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 10th 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.
