To the hills

On Friday evening to Koshi campus with Durga where he is doing his MEd teaching practice in Applied Linguistics. I am his audio-visual aid. After a hazardous journey on the back of his motorbike in a high wind, we arrived at the campus – an assortment of tin and bamboo roofed rooms around a courtyard. The students, second year BEd English were delightful; the session was highly interactive, with lots of examples. When I emerged, the third year students had set up chairs under a shady tree ‘for conversation’. They have never had the opportunity to talk with a native speaker before, so we talked until the sun set. I will go again.
I have also been enjoying reading Deepti’s masters thesis on control of snail pests in eastern Nepal. It reminds me of A level projects by diligent girls. We spent a morning together discussing possible improvements, but it’s difficult without knowing the expected standard; she wants me to go and meet her supervisor.
We have developed a new system of rubbish disposal, after several weeks of being woken at an early hour by the boy with the cart who comes daily and rings the bell just in case we have anything to get rid of. Leaving the bags outside is an option we tried, but found that the goats got to the rubbish first and scattered it all over the road. We now hang the bags on the metal spikes on the top of the gate. It resembles the Tower of London after a beheading.
The water situation continues to be dire. Chhatra’a sister has now had the pump removed and taken the motor away. With Karna’s help, we have contacted the plumber who did the original work on the house; he has phoned Chhatra in America and has agreed to do the work. He arrived on Monday at 7am and Tuesday at 8am with workmen, but Chhatra’s sister will not supply the materials. Meanwhile the rain falls steadily and sometimes torrentially as a result of the cyclones in the Bay of Bengal. The weather is pleasantly cool.
May 20 Buddha’s birthday was a public holiday, and the headteachers demanded a day off after an exhausting day of action research with me, enlivened by teaching them the hokey cokey. The primary training continued. A noisy evening with temple music on one side and a rock concert on the waste ground at the end of the road on the other.
At the weekend we managed our long planned visit to Ilam at last; we were invited by two enthusiastic teachers we trained last October, but transport strikes and ‘trouble in the hills’ had made the journey impossible. We met Surya, the head of the ETC, at Tulsi’s son’s wedding and he was very keen for us to visit his training centre. It seemed a good way to combine business and pleasure. On Wednesday, the peace following the election was shattered by storms, strikes, burning tyres and police curfews, but Thursday dawned peacefully and we had seats on a bus heading for Itahari before 7am. East along the Mahendra Highway for 3 hours to Birtamod where we changed onto a microbus heading up to Ilam, another 3 hours away. When it was stuffed to bursting point we began the ear popping climb through spectacular wooded hills, causing the girls in front of us to throw up. The top of the ridge was shrouded in mist with thick bamboo forest, abundant cardamom plants and tea gardens. A rapid descent to cross the mighty Mai River, before the final ascent to Ilam. Ilam has been described as ‘the Darjeeling of Nepal’, but apart from the presence of tea there are few similarities. We checked into the Green View Guest House that overlooks a tea garden, ascending a flight of stone steps to a room with two wooden beds with thin cotton mattresses, warm quilts, some camouflage material over the window and a small bathroom with running water. We decided to attempt to locate the ETC ready for our official visit on Friday. As we walked out of town following directions given to us at the guest house, a young man came hurtling down a precipitous slope shouting “You are Deborah; I have seen your picture; can you help me with my action research?” He had just finished a training day and wanted to share his ideas, so he led us to the ETC across a ditch, followed by an undignified scramble up a muddy cliff, where Surya was delighted to see us. The primary teachers were just finishing their day of PE training with some military looking exercises on a small patch of flat ground, and we contacted our friend Rajendra and arranged to meet later. The primary teachers led us back into town and we wandered north and suddenly bumped into Pankaj, the bright eyed young English teacher from our training who I had tried to contact by e-mail to let him know of our arrival. He was so excited and took us on a tour of the town, where he knows everyone and everyone knows him. He has done extraordinarily well; his family are from a small village 2 hours away, where he attended the village school, achieving high enough marks to study for his BA in English, followed by a MEd in Kathmandu. He now teaches +2 (sixth form), does some training at the ETC, runs a communications shop (photocopy, fax, phone. computer) and is a ‘radio jockey’ on the local FM station. It is a bit more than a one horse town; the main street was busy with trotting ponies carrying milk churns from villages in the surrounding hills to the cooperative dairy. Ilam is the centre of cheese production, as well as tea. The main street is lined with shop houses, many with wooden balconies on which plant pots with a spectacular array of geraniums, hydrangea, foxgloves, and fuschia were balanced precariously. An extraordinary number of shops sell women’s sandals.
Rajendra and Pankaj met us in the evening over our daal bhat to help us plan our visit. On Friday morning we returned to the ETC for the final session of a workshop, and we toured Adarsha, Pankaj’s school and Makendra Campus where Rajendra teaches degree students. Then to the Education Office to meet the new DEO; Hari is a charming man, who studied at the Institute of Education in London and in Denmark and Japan. Prompted by Surya, he organised a trip by DEO jeep to Mai Pokhari, a sacred lake for Hindus and a conservation area on Saturday.
Saturday dawned bright and clear with glorious views over the hills, dotted with tiny villages. Rajendra and Pankaj joined us for breakfast, and by the time the jeep arrived around 11:30 the sky was overcast and the mist was swirling through the trees. We rattled past ponies taking their empty churns home and soon came to the end of the tarmac. The next 8km, only possible in 4WD took a bone shaking hour, the rain pelted down and visibility was reduced to 3m. The driver and Hari assisted the windscreen wipers to help find the way. It was impossible to see the lake when we arrived, so we dashed into a wooden tea shop and sat on benches in semi darkness while the rain pounded on the tin roof and fog crept in through the broken plank walls. Our stay was enlivened by plentiful tea and conversation with a group of very wet female students who had come to the lake to celebrate the end of their exams. After an hour, the mist gradually lifted and the rain stopped, so we ventured out into a dripping green landscape and were eventually rewarded with stunning views over to Darjeeling and a pale glimpse of sun. The lake is beautiful, with splendid water lilies and surrounded by pine forest. There are 9 small bays around the lake, each with religious and ecological significance. While our friends did puja, we searched for warty newts and admired the rhododendrons. A young boy accompanied us so we did not get lost, while his brother stayed to roast maize over a fire and his cheerful granny ground it into corn. On our last evening we were joined in the restaurant for our daal bhat by a young deer, apparently a resident on the third floor, and then by Rajendra and Pankaj with presents of tea and photographs to take home.