Biratnagar

It’s easy (even for us) to find our way around here. We live in Tintolia, a residential area in the SE. David’s office is in the SW and mine in the NE, so we set off at right angles in the morning. There are two main N/S roads, the highway from India to the airport, which has occasional brightly painted overloaded horn honking trucks, ox carts carrying oil drums and cycle carts loaded with chij bij (stuff). Cycles and motorbikes weave in and out. There are a few restaurants, and people making baskets, pottery and wooden items. Main Road runs parallel and is the main shopping street. From south to north, the shops are roughly grocery, stationery, fruit and veg market, fabrics, kitchen equipment and electrical goods, interspersed with Hindu temples. We have established good relationships with several shopkeepers who give good discount, refunds and replacements. Chinese electrical equipment is ridiculously cheap with a short life expectancy, but it produced excellent banana lassi and toast for breakfast. David is keeping the carpenter busy making up his designs. I am revelling in my collection of kitchen plastics, to which I add daily on my way home from work. We selected some curtain material yesterday and the curtains were ready for collection by the time we had shopped for vegetables! The only china plates we’ve found in town are at the Xenial (swimming pool) hotel; not available in Nepal so the obliging chef went across the border to India for us and bought us a set (open border 5km from here for Nepalis, but not for us). The only day off is Saturday, when all the shops are closed. Maoist activists forcibly close down the ones that try to open. Our only disappointment is that there is currently no cheese in town, as there is a bandh on the highway from Ilam. Tinned Indian cheese is a poor substitute!
The move to our new home was incident packed. We loaded 14 items into the small hotel minibus. Thirteen items were unpacked – my computer bag with all my work and important documents was missing. The bus had departed to pick up students and I spent an extremely anxious hour before it returned and my bag was unearthed from under the back seat. Workmen were ‘cleaning’ with dirty rags, and Chattra the landlord insisted that they finished. Then the floor polisher came, so it was impossible to do anything. We went off to shop for some cleaning materials and were caught in a storm. Found sanctuary in ‘Maakhanu Bhog’. Lunch interrupted by chef running shrieking from kitchen brandishing a broom with which he clubbed to death a small rat. When the rain subsided we emerged to find that the sewers had overflowed.
We were able to unpack in the kitchen and set up the bed. The gas cylinder did not arrive until 7pm, so we went out to eat. Everything was locked and barred when we returned. When we eventually got in, we had a very comfortable night with 2 fans and only a few mosquitoes.
The next day was much better and I was able to cook dinner for Gerry, another volunteer here to do some IT training. The effect was spoiled by a mass hatching of lacewings, with a life span of about 3 minutes, after which they plummeted into the food.
It took less than a day to get a broadband connection - the landlord made some enquiries in the morning and by 5pm three chaps had arrived with a cable that they stuck through the window and put 2 bare wires into an electric socket. It works!

Work continues to delight and frustrate – we are meeting lots of people, speaking terrible Nepali (we will try and find a teacher next week to give us tuition a couple of mornings before work) and doing some constructive things. I planted a tree at a local primary school for World Environment day on Tuesday, helped by several hundred small children. On Friday I did some input into a science teacher training day in a open sided shed with 23 male teachers and 2 female goats. Still trying to arrange a planning meeting with all my colleagues. People meet but there are no meetings in the western sense. It’s only 2 weeks, and establishing good relationships is a priority!