A passage to India

At dawn on Saturday we left home to walk to the bus station. Women and children were already bashing their washing with wooden bats, while men were taking early morning exercise; old men in lungis hobbled along with sticks, behind portly middle aged men in shorts and shiny white trainers. We met Dinesh, as arranged, but there was no sign of Joseph. The bus stand was alive with people, animals, sacks, buses with revving engines and honking horns, big controllers selling tickets and persuading travellers that theirs was the ‘best express bus’. Having secured our seats on the 6am bus for the border, I phoned Joseph, still operating on African time, so we eventually left without him. We stopped frequently to pick up more passengers, and Joseph managed to catch us up in a frantically pedalled rickshaw before we left the city.
The journey along the Mahendra Highway was a delight, with women in brilliant saris planting rice, men ploughing with oxen, buffalo wallowing, cow and goats grazing, ducks paddling and pot bellied pigs foraging. We travelled through dense forest, stands of bamboo, and fields of maize; crossed many potentially huge rivers bringing water from the Himalaya to Bangladesh. The Bhutanese refugee camp (in the news daily) stretched along for many kilometres. There were many Hindu temples, Buddhist chortens and prayer flags, Limbu and Tamang burial grounds, with graves marked by miniature traditional houses. As we approached Birtamod, blue-grey hills appeared to the north, and the landscape was filled with tea plantations. Many passengers left to head up to Ilam, and were replaced by a herd of very lively goats. Two decided to sit with David. After 4 hours we arrived in Kakarbhitta (125km).
We completed exit forms, got a rickshaw across the vast Mechi river bridge, and entered Indian after more form filling and passport stamping. Raniganj, in West Bengal, is much the same as Kakarbhitta. There was the usual array of small shops selling snacks, and all manner of chij bij . Buses depart every few minutes for Siliguri, and jeeps for Darjeeling. We stopped for some mango juice, then retraced our steps, to the bewilderment of the officials on each side of the border. We emigrated from India and re-entered Nepal in less than an hour. After some lunch, we visited Dinesh’s organic fertiliser project – a long open sided shed where local farmers bring their cow dung for drying and packing, and caught the bus back. 8 hours on the bus; one hour in India!

My internet has been struck by lightning
The monsoon has started dramatically with a violent storm on Sunday, destroying our internet box. It was repaired within 24 hours, but we had to buy new equipment. We are now scrupulous about disconnecting everything when not in use. It is noticeably cooler, but even more humid (can RH be greater than 100%?). Three prangs on the bike this week, with a young man determined to avoid a puddle but not me, a monstrously large buffalo and a flock of over-excited chickens. The banana trees have grown so large it is impossible to open the windows at the back of the upstairs training room. Our balcony plants are exuberant.
This week David has spent a morning with each of his three headteachers for wide ranging discussions to establish a framework for working in the schools after the monsoon break. With the help of a structured list of questions, a dictionary, gestures, drawings and descriptions, he has obtained a remarkable amount of information and a lot of good will. He had an inauspicious return to the DEO on Friday, hitting the bridge of his nose on a metal gate, producing copious amounts of blood. A colleague took him to a nearby doctor to patch him up – treatment, dressing and antibiotics for 25p. He is now sore and bruised, but cheerful, sitting on a damp terrace surrounded by his plants.
I am fortunate to have colleagues who can speak English when they need to. They did not need to until I arrived, but are getting more confident every day. I have spent a lot of time with Durga this week, getting lots of useful insights and we are starting to make plans for the new financial year. We are enjoying our language lessons with Bedu. Improvement is slow, and it still takes ages to construct sentences without writing them down first. Favourite new word this week milda julda = similar. We have a brilliant new piece of software that converts Romanised Nepali into Devanagari script, and Durga is also showing me how to type in Nepali. Next I want a microchip inserted into the language centre of my brain for instant translations. He cycled part of the way home with me on Friday, commenting that people were amused to see me riding a bicycle. “But many women ride bicycles”; “Not old women” he replied.