Happy Birthday Mom!

pictures from the last week in the village

Aama and Uncle <3 my Nepali parents

my favorite ECD kid

New rai Women's group goodbye

my best friends in the village Suresa (right) and Mira (left)

friends from New Rai womens group

mahadev besi volunteers

two friends from Old Rai womens group

getting my last tikka from hajurbua

Some more pictures!

 Out for a luxurious night in Kathmandu with my friend Katie before leaving for the village! This restaurant is called Or2K and is owned by an Israeli. Half the menu is in Hebrew and the place is always filled with Israelis and other tourists.

 This was a spontaneous dance party with our bus driver and some of the Nepali staff in a restaurant on the way back from Sundrawati. The girl to my right in the blue t-shirt is one of my best friends on the program, Eliana. 

My bag packed, on the bus on the way to Mahadav Besi!

This was my Nepali teacher during the orientation, Soba.   

 
My bedroom and bed (left) in our mudhut!



(Below) Downstairs in our kitchen/dining area.

Our neighbor, Aama (mother), looking at her new born baby goats.

Working in the organic farm

Some friends I made from the boys youth group.

Hajurboa, our grandfather/neighbor, sitting on the porch next door  as he does all day every day.

Our beautiful Seder table in Kathmandu!

Village Life

These videos are from our first meeting with one of the youth groups in the Rai community.

My Gd, I don’t think life gets much better than this. I love life here. I am amazed at how quickly I have adjusted to living here in our mud hut in Mahadav Beshi. The squat toilets, bucket showers, wooden beds, washing our clothes in buckets, the single gas burner, the trucks that go by packed with Nepali villagers getting a ride down to the Bazaar on top of a truck full of stones, the mice, spiders, stray dogs, the goats and bull that live next door, all of it. I love it. It is now Sunday afternoon and we are all hanging out and doing our own thing. We will be starting to work with our groups this week and are taking some time to prepare. I will be working with 3 different women’s groups from different communities which each meet once a week, teaching English to teachers at one of the schools in the village twice a week, and working with a teenage youth theater group. I am a little nervous about starting but expect to really enjoy all of it. All of the people I have met so far here have been lovely and all excited about working with us. I just know that this is going to be a wonderfully rewarding experience in ways that I cannot yet imagine.

             We have been living in the village for a week now. Last week was spent meeting with all of the different communities and introducing ourselves, asking questions, etc. Many of the youth groups prepared games to play with us. I am already starting to recognize some of the faces around the village and the Bazaar and feel as though I am becoming part of the community. On Friday I went down to the Bazaar with two of my friends to buy some food for Shabbat. We hitched a ride on the street right outside our hut on a tractor pulling stones. As I lifted myself onto these pile of stones for the windy drive down the hill to the shops I noticed that the boys in the front of the tractor were a few of the middle school boys from the youth group we had met with yesterday. They were equally excited to see us and my favorite one even remembered my name! He said, “Mira! Que cha?”. And that was enough to make my day. As we made our way down, while I wasn’t thinking about how freaking scary and dangerous it was to ride on top of these stones, I was able to speak some broken Nepali with him… the most impressive sentence being,     “Tapaiharu school jaane?” which means “You are all going to school?” I was really proud and they were all just as impressed and thrilled with my speaking skills.  Getting rides on these trucks has been one of the highlights of living here. I love the short interaction with the truck driver or other people in the truck, and the thrill of the ride is there every time. I feel so free and happy looking at the beauty around me. It’s unreal.

