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!

I don't know how to describe what I saw tonight.

We walked around the city at night to meet some street kids. These little children come in from the villages around Kathmandu and live on the street. They collect rags for money and beg as well. 1 in 10 of them has AIDS. They form gangs to survive, and are often beaten or raped by the older members. All of these kids are addicted to sniffing glue.

We were walking along the street when we ran into Nikel. Voni, our madrich, knew him from before. He was a street kid who had cleaned himself up, gone home, only to return to Kathmandu again. We found him rummaging through the trash, looking for wood to stoke the fire he and some of his friends has built. We walked over to the find and found a group of 10 young boys- they were roasting leftover chicken they had found on the street. They were all filthy and thin. I took out a first aid kit and I started bandaging some minor scrapes. Many of them had razor cuts on their arms and legs, signs of their beatings. Several of them had open wounds. One boy, showed me a cut. "What's your name," I asked him. "Timis," he said with a smile. "How old are you?" "Thirteen," he said. He looked like he was seven. We sang songs together and when I finished cleaning up his major cut he pointed at a little scab. "Here also!' he said. I put a band aid on that one too. He found another tiny scar "And here! Here!" This went on for a while- he was so pitifully desperate for human contact, desperate to be touched. I looked back over at him a few minutes later while I was bandaging another child. He had his face stuck in a bag. At first I thought he was hyperventilating. Then I realized- he was sniffing glue. He saw me looking at him and quickly stuffed the bag in his shirt. He was embarrassed.

I noticed then, how could I not see it before, all these kids were clutching plastic bags. Some had them stuck into their ragged shirts, others held bags in their dirty hands. From time to time they would put their little faces in them and draw deep breaths.

To see a child getting high. There are no words.

Voni told us before how the glue messes with their brains. In particular it affects motor coordination. I tried playing a hand game with one child. Clap right, clap left. Two hands together. The kid couldn't get it. His hands wouldn't move. He kept on stumbling.

We walked to a street children drop in center. Ten little faces peeked out from under covers, looking at us. Here was a place where street kids came to get fed and find a place to sleep ( on the floor actually). The worker there told us stories of children coming in so high they didn't know who they were or where they were. Many of them came from homes where they were beaten. Some had no parents. They looked so innocent. Ten little faces- peeking out. But all of them were stoned.

We continued walking and met a kid sitting on a street corner. He called out to me, high out of his mind. He could barely speak.His name was Sunjar. His friend came to join us. He tried to tell me his girlfriend's name was Malaa too( that's my Nepali name) but his words were so slurred I had trouble understanding him. "Why are you doing glue," Voni asked Sunjar. "It's going to mess with your brain." "It was already messed up from before," Sunjar answered, laughing. He tried to shake me hand goodbye but he couldn't quite get it.

I tried to describe what I saw tonight, but I don't think this did it justice. There aren't any great solutions, these children chose to be on the street, life in the villages doesn't seem better to them. TBT used to work with them and chose to focus its energies on the root of the problem- making the villages better places so kids don't run to Kathmandu and become addicts. I know all this.

But still.

They were so little.

Lots to process.

Sunday we visited one of our volunteer sites, a slum in the Kathmandu called Kalamti. We walked into a daycare center (which also functions as a community center) and were greeted with flowers, tika, and bananas. Sitting there, looking at the cheery blue walls, painted with colorful, smiling animals it was easy to forget exactly where we were. And then we heard the stories.

About the three year olds that have shown up to daycare drunk.About the bruises that these kids come in with. About the intoxicated fathers that come to pick them up. About how the children have to be taught that they can't go to the bathroom on the floor. About how this slum is full of migrant workers and there's no sense of unity, or community.

We went from there to a high school TBT works with.The school is compiled of seven rooms. For four hundred students. They have to come in shifts. All of the kids work as child laborers at restaurants, at markets, as domestic helpers before or after school.The ground in Kalamti is made up of garbage. The school is surrounded by trash. It's everywhere, stinking, in piles and piles. What does that do for a person's self worth, to live their life in garbage?

We also heard about the amazing things TBT has done. How the daycare kids have doubled their weight. How many of them have continued on to get a primary school education. How the teens work in a theater program, in a youth movement. How TBT has set up a women's group, literacy classes, medical care, home visits, a micro finance plan. How they're slowly but surely building a sustainable community, a strong support system.

