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 :)