Nepali spring

The Terai spring is characterised by leaf fall and the instantaneous sprouting of green buds. It lasted for 3 days before the temperature rose dramatically. It is now over 30oC in the day and this week the night temperature has risen from 7 – 21oC. Nepalis are shedding their layers of winter clothes; a few hardy men are back in sandals and their woolly hats have been replaced by traditional topis. Women are wearing scarves instead of blankets over their kurtas. It’s the wedding season, so each morning we are woken by wedding bands, and chanting and singing goes on until the early hours of the morning, when the new loudspeaker at the mosque starts, accompanied by a strident dawn chorus of courting birds.
We have both been working ‘early shift’; David visiting schools where tiny children who rarely attend school are sitting on benches doing formal examinations. For most of them this means copying the paper with a small stub of blunt pencil. During the rest of the day he is developing materials for early years teaching, and I arrive home to find the floor covered with alphabet letters and multiplication tables. He has enlisted the help of the carpenter who made our furniture to make building blocks from scrap wood, the stationers for paper items and plastic balls, and Umesh at the fabric shop for pocket boards and children’s socks to make small puppets. After exams are over, the schools close for teachers to mark the papers – given that most children can’t do the papers, this seems an unnecessary indulgence. Then its holiday time again, followed by the start of the new Nepali year (mid-April); the first 2 weeks are spent registering the children before any teaching starts.
Meanwhile I have been taking training sessions on action research for secondary school teachers, cycling off just after dawn with the sun low and red in the sky and the orange neon street lights still on. Scabby dogs stretch out to catch the first rays of the sun; men in lungis and blankets are huddled at tea stalls; women in red saris are on their way to the temple for puja, while others are lighting fires to make breakfast and sweeping the dirt from one pile to another. People are coming in to town with sacks of vegetables for the market; bicycles are laden with sugar cane while others have a pair of goats suspended in jute bags from the handlebars and a cage of scrawny chickens on the carrier. Children on early shift are straggling to school and the cows and goats are still curled up under the trees.
March 13 - David’s birthday. He was still sleeping when I left at 6:30 for the ETC to teach action research to social studies teachers, leaving a candle stuck in the last slice of homemade bread in the kitchen. The social studies teachers speak no English, and Govind, their trainer speaks about as much English as I do Nepali. It was remarkably successful, with lots of laughter, many different activities and the help of my dictionary. At 9, a visitor arrived and joined in – I later discovered he is the deputy director of NCED (National Centre for Educational Development) on a monitoring visit, who will be a useful contact; we were able to spend most of the day together. At the end of the session, the 2 women took me off to the photographer, combed my hair and adjusted my clothes to pose for a photograph ‘for memory’. We finished the 3 day workshop for secondary teachers at the end of the morning. At 1:50 the papers for the 2pm examination arrived on the back of a motorcycle in a carefully stitched cloth bag, double sealed with sealing wax. On the way home I bought luridly coloured birthday cake at ‘Kiran’s cake parlour’, and was delighted to find that we had running water at home again after 2 days without any. The electricity was off, of course, but after a candlelit dinner (again) it was restored in time for us to watch ‘Elizabeth’, one of the many DVDs we bought in Kathmandu for £1 each. From time to time the language changed from English to Russian, adding new interest.
The election campaign is gathering momentum, with daily rallies and heavy police presence. There have been no unpleasant political incidents here since we returned. The only recent fatalities have been as a result of ‘huge tuskers run amok in Jhapa’. To our dismay, we have been recalled to Kathmandu on March 24 (although as we have just had another day without water or electricity there may be some compensations), as our passports need to go to immigration for new work visas. We will have to stay until after the election. The VSO annual conference has been rescheduled for election week, so we can all be incarcerated together. A group of new volunteers has just arrived, and we will spend some time helping with their initial training, planning conference activities and training materials for when we return.