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Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Nepal

Hi Everyone

I'm sitting in an internet booth in the village of Pokadi, the next village up from Ganganagar, where we are staying. Internet here only works sometimes and uploading a photo takes absolutely ages, so we will be posting some photos soon. 

We have been in Ganganagar for nearly 3 weeks now, staying with a very nice local family, Ramzi and Indira, and their son Sanjit.  As their 2 daughters are now married they have a spare room available. Each day they cook us daalbaat, which is mainly rice with a little bit of lentils and vegetables. People here mainly eat just 2 meals per day (big ones), one at around 9am and another around 7pm, with a small snack mid afternoon if hungry.

The village is very beautiful, with lots of rice fields, buffaloes, bicycles and virtually no cars, just the occasional motorbike. Even the school bus has stopped running for the Dashain holidays.  Yesterday we saw a wild rhino (huge one) in the wetlands, just 40 metres from the village houses, near to the resource centre. The resource centre is a room with a few tables and a fan where we go to teach the children English each morning. Most of the children are from a marginalised cluster of houses on the edge of the village, set up for displaced people from other parts of Nepal, due to flooding or other problems. They appear to be mainly lower caste landless labourers, but some seem to have small vegetable plots. Anyway they are living pretty close to the breadline most of the time.

We have about 15 children in each of our 2 classes (one for 5-9 year olds and one for 10-12 year olds) and run a structured session that includes oral work, action songs, games, story reading and some written work and colouring in. It's been really enjoyable teaching the kids and a pity that we are not staying for much longer.

The other project in Ganganagar is "Happy Home", which is sort of an orphanage or more accurately a sort of foster care boarding hostel for kids from families that can't look after them. The children have now gone away for the Dashain festival, but up until 2 days ago we were going there each afternoon for a few hours and working with the kids there.

That's all for now. There's so much to tell, but more interesting when embellished with a few photos.

Sean  :)

1 comment:

Tom said...

Hi you two :)
What a great adventure you are having!
We are really looking forward to the photos and some of your Nepal anecdotes.
Hari Om
Tom