Life here basically consists of buying or picking vegetables from our kitchen garden, cooking, cleaning up, and washing clothes. We have a small brick stall with a hole for a toilet with a metal container outside that we use to burn our toilet paper after we use it. Right next to the toilet is a stall made from tarp that we use to take bucket showers. This is another one of my favorite parts of living here. There is something so freeing about showering outside. I absolutely love it and can’t imagine showering in a regular bathroom. It is pretty hot here during the day and showering is really refreshing after a long day in the heat. Twice I have boiled water to add to my bucket of semi clean water when I shower at night after it has cooled down a bit. It feels great to feel clean at night and relax and eat dinner. We have been making popcorn at night and just hang out all together in the “barn” that we cleaned up and made into a sitting area. I swept it out the first day we got here and put some straw rugs and pillows down to make it our lounge. It is all open with banana trees surrounding the outskirts. One of the boys in my group has a hammock that we set up next to it; pretty much paradise. We buy fruit, yogurt, rice, soy, bread, and vegetables down the hill in the Bazaar. There is one place that makes a really good banana lassie with yogurt, bananas, and a little cinnamon for just 25 rupees.  When we see villagers walking down the road in front of our house with their harvest in baskets on their backs we stop them and buy whatever they are carrying to use for dinner. Last week we were at the farm meeting with one of the groups and picked beans to cook for our dinner. Our neighbors next door give us green onions from their garden pretty much every day. They also bring us dud chia (tea with milk) from time to time. They are really sweet, wonderful people. I try to talk to them whenever I can. The grandfather, hajurbuo, sits on a bed outside on their porch every day all daylong. He watches us and brings us little stools if anyone is ever sitting on the ground. He lives there with his son, who we call Kaka (uncle) and his wife, whom we all call Amaa (Mom). They have three sons, one of which lives at home and is in high school, one who is married and lives in the city, and another that works in the city and comes home on weekends. Two young kids, their cousins, have been staying with them this past week while they are on holiday from school.

We learned all of this on Friday night when Kaka and his 23 year old son came into our hut to visit after Friday night dinner. They came in and sat down with us around our small table. We gave them what was left of the chocolate rice crispy treats I made. We communicated in broken Nepali and the little English that the son knew. After about 45 mintues Kaka told us that he cried when the last machzor left and motioned for us to come to his house next door to see a picture of Or, our madrich, who was a participant on the last machzor. We followed him up the ladder next to our house where we found the rest of the family members all in bed together; a scene that looked pretty close to the scene with all sets of grandparents in bed in Charlie and the Chocolate factory. Aama, the mother, motioned for us to sit down and watch the small T.V. with them. It was so cute how welcoming and comfortable they were with us.  They are accustomed to living next to the volunteers and it is clear that they want a relationship with us. Whenever we make food we give them a little to try.

Here are some of the highlights from the past week and a half here, in no particular order:

1. The first day we arrived in the village we stopped by the local vegetarian daalbaat restaurant for lunch. My friend Yael and I decided that we would try to eat the rice and lentils with our right hand for the first time as the Nepali people do. It was surprisingly difficult and I found that it made me eat more slowly.  It was fun and made eating an activity for all of the senses. 

2. Right after I finished taking my bucket shower on Friday afternoon before Shabbat, our crazy neighbor (Hajuramaa = Grandma in Nepali) came running over to me with a younger man and yelling something. She was holding two different kinds of creams in her hand and asking which to use on the man’s injured leg. She turns to me and talks to me, going on and on, as if I can understand everything she is saying. Jenny, one of the Nepali staff on our program, explained to me that someone was injured and they wanted help. I quickly offered to deal with it and went up to my room to bring the small bottle of Neosporin in my medicine bag. I came down and brought the first aid kit from our kitchen. The man lifted his pants to show me what had happened – I held my breath hoping it would be something I could handle… he had a really deep gash in the side of his leg. I was so excited to play doctor. They both looked at me as if I obviously knew what to do and I was acting very confident. I put some Neosporin on the injured area and taped a bandage to his leg. I figured out that he got jabbed by something on a truck and that our crazy grandmother neighbor is his mother. I told him to keep it clean and it would be okay and the stuff I put on was “derai ramro” (very good).

            The next day I saw our crazy neighbor again, Hajuraama (grandmother), and I asked her how her son’s leg is doing, if it’s better. I somehow managed to understand that she was going to bring him back tomorrow so I could give him a new bandage. He came back Monday evening looking for me and I played doctor again.

3. Every night we see the most beautiful sunset with a huge orange sun that goes down directly in front of our house. We are always out front, preparing dinner, drinking tea, in the hammock, etc. and watch it from our porch area.

4. On Shabbat we walked to the nearby waterfall. It was absolutely gorgeous. To get there you have to walk through the stone quarry community. I talked to all of the little kids and some of them even started to follow us. On the way we walked through a little field and passed a man with his two cows. He seemed to remember us and we realized that it was the old man we had met a few weeks ago when we visited Mahadav Besi with the whole group – he was the most educated in the village, passed 10^th grade, and also grew the biggest cauliflower in the village! Young children were running around eating berries off trees and doing flips head forward off the edges of the fields to the next layer. I had a feeling of being in such an exotic place.

