Nepal Adventure - Purple Paint, Children and Flowers

Nepal Adventure Day 13 - Purple Paint, a Trip to the Stone Age and Flowers

The sun seems to beam into the room straight from the mountains this morning. Bright and early. That's one thing this trip, we are certainly living with the sunlight. Early to bed and early to rise. Not a lot of distractions to keep you from listening to your rhythms.

After breaking our fast with fried eggs and roti bread the kids and I squeeze into Durga's truck, grown ups in the front and kids in the back. Randall is going to spend the day alone recovering. We are off to help out in the First Steps Himalaya classrooms.

I've mentioned before the school system in Nepal is really a new concept here, only starting in the 1950's, so you can imagine it is in it's infancy. The first school that we stop at briefly is a state school and recently the  Germans have built some sturdy classroom blocks. They have provided a big clean school building for the students to attend, but as with all the schools in Nepal the teachers are either lacking or inept. 

First Steps Himalaya, Fionna and Durga's grassroots charity, is all about the teacher education. As with most of the schools that they have approached they have started in this school by starting up a preschool classroom. The deal with the school is that FSH provide the trained teacher, the materials and in some cases clean up and paint the school rooms and the school takes on board the more modern teaching practices. (Standard practice is still the cane, shouting and rote learning.)

               

We don't stay long here as there are a few children who are quite scared of the blue eyed blond people, with one hiding and crying over these scary monsters suddenly appearing in her life. 

                              

So we are off to stop in the larger town nearby to buy paint for the classroom that FSH is opening up at one of the other schools. Our mission for the day is to clean the room up and get it ready for the class to move in to. 

The town is busy with the people getting ready for their day. The paint shop is dead in middle of the town. We park and haggle for a while about what color to get. In the end the girls talk us into purple.
                                      

As we wait for the paint to get mixed we wander around the town. Gone are the touristy shops selling singing bowls and souvenirs. Here is the nitty gritty of life. An alleyway blocked up with chicken wire and filled with white chickens, stalls selling fly covered sweets, some shops with clothing and fabric, and a couple of jack of all trade shops. The staring is intense. We are well off the beaten tourist track so the paint shop gets quite full with the bolder curios by-passers.

Armed with our cans of purple paint we throw the kids into the back of the truck and head off to the school. We are greeted by the headmaster and the new preschool teacher. And straight into it we get. First it's a matter of taking out the old matts, we find a scorpion and heaps of spiders. Luckily my manly son saves me from any of the creepy crawlies. The filth is appalling. 

As the day goes on we get the classroom cleaned up and ready to go. And it's time to get the paint ready and let the kids go for it. They do a fabulous job painting the walls. Rolling out the purple walls certainly takes this cement block from dingy into somewhere you'd be happy to have a child come into. I'm so proud of our kids just rolling up their sleeves and getting straight into it. I hope that someday they will look at the things they have, and the resources of their own schools and not just take it for granted. 

Some of the materials that we brought with us from Kathmandu, and that our friends back in New Zealand sponsored, will be sorted out and used to get this classroom up and running. I'm sure the little people going in here will feel the love, rather than feel as though they are just small inmates being shouted at. 

Pretty soon there is nothing left to do and we leave as the school children stream out of the school and head home for their lunchtime meals.

We stop at a little hole in the wall family place - I hesitate to say restaurant - for lunch. They provide us with several big plates of momo's - the traditional dumpling-like food that many families eat here. These particular ones are filled with a super spicy onion mix that gags us all! Luckily I spy a couple of cokes and buy those to keep the troops going. The kids think that I've grown two heads allowing them to share a coke. But at least it's not spicy and it's safer than anything that might have come into contact with the water here! 

Hiking into the countryside in search of our next school

And we are on to the next project. This one is in a dramatically rural area. We drive down a one laned dirt road and through rice fields for ages before finally stopping at a mud house. This house belongs to an elderly lady in the village who has taken a couple of orphan children into her care. These children are sponsored by FSH and Fiona and Durga are here to bring school clothes and books for these children. The lady who lives as basically as the poorest of our ancient ancestors live invites us in to see her house. The ground floor is a large room that houses her animals in the cold of the winter and up the dark wooden ladder to the earthen floored upper story where the family live. It's striking that she is living like the Vikings would have lived 2,000 years ago.

Mainstream students trying to make the most of their school time, even without a teacher.

Liana creating a little fun in the FSH preschool classroom

From her house we walk down through the rice fields to finally reach the village school. This, being a poor village and in the remotest part of Nepal as well has a hard time finding teachers, let alone quality teachers. When we arrive there are eight classrooms filled up with grubby children. Only two teachers total can be found in attendance. At the far end of the block is a little FSH classroom that has been started recently. We let the kids decorate their room and Juliet has a ball entertaining some of these small children teaching them how to put together a puzzle that we have brought with us from a friend in New Zealand. Liana  in particular gets very involved in the painting. While Jaimie and Liam roam about the school checking it out. I follow suit (my artistic skills are pretty minimal to say the least) and am really quite shocked at the state of the school. What is the point of these older children attending so called school if there are no books, no teachers with ridiculously poor hygiene? 

I do get that it is a culture in transition, leaving it's basic traditional life behind and wanting to start keeping up on a more global scale. Education is the natural step, but for us, watching from the outside it can be frustrating to watch the baby steps.

And finally it's time to head back to our lodgings and our awaiting dinner of Dal Baht. It takes us quite a few hours of winding single lane roads to get back to Gyan's house, but we are welcomed with Sumi's smiling happy face! The girls race off with her to play with the baby goats and pick berries. They arrive home with tales of Sumi's grandmother, goat stories and covered in dirt. It's all good. They have been adopted as members of the family.

Back at Gyan's House resting after a long day at the schools....

During dinner a large group of army officers stop by. At first Randall and I exchange worried looks. Not too ago Nepal was gripped in a bloody and awful civil war between the Maoists and the Government for ten years. The peace is now kept by the military and these road gangs of military men are common. But it's our first encounter with them. They soon settle in and are drinking tea with us as if nothing was amiss. It turns out that one of them is related to Gyan's wife and this is a fairly regular occurrence. Sigh of relief.

So, it's been a busy and enlightening day. I've enjoyed every moment of it (apart from the spicy momo's) and look forward to what tomorrow will bring. I'm so very happy to know that my wonderful husband is upright and on the mend. 

With the taste of Dal in my mouth I'm writing this in the dark (no electricity of course) listening to the night sounds. Far in the distance I can see the lighting playing along the mountain tops. I feel a million miles from my snug home in New Zealand, but also feel very much at home burrowed into my sleeping bag in this little throw back to the way the world used to be.

Goodnight!