Friday 17th, first day of the seminar, tea is served at 7. At 9 we have to eat daal bhaat (rice, lentils and lightly curried vegetables), after which we head for the school. The teachers are really great and very enthusiastic but their command of English is so poor I'm having trouble getting the pennies dropped! Besides, the teaching techniques are sooo new for them, sometimes they look at me with completely flabbergasted eyes and I have to repeat the task a hundred times...
Yet slowly but surely I get them all involved
The seminar takes place in a state school’s classroom with a corrugated iron roof, no window panes, just shutters and no electric lighting or sockets. Due to a bomb threat on the road, many teachers had to walk for miles to reach the school and they ask me to finish early for they will have to walk back to their villages as buses are not running. I also learn that Saturday is holiday in Nepal and they’re not coming to the seminar and could I please modify my schedule to fit theirs?
We round off the first session singing nursery rhymes and we’re all feeling happily worn out. After the devilishly spicy meal at school we go back to our host family, Almudena to play with the children and me to a well deserved chill out. The whole town seems to know why we are here and there’s no shortage of people willing to carry my bag, the heavy folder or simply keeping us company strolling along. They love Alma and they want to play with her and tease her and teach her Nepalese.
The communal loo’s reek is so pungent that Alma needs a lot of encouragement from mummy every time she has to face the music, there is no such a thing as toilet paper but a little jar that one is suppose to fill with water and, humph, wash one's bottom with one's left hand. The right hand is the one for the food, the left one is reserved for more private issues and is very offensive to hand out something or touch people with your left hand as it’s consider jhutho ( I find this particularly daunting and always get it wrong). Around 21.00 we eat more daal bhaat, occasionally sexed up with buff cubes fried with spices and greens. Shreeja wants to play with Alma and copy her, she has taken up eating with a spoon just because Alma does! Here they use the (of course ) right hand for eating, and there's much noise, belching and munching and burping and even picking noses at the table.
Whenever they feel like it, they just storm into our room without knocking, I’ve started locking the door to the room and they find this strange habit of mine quite amusing. To put it simply, Nepali people don’t know what privacy is.
We go to bed early partly due to one of the many frequent power cuts, feeling exhausted but bearing a great sense of achievement. The lights go off just as I am trying to remove a splinter off my thumb,
Learning rather than teaching.
Sharing rather than taking.
Trusting rather than being afraid.