many of you are familiar with. Interesting paper, but I’m glad to be done.

SO, the reason my tea intake has been through the roof was partially this paper, partially our huge language exam on Monday, but also our trip to Jomsom! We were planning on leaving on Sunday for a two week trip to northern Nepal, (in the Annapurnas, not far from Tibet) but because of a huge bhand (strike) that is supposed to go into effect on Sunday, we are leaving a day earlier, which means we have to get a lot of stuff in order even sooner. The scary thing is, when we get back from our trip we just have one week in the city during which we have to do all our final exams and get everything together for our ISP projects – AND, it’s also our last week with our home stay families, so everything has gotten super hectic. AND, since I’m still a little unclear about what my ISP is going to look like, I’m a bit more frantic than most. But, as they say in Nepal, “ke garne?” (rough translation – What to do?) But anyway, I am so excited about the two week getaway. We will take a bus to Pokhara, which is almost directly west, and stay there for a couple days before flying to Jomsom – just a 15 plane ride through the pass, and then a five hour hike later we will arrive in a village where we will stay with one other SITer in village families for seven days. After the week long rural homestay we can trek out of the mountains and get back to Pokhara in four days, so we can do it however we like. I cannot wait. I think, as of now, I will be trekking out on part of the Jomsom Trek that you can read about in guide books, and will hopefully be able to go up Poon Hill in the morning (with about 800 other tourists). After seeing photos from when my Aunt Liz hiked it, it doesn’t seem like a place I should miss.

Ok, other fun things that have gone on: FIRST, Holi is finally over, which means that I no longer get pelted with water balloons every time I step outside, I no longer panic everytime a school bus passes, I no longer have to scan the rooftops before stepping beneath buildings and I no longer think that every shadow, whether it be from a bird or butterfly is a water balloon headed my way. Tuesday, which was the actual holiday of Holi was actually a really great day. We didn’t have school, and by 8:30 am, (after my amma came into my room and told me I was an alchii chora or “lazy child”) I was on the roof pelting people with water balloons and/or simply emptying buckets of water on people who passed below our house. At around 11:00 a bunch of my friends from SIT came to the house and we had a giant water balloon fight and covered each other in brightly colored powders – it has been four or five days now and my face is still slightly yellow from all the toxic dyes that have seeped into my skin. You can’t really understand how crazy the holiday is until you see pictures!

Aside from Holi I have been pretty consumed by work, we had another language exam on Monday, and I feel like I’m able to converse pretty well now. I have grown to love my family – we spend many electricity-less evenings sitting in bed under the giant Nepali blankets that I have become obsessed with (I’m plotting how I’m going to get one home – they are suuuper heavy and wonderful) and just chat. On the worst nights I am commanded to sing – last night I did solo performances of “My Heart Will Go On,” and, my brothers favorite, “Dangerous” by Akon. Even though I think I have, quite possibly, the worst voice in the history of the world, they eat it up. My sister has become very fond of Nacho (my stuffed elephant, for those of you that don’t know him) and I’m concerned that I may have to keep a close eye on him, as she has a knack for acquiring things of mine that she likes. I’m still in the process of getting my favorite t-shirt back. Normally I would let her have it, but that t-shirt accounts for roughly one-third of the shirts that I have. My Amma continues to awkwardly corner for me for one-on-one sessions that slowly turn into huge misunderstandings. I learned that she and my father had a love marriage, which is pretty rare, but she was 16 at the time! She then asked about my real family and I said that my parents had been married for 25 years and that they were 55, but it’s unclear to me whether she heard that, or that my parents were 25 and had been married for 55 years. As always, communication here is pretty questionable. OH! I had my first taste of chicken at home a few days ago – I made a point to re-emphasize how much I enjoyed it as I’m hoping maybe goat can be erased from the menu. However, at this point we have just one week left with the fam…. Also, I keep forgetting to mention, for my Mom’s sake, that badminton is a BIG deal here – everyone plays it and it’s super intense, I tend to see people playing a lot on my way to school in the morning and I keep thinking I need to tell you Mom that with your badminton background, you would be sooo cool in Nepal.

A few nights ago some friends and I ate dinner at Boudhina, the huge Buddhist stupa in the Boudha, the Buddhist area in the city. Kathmandu is such an early-to-bed city that I have rarely been out at night – so it was really fun. The Stupa is such an amazing place – the Buddhists who come walk around it, clockwise, spinning the prayer wheels and it’s impossible not to get pulled into the rhythm of it. Everywhere people are lighting butter candles, and it’s almost silent aside for the incessant people hawking Tiger Balm. It’s a very powerful place, and it was one of my favorite nights in the city.

Goodbye for now. My next post will likely be in a few weeks when we get back from Jomsom, as we definitely will not have Internet access while we are there. I hope you got to see the few photos I was able to upload, sadly that will probably be all I can put up as it takes a ridiculous amount of time for them to load.