5. Sunday morning our neighbor’s goat give birth to two baby goats. Watching the birth was incredible, emotional, and a little disgusting all at the same time. They came out surrounded by the placenta which then popped and out spilled a little baby goat covered in yellow gunk. They are so small and cute. 

6. Before coming to the village a friend and I went to look to buy sheets in Kathmandu. We discovered that there is no place that just sells readymade bed sheets. There are only fabric stores where fabric is sold by the meter. We must have spent an hour going between two of these types of stores on the same street, trying to determine whether they were giving us the tourist price, if they could get elastic to put on the corners of the bed sheet, and which fabric was the softest, cheapest, and most light weight. It was a pretty hilarious situation. I was actually in shock when we came back the next day and there were to sets of perfectly made bed sheets, two pillow cases, and two blanket covers. We did it! And they are so comfortable and soft and pretty. I am happy every time I quickly climb under my mosquito net to get into my wooden platform bed with my nice sheets.

Another very vital purchase that I made the day before flying to Nepal was my mosquito net from REI. Mosquito Net = peace of mind and happiness. Despite the fact that I cannot sit on my bed during the day or sit up straight when I am in bed, it is one of my most important things, which improves my quality of life here to the nth degree. I am anal about tucking in every side under my little mattress, which is really more like a thick blanket, every time I get in and out of bed. I feel so safe and protected from anything and everything that is living with me in my room, spiders, grasshoppers, mosquitoes, mice…. None of them bother me when I am under the safety of that net. 

Women's Group- Family Planning: Trip to FPAN

There is too much that has happened to try to write about all or even some of my experiences over the past month, so I am just going to write about the present time. I am currently sitting at a table outside with my laptop at the Swayambu cafe, a small cafe with wireless internet a 10 minute walk from our volunteer house in Kathmandu. We had about an hour and a half to eat dinner tonight so I decided to get away for a bit to get a change of scenery and some time alone. This is something that always seems like a great idea in theory but I don't always make the effort to do. Tonight I decided to just go for it. In a weird way, many times being here in Nepal reminds me of being at camp. I think it is just this sense of absolute freedom to roam around without any responsibility, wear t-shirts and baggy pants, eat when you want, socialize, etc.... it's like the entire country of Nepal is free to explore and discover. It's an awesome feeling. I am now sitting here by myself drinking my second cup of coffee at 6:45 p.m. just because I feel like it and am not thinking too much about anything. Just enjoying this time to myself.

Today the people in the women's thematic group visited an organization in Kathmandu called F-PAN which deals with family planning in Nepal. We spoke with the director of the organization asking him questions about contraception to gain information for the work we will be doing in the villages. One of the main goals of the Women's groups will be to educate about family planning - different methods of contraception, what side effects to expect, why it is important, etc. At first I had a lot of mixed feelings about doing this work. For one thing, it felt like a very personal issue to be dealing with. How is it okay for us as Westerners to come into these villages and impose our ideas on these women? Secondly, I am not convinced that the Depo-Provera injection that is given every 3 months is the safest way for these women to practice birth control. It seems strange to take these Western inventions and give them to these women whose bodies work differently, with different diets, a lot of physical labor, etc. and without informing them of the side effects hope to solve the problem of overpopulation. These were my initial thoughts. In our first group meeting I kept going on and on about how there must be more holistic, natural methods of helping these women.

One of the main issues is that without contraception, women in Nepal do not wait between having children. There is some crazy statistic, which I do not remember right this second, about how many women have children within a year of giving birth. Aside from the obvious problems of not having enough money to feed a large family, and that these children are forced to become child laborers, which leads to health problems and more extreme poverty, these high birth rates are dangerous and physically harmful to Nepali women. So, family planning, like all the other work we will be doing here, is a larger issue on both a societal level and the level of individual families. These issues are complex and all very interesting. I sat there in the F-PAN office today wondering how I got here to a place where I am able to use my skills and experience to help doing exactly what I am interested in?! I am fascinated by these health related issues. I am really enjoying doing the research involved and am very much looking forward to working with the women in Mahadav Beshi. I am so happy to be working in the Women's Group. I attribute a lot of the reason I chose to work in this area to my experience in the Sterling Women's Weekend this summer. The Weekend made me so much more connected to my identity as a woman and my connection to all types of women. I am not sure I would have felt this way before doing The Weekend. I used to have feel a certain stigma whenever hearing "Women's" related things but now I feel so drawn to it. As much as I love children, and little Nepali children are the cutest, I know that the Women's Group is the perfect place for me here. The social work aspect and health related issues are a perfect fit for me and I am so thankful/excited to have found myself here.

