I think I might just be the next Prime Minister of Nepal.

So, I was sick two weeks ago and that made working really difficult. It's hard enough to be sick but to be sick in a foreign country with no running water, (and no chicken soup, not to mention no mother!) is even harder.

I think I made up for it this past week, I was busy working all day from early morning till evening. I worked with our teenage girls group, ran two stone quarry children activities, and observed a whole bunch of classes in order to assess which kids might be a good fit for the resource room.

First of all, I sat in on a class with 84 students and one teacher (12 more students were absent). Id like to say that's an anomaly but the other classes I saw had similar amounts of students. Also, the teacher was (ostensibly) teaching English, yet she couldn't hold a conversation with me. Thirdly, when I asked her about the lowest students in her class academically she had them stand up in front of everyone and say their names.

Forget about the teacher, the textbook was even worse. There were several typos, many grammatical errors, and vocabulary that was totally inappropriate for the grade level (why do third graders, who can barely read and write need to know the words 'subspecies, 'predators,' and 'devoid?')

Still, I think I now have a rough picture of what I want the resource room to look like, and I have a general idea of which students I'll be working with. Hopefully, this week things will actually get off the ground.

As for the other projects- a main focus of the girls' group is capacity and confidence building. These girls (who are all beautiful by the way) don't go to school- most of them are now learning how to read with a literacy class sponsored by TBT. The cultural differences are overwhelming- Reut and I planned a lesson on public speaking and the topics we assigned them were as follows: working in the fields, cooking daal bat, washing laundry, and cleaning the cow shed. The truth is, thats all they're comfortable speaking about- those are their daily routines. Mah La'asot?

So as for me taking over as Prime Minister- yesterday I met with the Minister of Disability Education in Nepal (that's a rough assessment of his title).Basically, this man, nice as he doesn't seem to actually do anything. He did, however, invite me to join him on a special tour on Monday and mentioned the possibility of working with him to plan a 6 day seminar on inclusive education for teachers around the country. It's all very overwhelming and I think I'm both disheartened at what is yet excited about the prospects of what can be.

Nireh....

One last story of course. Yesterday I was in the TBT office waiting for Yotam (an amazing tzevet member) to come with me to the aforementioned meeting. Yotam walked into the office with a young Nepali women in tow and told me to wait one minute, he had a crisis on hand.In short, this woman had stopped Yotam outside the office asking him if he knew of a place that needed a housekeeper. She was so insistent and looked so miskena that Yotam probed a little deeper and found out the following: She had just run away from her village because her husband a. beat her and b. married another woman. Now, she was now wandering around Kathmandu, looking for work, with no place to go and 40 rupees in her pocket (less than 50 cents). Yotam brought her into the office and basically set her up with a shelter for that night, some money and the name of an organization to go to the following day.

I spoke to Yotam about her for a little bit and we discussed how hard it was to know when to believe people or not. (In his opinion, which I sincerely trust, she looked to be in shock, and he believed her). At the end of the day though, how many individual people are there like that- especially in a country like this? And can you help each and every one of them? Are there limits to helping others?

P.S. Hi to the T-baums.

P.P.S. On the way to Kathmandu from Mahadev Bessi our bus hit another vehicle coming around a bend. The driver stopped, a passenger got out, and reported that although the other bus was dented everyone was alive. So the driver beckoned to him to hop back on and we continued on our merry way.

Village Life

So I live in a mud hut. It's a nice mud hut though, but before I describe it let me backtrack to how exactly I got there.

Our group left Kathmandu on Monday morning and arrived in Mahader Bessi. The town is basically a strip of stores along the one main road in Nepal. We work in the school in town and then also in two other communities- the Rei community, which is a (prehistoric) village15 minutes up from town. We also work in the stone quarry community which lies below MB, along the river.

So we trek up to our house (it's right outside of the Rei village) only to find another family living in our house. That's fun. We sort things out, the family moves into the storage room for the next ten days (ten days being a unit of time in Nepal that means "at some future point," and settle into our new home.

Slash hut.

Mud hut.

