A mud hole

I know it has been a while since last I posted and they will only become less frequent because I have finally moved to the village of Mahadav Besi! There is no internet there so I will post when I have access to a computer. The village is really beautiful, hard to describe but there are rows of fields that almost look like green pyramids carved into the mountains. There are seven of us in one mud house. When we arrived it almost felt like we were young children who stumbled across an old house in the woods and decided to make it a play house only we decided to actually live in it for almost 3 months. The monsoon had ruined part of the house, and no one had lived there
in over 5 months, so it was time to clean things up. There was a hole in the roof of my room as well as the ceiling of the people below me and as fun as it to play will I fall through or won't I, we needed to close it. It turns out that one of the best muds to make a sturdy floor is, you guessed it, buffalo manure, which can only be properly mixed by, you guessed it, our hands. My friend reminded me to really get out all of the "lumps" as if this experience wasn't scarring enough but in the end, it was kind of exciting to help build my own floor, whatever materials may have been used.
  Most people in my group are extremely proactive and have worked really hard to make the house a home and someone even made a small clay oven outside along with a hammock. Someone even tried to create a tap in the bucket shower so it could be even closer to taking a real one. Every night the power goes out for about an hour and a half right as we are cooking dinner but everyone wears their headlamps and just keeps on chopping, and I must say I have become quite the master of peeling potatoes in the dark and still have all of my fingers.
Sometimes I feel like I am in one of those museums that has the exhibits where you can dress up and pretend to cook in a kitchen from the 18th century but then I realize this is how all of my neighbors in the village are living today. We have three Nepali staff who work with us and come with us to all of the meetings to translate as well as
provide their own knowledge. They are so warm and helpful and the people love them just as much as we do. We have not started actually working in the groups and communities yet because we are still observing them all and trying to figure out what role we will play and how helpful we can be in such a short amount of me. I will be working
mostly with a girls group in which they can hopefully speak out things that may be embarrassing or not openly discussed in their society normally in a safe place, working in a theater group and choir at a school, and in 3 women's groups as well discussing a variety of topics. One of the women's groups is located in the stone quarry in
which the women work to break stones everyday to be sold and they are migrant workers that live in very small tin and plastic structures near the quarry. They lead a  challenging life but today we had our first meeting and the women shared a lot and even laughed for most of the time and told us they felt very comfortable in this setting so I am excited to see what we can accomplish or at least provide an hour a week for them to relax and talk about any issues on their minds.  Although some of us feel at times that we do not have so much to do in the village and that our groups meet so infrequently, there is something so comforting about being able to walk around the village and have people call out your name from fields away just to say hello and how are you, knowing its the only words you truly know in their language. Although some of the bigger goals I had in mind might be harder to accomplish in the amount of time I have here, there is so much for me to learn here about myself, the land, and of course the communities and I look forward to see what the next 2 and a half months will bring. 
     Food for thought: We had a couple of girls come over to the house during our last days of training from the youth group and they asked us to share what the youth do in our own countries. One group of Israelis did a small skit showing games they like to play and explained about strong the youth groups are there to which one girl said " That all looks like fun, but when do you all find time to work in the day?" No one knew how to answer and then someone finally tried to begin to explain how in Israel and America a lot of children do not work at such a young age and for those who do it is sometimes more for their own "piggy bank" and rarely to pay for the groceries for the family. There are obviously many who must work as well but for most of us in our group and in our social circles this is not the case and it made a lot of us think about our own childhoods and how working at that ice cream shop in the summer to pay for a new iphone maybe was not so bad after all.

A Winding Road

    This week we finally had the chance to visit the third location that some people may be working at. The village is 8 hours outside of Kathmandu and the only way to get there is go through a winding road in which there really is only one way. Buses honk their musical horns to let others know they are coming around the bend and if another one is coming also then both must slow down and pray that they both make it through because the alternative is one going off the cliff. When we finally arrived in the village, we looked around at the beautiful scenery and realized just how high in the mountains we really were. At this point we were used to the welcome ceremony in which we receive tika, usually a red powder mixed with rice, placed on our foreheads (and my nose somehow every time) and flower necklaces. We were staying with host families which I was slightly nervous about with my lack of Nepali language skills but excited about as well. The family lived in a beautiful mud house that the father had built and had two sons who spoke some English that made it easier to communicate. The mother used an open fire in the middle of the house to cook the food and to warm the house as well which caused a lot of smoke to fill the house, so much so that I had to leave the room when I went down the small stairs to breathe in some fresh air.
    My favorite member of the family was the grandfather or Hajur Bua, a small man with just one tooth, who wore an old  blazer from who knows where, and a pair of shorts, in 10 degree weather, and still managed to smile and laugh every time I said any word in Nepali. We learned so much about life in the mountains and how much agriculture controls these communities' lives. We met the incredible youth group there that has meetings once a week and have already helped reduce alcoholism in the community just by raising awareness of its causes. The school we visited has to be moved within the next 6 months because if it is not, it will be washed off the area with the next monsoon season. It was inspiring to see how far they have come but there is still a lot of work to be done. With no internet and very unstable electricity, we were able to really understand the power of disconnecting and focusing on the moment, and see how much more it brought families together.  There were definitely no TV dinners in sight. On our way home we stopped at a hospital hat seemed to be quite impressive and supposedly offers lots of free treatments for all kinds of needs. I couldn't help but think if they had this kind of hospital ion a place like Ghana how many more people could use and deserve (especially one very special boy) that kind of care but hopefully this is just a model for future cheaper hospitals in many places in the world. This week we find out where we will be placed and I would really be happy in either village, even if one is an 8 hour ride to the capital city so I shall keep you updated as I find out as well as add more photos.
   I seem to have forgotten to mention the monkeys that live near our house here. At first they seem exotic and exciting as previously mentioned but after the latest attack, I know longer hold that special love for them. I had been warned that they like to take people's biscuits or plastic bags but did not think much of it. As my friend and I were walking to the Monkey temple, I was carelessly swinging my biscuits in the air until a monkey jumped in front of us. he basically put his monkey hands on his monkey hips, just like the high school bully in Full House waiting for Stephanie's lunch money ( for those of you unaware of the reference I apologize but you get the idea). I naturally started shrieking which led him and his monkey accomplice to start circling us until I threw the biscuits in the air as he jumped to catch them. He then proceeded to eat every single one in my face and lick the wrapper just to be obnoxious. For the rest of the day I had monkey anxiety and could not be near them without wondering if I would be jumped or not. I know this is all part of the process and hopefully next time I will be able to keep my biscuits and teach the monkey a lesson. For now I'll just hide my food under my coat. Monkeys: 1 Sophie : 0