There is much more to say (I have a feeling I will be ending all of my posts this way), but I need to head back to the house soon and the electricity just shut off so I am now sitting in pitch black by candle light. We are leaving for the villages Sunday! I will have my cell phone there but no internet access. The closest internet access to Mahadav Beshi is a half hour drive away. I am not sure how often we will be going. For those of you who have asked me... my cell phone number here is: 981 - 822 - 6210. I will continue to write. I love and miss you all!

Some pictures!

Tea break stop on the way to Mahadav Beshi

 Mahadav beshi!

 Our volunteer house/mud hut  in Mahadav Beshi!

Inside the mud hut! ( my new room for the next 3 months :)

Purim at the Israeli Ambassaor's (man on the left in blue and purple) house!

                    Befriending the cows like my Omi <3 <3




Just wanted to upload some pictures to show that I'm here and making friends! We were split up into our villages this morning and I will be going to Mahadav Beshi (pronounced Madabesi), a village an hour and a half away from Kathmandu. It is a very interesting place with many different projects and places to work. A lot of agricultural work has been done there by Tevel b'Tzedek and they now have an irrigation system that allows for flourishing fields of growing cauliflower, cabbage, papaya trees, rice fields, tomatoes, potatoes. It is simply beautiful. I am with a great group of people and very happy about being placed there. When we went to visit the village for a few days last week I immediately fell in love and just knew I could see myself there. It is slightly bittersweet because not everyone I have become friends with here will be in the same village. A lot of my friends will be in another village much farther away. But I am happy that I was able to trust the good feeling I had about the place and the Nepali staff that we met and follow my intuition to make it my first choice. I will be working with the Women's Groups. The villagers in Mahadav Beshi are of the Rai people. There is also a population of migrant workers that live in extreme poverty by the river working as stone breakers. There is a lot more to write  but I need to go finish getting ready for Shabbat. I will try to write again soon! Shabbat Shalom from Kathmandu :)

Living Goddesses, Yoga, and Monkeys

Well, I have only been here for a little over a week and I already feel like I have too much to write to keep up this blog. But I will try to do my best to give an overview of what things are like here and what I have been doing.

I was pretty nervous the whole way here on my flight from Delhi. The flight was delayed about three hours and to be honest I was relieved to be able to just sit in the airport, despite the many hours I had already been traveling. I did not have anywhere to be and was feeling very anxious about the reality of landing in Kathmandu, getting a visa, collecting my suitcase, getting a sim card for my cell phone, choosing a hotel, and finding a way to get there. The flight was short and I did my best to distract myself by watching Modern Family episodes on my personal T.V. At one point the captain came on the loud speaker and told us that the weather was better and visibility would not be a problem, but there was a lot of air traffic so we would be circling until we were able to land. He thinks we have enough gas but we might need to land somewhere else, "hopefully it will not come to that". Awesome. I just thought it was funny that he shared this with all of us. 

Anyway, the views of the mountains were beautiful flying into Nepal. The huge green hills and snow capped mountains in the distance were unlike anything I had ever seen. As we were landing and seeing this aerial view of the city I just kept saying "Oh my G-d, oh my G-d, Oh my G-d". Wow, it was just this crazy overwhelming feeling of excitement and anxiety all in one that I was actually finally here, in this foreign, beautiful place. The Kathmandu airport looks like a long wooden barn. Everyone walked right off the front or back of the airplane onto the ground where we got on buses to drive us to the terminal. Inside there were booths to fill out forms for a visa, a line to hand in that form and pay the visa fee, and then you walked straight over to the baggage claim. Pretty simple. It didn't seem like anyone checked the forms or information too thoroughly at all. Just a formality and way to make money. 

The baggage claim area was a huge warehouse with a long luggage belt, with bags and boxes strewn all over the floor. Literally all over. There were people everywhere and it was hard to find a place to walk. By some miracle I happened to see my bag close to where I was standing. When I walked over to get it a Nepali man came over to me and began picking it up and leading me out. I told him I still had another box I needed to wait for. He waited for the box, picked it up, and then motioned for me to follow him with all of my things. I am not sure where he came from or how he singled me out but I really didn't have much of a choice about any of it. He led me in front of the whole long line of people waiting to put their stuff through the security machine and got me all the way out in about two minutes. I told him thank you and it was okay I could take it from here, feeling a little unsure of this service, wondering why it was okay for me to just cut the entire line. He then looked at me saying, "tips? tips?". Ooooh. So this isn't just part of the airport service.... In hindsight it is very obvious to me but at the time, my very sleep-deprived, nervous self was just trying to take it all in. I gave him an American dollar (all I had at that point) and hoped he would be satisfied. 