It's actually not so bad if you don't mind the bugs and spiders and mice and dirt. I'm getting used to all that surprisingly. Even the outhouse/toilet hole and the cowshed outside my window don't bother me so much. What's really hard though is to live without running water. Until we get our storage tanks filled (again, it'll happen in '10 days') if we need water for anything (drinking, washing dishes, showering, brushing teeth) we need to walk 15 minutes to the well and fill up our buckets. It's kind of a hard process. But the two (very manly) boys in my group built a shower aka cubicle to stand in. This is how you do it:

Walk to well. Fill bucket. Spill half the water walking back. Pour water into pot (spill more). Heat up water. Bring pot into shower cubicle (aka 4 tarps with a wooden stand). Soap yourself to the best of your ability and dump pot of water onto you. Realize that you need more water to be genuinely clean and contemplate going back to the well. Realize it will take too long.Decide to just suck it up, dry yourself off and pretend to be clean.

Cleanliness aside, it's really fun here. Challenging, but fun. This week we'll be meeting with our groups for the first time so that's when the hard work starts. I'll be running a youth group in the Rei and Stone Quarry communities, and English class for the teachers at school, and a leadership group for teens. Perhaps most importantly, I'm working on building an infrastructure for a resource room in the school and for special education in Nepal in general. (There is no concept of special education here at all. ) More on that later.

Gotta run because it's almost shabbat here. I'm in Pokara in the weekend with some other TBT friends.

P.S. The storage room family is amazing and they bring us food all the time. We talk to them in English which they don't speak. Last night our conversation went something like this.

Me: Namaste Ama

Her: Namasta Maya!

Me: How are you? How was your day?

Her: (She smiles and nods)

Me: Are you okay? Kasto cha?

Her: (She frowns and points to her stomach)

Me: Oh, it hurts? I'm so sorry to hear that! Do you want some medicine? Can I do anything for you?

Her: (she smiles and nods)

Me: I'll go get some Tylenol for you. Do you understand anything I'm saying?

Her: (smile and nod)

Me: Ama, did you know? Esti's going to the moon tomorrow night?

Her:(smile and nod)

Gotta love cultural communication :)

Lots to keep track of- it's hard to remember it all!

A bunch of us planned to spend Shabbat on a goat farm in Chitlong, a district outside of Kathmandu. Although we were told it was a challenging bike ride, four of us decided to give it a try. Friday morning, we rented mountain bikes in town and set out on the main road. Okay, 'challenging' was an understatement of the century. It was the hardest thing I've done in my life, physically speaking. The path was very steep, totally rocky, extremely dusty, and filled with ruts and ditches. We had to hike up a large part of it, which is no easy feat if you're shlepping a bike. And although the views were insanely beautiful, it was hard to keep my eyes open after seven hours of extreme biking.

It was worth it though- Shabbat on the farm was INCREDIBLE. The village was stunning, straight out of a picture book. The food was great (fresh goat cheese), and Shabbos day we walked to a beautiful lake (which we thought was nearby and turned out to be two hours away. lo nora). I won't go into details about our shady, drunken innkeeper (for my mother's sake) but suffice it to say we had some interesting times...

That's mainly it for the down time. We have a tough week ahead of us, full of training. I've been placed in Mahader Bessi, the stone quarry/village community. I'm really excited about it albeit slightly nervous as it has the reputation for being the toughest community with the worst accommodations. Also, it has a super high alcoholism rate. But, it does have the best lassi's (yogurt milkshake) in all of Nepal. (p.s. worst accomdations = no shower or running water)

I'm still figuring out what I'll be doing specifically but as of now I'm working on building a seminar on special needs education (for teachers) and also doing something with the youth here. It's all very overwhelming.

One last story to leave you with: Today we went to observe a classroom in a slum of the city. The teacher was (attempting) to teach plural and singular in English. To demonstrate, she wrote the words 'child' and 'children' on the board and then asked the students to practice making words plural in their workbooks. So this is what the students wrote:

Singular: Child Plural: Children

Donkey Donkdren

Mouse Mousedren

Welcome to the education in Nepal!