Yesterday we went to another one of the volunteer sites, Mahader Bessi, located two hours outside of Kathmandu. More flowers, more tika. (The first time you get tika it's cute, but by the fourth time it's kinda annoying....) One of the communities is a small village. TBT has done amazing things there, they have a farm and a fishing pond as well as a women's group and youth movement. The other community is in a stone quarry. It's comprised of haphazard shacks and tents on the river. The people there are the poorest of the poor. The men gather rocks from the river and the women work all day smashing them into bits to be used for gravel. By all day I mean from 3 am to 9 pm. One of the saddest moments was when they told us they were excited to learn things from us and we said "We want to learn from you too." One of the women said "What, how to break stones?" All of them laughed. It wasn't funny though.

Here's a great link on this community

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcOx-utExlI

After, we went to visit the school in Mahader Bessi. We walked around the classrooms. They were packed with children, crammed into little rooms. Half of the classes didn't have teachers. I looked at an English poster, proudly hanging on the wall, full of spelling and grammatical errors. I walked into a classroom of three year olds, sitting on the floor, methodically repeating the alphabet, over and over and over. Anytime a child moved, the teacher reprimanded or lightly slapped him or her.( When asked "What is education about?" in Nepal, the vast majority of teachers answered "Discipline.") When I was three I was running outside, playing on the swings, and doing art projects.

After that we met one of the youth club groups. These teenage girls were amazing. They were so excited to meet us. They told us about their aspirations to help their communities, to be doctors, bank owners, and social workers. They begged us to come help fulfill their dreams.

Back at the house, we had a discussion, reflecting on the past few days. Many people expressed their hopelessness, others seemed motivated by what they had seen.

I'm not sure what I think.I have to chose a location to volunteer at by Thursday.

We'll see....

What a packed, tough week.

On Monday, we split into groups to go on a 'Poverty Tour.' We scoured out some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city to get a sense of how people here live. I saw some really heartbreaking things- three generations of women, starved and dirty,walking along the side of the road, each of them bent over, struggling under heavy loads. We walked through the riverbank slums and saw families living in makeshift tents, washing their laundry in the polluted river, playing in the mud, scrounging around for something to eat. All this was sharply contrasted by several large mansions close by, gated in by ornate walls, blocking out the dirt and the poverty and the pain of the surrounding people.

How do we live in such a world?

Wednesday was less intense,we hiked up to a beautiful Buddhist monastery overlooking the city. We wandered around the peaceful grounds, led by Tashi, a very sweet 13 year old Tibetan monk. He showed us their meditation area, main temple, and answered many of our questions about his life and religion. Did you know that Buddhists believe if you have good karma, when you die, you're able to chose between going to heaven or becoming a reincarnation of someone else? (What fascinated me about that is (in contrast to other religions) it implies that the next world is not necessarily better than this world)

We also had many, many lectures about the current (terrible) state in Nepal. Just some facts and figures to orient you.(note- statistics vary, the lack of government control, or government at all makes it very difficult to gauge things properly)

Nepal

40% of people live on less than a dollar a day

infant mortality rate - 62/1000

maternal mortality rate - 780/100000

There are 26 million people in Nepal and only 1300 doctors

There are 4 hospital beds for every 10,000 people

Only 60% of the country has access to sanitation

Life expectancy (depending on area) ranges from 40-60

Literacy Rates- women 34%, men 62 (The Dalit-lowest- caste has a 24% literacy rate)

There is no special education system whatsoever in Nepal

Last night we all took some time to recover, and the top floor of the house hosted a party. It was a little disorienting to relax on the roof, under the stars and (full) moon and play games after the week we've been through. But mostly, it was just very nice.

Shabbat Shalom!

Return of Sanjay!

Walked 40 minutes to Chabad in the pouring rain for lunch. Ate with some TBT friends and a thousand Israelis.

During lunch an older Australian man named Bernie got up and started talking about how he wound up at Chabad. Apparently, he was wandering around the streets of Kathmandu on Friday (his first day in the country), lost, when a young Nepali man kindly showed him the way. As Bernie and this guy were walking, they struck up a conversation. He discovered this friendly young man was originally from India. And is now in art school. And works as a shoe shiner. And has three siblings. And lives in a slum(Is this sounding familiar yet???). After Bernie was finished I asked him if he remembered the guy's name. "Hmm, something with an S," he said, thinking. "Sanjay?" I asked.

"Yes, yes! Sanjay, that's it!" he replied, excitedly. "Umm, did you by any chance buy him groceries for his family?" "I did," he said, smiling (seemingly proud of his kindness). "Do you know him?" I didn't have the heart to tell him what had almost definitely happened. "Oh, I just met him and he showed me around as well," I replied.

He didn't need to know the real Sanjay story!