Something I have noticed about this country is that either everything is done for you, and you are surrounded by people imposing their services on you, or you must not accept any help at all and assertively refuse all gestures so that you are left to figure everything on your own. I am not sure what I expected. I imagined leisurely finding my way and stopping to ask people directions or get suggestions from the man at the front desk at my hotel, I guess more like the way it works in the U.S. It turns out Nepal is a little bit different. I must have had 3 men standing around me, waiting for me to come in their taxi or go to their hotel,  while I tried to understand and make decisions about buying a sim card at the airport. As soon as I was done one of them took my bags and walked out to the street, threw my bag in the back seat of a little white car, what I realized after a minute was a taxi which was at a standstill in the biggest traffic jam I have ever seen. His friend jumped in the seat with my suitcase and they all yelled at me to get in the front of the car, on what we are used to as the drivers side. 

The only rule that I can see about driving here is everyone honks their horn to let all around know that they are coming. Other than that, it is kind of a free for all with motorcycles, rickshaws, taxis, and buses packed with people zooming inches away from one another - literally inches. I was in awe of everything I was seeing around me on that first taxi ride. I could not stop looking out the window, taking in my new surroundings. It was amazing and I don't think I'll ever forget how I felt that day.

I'm realizing that if I go on in this much detail I will be writing forever. I am not sure how many of you are still reading this. The next few days were filled with ups and downs. The first night I found the Chabad house, met a few Israelis who were traveling, and ate dinner there. I was tired, overwhelmed, and a bit lonely to find myself in a very foreign place without anyone. It was hard to know who to trust so I realized I needed to be assertive with the young man working at my guest house and insist that he leave me alone. I could do things on my own. 

My first day in Nepal I woke up, walked out of my guest house, wandered the streets of the Thamel for about an hour, and somehow found my way to the "monkey temple". All I could think when I got there was "Wow, I am freaking awesome". There are very few signs, and streets are not marked so maps are close to useless. I could not even stop for a second in the street to make sure I was going the right way because there would be multiple men yelling at me and everything is so fast paced. But somehow I did it and I was so proud! The temple was beautiful and there were tons of monkeys running around. 

Later that day I met two girls from Germany with whom I spent the rest of the day. We had tea at a cafe and then went to Durbar Square. We let a Nepali man take us on a tour of the temples there and learned a lot about Nepal and Buddhism. We saw a living goddess who lives in the temple with the priest from the time that she is 3 yrs old until she gets her period. She is chosen based on physical and mental criteria and only shows her face through a small window twice a day. The tour was supposed to be an hour but lasted two hours and ended with tea on a rooftop cafe overlooking the city.

Later that night I met up with a girl from the program and three friends she met in India to get a drink at a bar in Thamel. We ordered beer that comes in a jug to which you add hot water to and wait to ferment. I just kept thinking.. how did this happen?! Last night I was alone, a little nervous and sad in a country that is totally unfamiliar and now I am sitting on a balcony drinking beer with a bunch of people after a long, fun, interesting day. It was awesome. I think I got a small taste of what it is like to travel alone and it is a little addicting. 

I have been working on this entry for almost a week now. I plan to be more brief in the future although it is hard because everything is so exciting and new and interesting. I have been with the program now since Monday and am having a great time. We are living in a house together for the first month. The first morning I woke up at 4:30 a.m with a few people to go to a yoga class outside one of the nearby temples. It was an awesome experience. There were over 100 people there practicing yoga in the pitch black before sunrise with booming Nepali music. There was even a dance session at the end. I kept looking over to my left and seeing the monkeys on the side and remembering that I was doing yoga in Nepal?! What?

We take daily Nepali lessons and classes on community development. We just visited the first out of three places that volunteers will be placed for the volunteering. Each place has it's own issues and challenges. Every volunteer requests a specific area that they want to work on (Women's Groups/Agriculture/ Youth groups/Education) and his or her preference for which village to work in. 

I'm working hard practicing my Hebrew and learning Nepali at the same time! Not always easy. But Im really happy and having a great time. Please stay in touch! I love hearing from everybody!