Bandhed in Dharan

After last week’s thwarted attempt (yet another transport strike – we managed to get as far as Itahari in a rickshaw) to reach Dharan, we walked to the bus station at 8am on Sunday morning and boarded a bus about to leave. David had a permanently reclining seat, while mine remained fiercely upright. The bus stopped every few hundred yards to pick up more passengers, milk churns, baskets of mangoes, plants and assorted wild life. The 22km road to Itahari on the main east-west highway is flat and straight, with a string of villages, fields, grazing animals, paddy being ploughed by oxen before rice planting and many small industrial complexes, ranging from steel plants to biscuit making. We reached Itahari in under a hour, much more comfortably than on the back of a cycle rickshaw in blazing sun the week before.

After Itahari, the landscape changed dramatically, with increasingly dense mixed forest, even smaller and more scattered villages, and women carrying huge bundles of wood from the forests. Memories of the permanently bent firewood carriers of Ethiopia. As we approached Dharan, the first hills appeared, thickly wooded and shrouded in cloud. Dharan is an interesting town, relatively affluent, home of many former Gurkhas, with a large mixture of minority ethnic groups from the Terai and the hills. The market had fresh peaches, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, yellow plums and pineapple, treats not currently available in Biratnagar; there is also a supermarket and a department store (do not imagine Sainsburys or John Lewis). We planned to shop before returning home. At 12:30, in the middle of a torrential downpour, we met Etienne, a young Dutch volunteer working for an NGO in HIV/AIDS education and went for lunch. Half an hour later we heard strident voices through loud hailers, and within minutes all the transport had pulled off the road, shops had pulled down their shutters and the market had packed up. We discovered that the Maoists had called a bandh for the killing of one of their members. No-one seemed to know how long it would last; ‘several days’ was estimated. ‘Ke garne?’ After lunch, Etienne went to a meeting and we wandered round for a bit, discovering that the highway was blocked in both directions by piles of burning tyres. We managed to get a hotel to open its shutters and let us in, so we secured a room for the night in case we could not get home. It is foolish to attempt to travel during a Maoist bandh! David had a shower and went to sleep; I wrote my diary. At 6pm we went out in search of supper and a toothbrush, and discovered that some minibuses were running. We checked with the police who assured us it was ‘thikchha’, but there was likely to another bandh the following day. We decided to get home while we could. The journey home was rapid – and a contender for the most people it is possible to get into a minibus prize. Those that could not get in climbed onto the roof. Police stopped us several times and removed the roof travellers; they reappeared and climbed up again as soon as the checkpoint was passed. We arrived back in a dark and deserted Biratnagar, having already telephoned the landlord to warn him of our late arrival. He is very solicitous and concerned for our well-being. Its rather like having parents again.

It feels like the end of term here – the monsoon break starts next week. Most of the teachers will be in the fields for rice planting. David is busy observing as many lessons as he can before schools close. He is working the 6 – 11am shift this week, and sets off at dawn on his bicycle. One of the 3 schools he is working with is in the countryside, where tiny children with no shoes, books or pencils cram into small poorly ventilated rooms. None of the schools has any resources, but in the town schools the children are equipped with books and pens. Most of the teachers spend most of the lesson reading from the textbook. The children are patient and well behaved; an attempt at ‘active learning’ seems to be to get all the children (sometimes over 100) to read from the book at the same time. He is very happy being with teachers and children rather than in the DEO. I am getting used to a leisurely start to the day, and cycle to the ETC at 9:30; some staff are frantically collating marks and preparing lists for the MoE, while others finish the training groups, back at the ETC for 4 days at the end of school based training. I spent Monday and Tuesday working with the primary trainees as they prepared for their final assessments, and joined in their celebrations after their examination on Thursday. Unfortunately I was required to sing. Several of them will be in schools within cycling distance after the break, so I hope to continue to work with them to monitor how training is put into practice. My enthusiasm for developing ‘training schools’ is for the longer term! The rest of the week I listened to secondary teachers ‘present’ (read aloud) their work (daily journal, case history, notes ….). I feared that they would be required to read every day of their daily journal for the five months of school based training. After two days sitting on a wooden bench listening, I suggested an alternative way of presenting the action research, which relieved the tedium and enabled teachers to learn from each other and discuss practical ways to improve their teaching. The final day was spent doing an examination. I have many questions about how these events reflect teaching competence! We have both written tentative action plans for what we hope do independently and together after the break and optimistically look forward to getting our colleagues together to discuss it. We have started Nepali lessons again with a bright young teacher, and can now ask a range of questions about teaching and learning. Unfortunately we will not understand the answers.

The weather varies between pleasantly cool (about 30oC) and windy, to blazing hot (40oC+). We are regulars at the pool to cool off at the end of the day before we make supper. David’s range of desserts continues to get even better, and we are trying to do interesting things with a variety of curiously shaped vegetables. Friday was a festival day – asadh pandhra, to elebrate the first day of rice planting, so we were invited to eat with Dinesh at his sister’s house. He is distressed that he has still not been able to get our furniture from his cottage industry project near Kakarbitta; his attempts are constantly thwarted by bandhs. After starting with the traditional asadh pandhra dish of chudra dahi (beaten rice with yoghurt), a succession of delicious vegetable dishes accompanied by yet more family members (4 generations) appeared. We cycled home in the darkness, very full, and with a year’s supply of homemade mango pickle. Our attempts to escape from the scorching plains of the Terai to the hills are scuppered again this weekend by yet another bandh.