Bats come home to roost

Bats not rats are responsible for the piles of poo accumulating on our window sills. We had both avoided mentioning this, as we also ignore lurking giant cockroaches when we turn on the kitchen light at night. The bats fly off at dusk and have returned by the time we get up in the morning; they add to the wild life attraction of living here. Many more roost in the mango tree outside.
TheTerai is now suffering from extensive flooding and landslides, with over 100,000 people homeless and daily reports of more deaths from drowning, snake bite and dysentery. We are fortunate in town, as we only have to contend with permanently muddy feet, damp clothes, soggy books and paper and mould growing on our furniture, trousers and shoes. Ants have invaded David’s computer and there are leeches on the pineapple.
We went for a wonderful rural ride on Sunday, taking advantage of a brief bright spell. A five minute ride to the east of our house brought us to bright green paddy fields, grazing animals, small farms, oxen ploughing, children playing in the puddles, women carrying huge bundles of animal fodder, and others cooking outside over fires. Another world on our doorstep. It might look idyllic, but living conditions are miserable, especially in the monsoon. Although people are very poor, it is relative; the further we travel from town, the more marked the poverty becomes, and there are real food problems in many villages. School feeding programmes have been successful at getting children into school, but have now been replaced by scholarship funding for Dalits, ethnic minorities and all girls. Most of the money seems to ‘disappear’.
Monday was full moon and the festival of Guru Purnima, celebrating the birth of Vysas who wrote the Mahabharata. It is now also a national teachers’ day, where students visit their teachers with small gifts. On Tuesday we went to the local UNICEF headquarters to meet Radhika, the formidable Programme Officer. I had met her at a training workshop a couple of months ago. As we discovered in Ethiopia, there are many different organisations working on similar projects with little coordination, so it seemed a good idea to find out what UNICEF, with huge amounts of international funding, was doing locally. We arrived at the huge gated compound after a 20 minute ride along the highway to India, parking our dirty bikes amongst the pristine white land cruisers. Hot and grubby, we were checked in by amused security guards in immaculate uniforms and taken to Radhika’s splendid air-conditioned office. We should not have been surprised to learn that UNICEF has conducted extensive active learning training with our colleagues, has set up a large number of ‘child friendly’ schools, provided tin trunk libraries to every primary school, developed tools for lesson observation and monitoring and evaluation. Needless to say, we have seen no evidence of any of this, and our colleagues had not mentioned it.
Days are still full of surprises. When I arrived at work on Wednesday, all the gates were locked and guarded by armed police. I managed to persuade them to let me into the school field and wheeled my bike through the swamp to get to the ETC. Some VIP was being filmed visiting the school building. No-one seemed to know who he was. There was torrential rain through Thursday night; surrounded by flood water at home. I cycled through floods most of the way to work, to discover that the ETC was underwater. At least my sandals got clean as I waded to the stairs. Upstairs I found the ceiling hanging down and the computer full of water. Did not turn on the electricity. Massive security on the way home, with roads closed and swarms of armed police with riot shields; the Prime Minister is coming home.
A gourmet weekend in prospect. When we arrived home on Friday, Tara and Chhatra were gathering huge armfuls of weeds from the garden. We have been invited to share them for supper on Saturday. Our usual Friday night treat at Unique Pure Veg restaurant, where the colourful Christmas decorations are a permanent feature. The range of dosas and Indian veg food is outstanding; we are were tempted by the ‘single swinder chocolate nots’ dessert, but settled for violently coloured icecream. The mango season is coming to an end, but there is now a profusion of pineapples and delicious small crisp apples from Kashmir.
Thursday night’s rain was apparently, the heaviest for 17 years. Today the air is clear, its less humid and temperatures are soaring. Our day started with the visit of Dinesh and Saraswati, a young female reporter from the Biratnagar office of Kathmandu Post, keen to write an article on the much talked about ‘old white people who cycle around town’. Our Nepali is not really up to giving coherent interviews, so it will interesting to see what appears. Our mouldy clothes are now drying out on the line. I am on the terrace listening to Monteverdi vespers. The ‘naked chef’ is in the kitchen making icecream with squidgy mangoes.