Interesting Article

There is an interesting article on the bbc website that you should check out.

Many of the women in our program who are staying with Hindu families, including myself, have dealt with much milder versions of this "confinement" that the article discusses.

Thanks for the Letters!!!

So first of all I need to thank Lauren, Alex, Sam, Ahni and Alicia for making me look like the cool kid on mail day. Four letters really brightened my day that, prior to that had been dominated by digestive problems… ☺

No real exciting news to relay…I have now developed perfect timing with three school buses on my way to school in the morning and have yet to make it to school yet without being pelted/soaked by water balloons. Luckily, though, the festival culminates on Tuesday with one final crazy water balloon, vermilion, rock, tomato, and potato throwing day. We don’t have class and my brothers have recommended that I “do not go outside on Holy.” Fair enough as I really don’t have enough clothes in Nepal to destroy any of them.

Monday I did the evening puja – or worship ceremony – at our house as my brothers were not home, my mom has her period and I’m older than my sister. It was pretty interesting and involved lighting various things on fire, lighting incense, scattering rice, making offers of fruits and then ringing the bell. It really made me feel like a part of the family, but at the same time was sort of uncomfortable because it is such a spiritual act.

Yesterday instead of Nepali language class we cooked Nepali food. My group was in charge of making roti – which are like thicker tortillas – and curried vegetables. Today we had to present our recipe in Nepali and somehow my group managed to say that we “cooked lots of people,” in our defense the words for people and vegetables are very similar. My sister also taught me to make ramen last night – clearly she was under the impression that I have never cooked in my life. I had to feign interest as she added ramen noodles to boiling water.

On a sad note, our academic director left yesterday to return to his SIT program in India and a new AD has stepped in. This is a transition year for the SIT Nepal program, so Azim was here for the first month settling us in and now a man named Bill from the US has replaced him. Azim was really great and provided us with a perfect introduction to south asian culture, and we are all so sad to see him go, however, at the same time Bill has a long history in Nepal working with the community forests and knows so much about resource conservation and management we are all excited for him to begin as well.

Load shedding here is up to 20 hours so we spend lots of time doing homework by candlelight and it’s pretty difficult to use the computer since it’s hard to charge them. We have a generator at the SIT house but it’s rarely run. Most stores here have generators so they are able to keep their shops open, or they use candles. The restaurant we ate at last night just had candlelight.

Ok, work time.

Photos

I have been able to upload a few photos!!!

Dhulikhel

Last night I got back from a two day adventure to Dhulikhel, a small Newari village located 30 km north east of the city. Six of us left after classes ended Friday afternoon and took a taxi (which is the size of like a hatch back Toyota) out of the valley. Somehow we all jammed into it, and we were ceremonially pelted with water balloons – yes, the color festival is still going down – on our way out of the city. We stayed in a very nice, but very cheap guesthouse that looked out to the valley opposite of the Kathmandu Valley and the Himalayas – when they decided to poke through the smog. They are just so overwhelmingly huge – we were at like 6,000 feet, and it looked like they were floating. We enjoyed some Nepali festivities on Friday night and then on Saturday we ended up doing a seven-hour, 12ish mile hike. We first hiked up along some dirt roads, through a bunch of villages to a Buddhist monastery situated high on a hill with stunning views of the hills, valleys and Himalayas. As we sat beneath the prayer flaps flapping thinly in the wind, I realized that that was the Nepal I pictured when I signed up. I thought little about the city, and the madness that is Kathmandu and more about those moments when you are sitting high above the world, hearing monks chanting and looking into the deep river gorges and terraced wheat fields and thinking that everything makes sense. I could have stayed there all day, or all week. The hike down through the valley was equally amazing though. We cut through fields and through small villages, relying entirely on people to guide us back to Dhulikel. We stopped and spoke with an old man who offered to let us all stay with him and who was absolutely beside himself that we could communicate with him in Nepali. We returned to Kathmandu Sunday afternoon, absolutely exhausted on another crazy bus. I got back just in time to watch the Grand Finale of Indian Idol on TV with my family. Apparently the city adjusted load shedding so that the majority of the city would have power at 8:30 when it came on. Thank God. The load shedding is actually increasing now so that we only have four hours a day of potential power, sometimes there is none and sometimes there is four. Not much else to report, I could write pages about our escape from the city, but I will spare you all. To leave things on an amusing note, I met up with a friend to walk to school today and on the way, distracted by a bus with a crazy melodic horn stepped in the largest pile of cow poop we have ever seen, wearing only sandals. We then walked 20 minutes to school – great way to start the day. And, tomorrow we are going to have nepali food cooking class rather than language class, but as our head language teacher likes to say, “it’s just not fun,” we also have to write the directions out in the script. Tough.