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.