Bonjour tout le monde!

Quelques petites nouvelles du Népal ou je suis arrivée il y a maintenant 10 jours. Je reviens d'un trek de 5 jours dans le massif des Anapurnas avec Antoine; c'était magique! Un guide fabuleux, un porteur a mourir de rire, des soirees passees a manger du Dal Bhat, des chicken momos, a boire du Masala Chai et de l'Everest Beer en jouant a UNO...des journées passées a traverser des paysages splendides, en passant par des vallées de risières à des forets de rhododendrons aux airs de forêt de Brocéliande en passant par des jungles tropicales où le bruit des perroquets, criquets et autres habitants des lieux est assourdissant...Un début de journée exceptionnel (et matinal) où nous avons assisté au lever de soleil a 5h du matin apres une heure de marche dans le noir direction Poon Hill, 3210 mètres...Spectaculaire.

Des images, de beaux moments, des fou rires malgré la barrière de la langue et des sourires pleins la tête, je soigne mes courbatures en me préparant à ma nouvelle aventure. En effet, je commence à enseigner à l'école de Sri Srongtsen Brikuti High School en tant que volontaire dimanche (et oui, ici c'est le premier jour de la semaine!). Je me suis fait faire une "chupa", la robe tibétaine traditionnelle, et dois aller la chercher cet après-midi. Je promets pleins de photos :)

Sinon, j'ai été un peu paresseuse en ce qui concerne le blog sur l'Inde du Sud...pas toujours facile de trouver le temps et l'envie d'aller s'enfermer dans un cyber café étouffant pendant plusieurs heures! mais là, je vais avoir plein de temps (j'espère) donc attendez vous à des nouvelles... Quant aux photos, elles arrivent!

A suivre...

Thursday 23rd October, Café Flavor's,, Bodha, Boudhanath, KTM

Tashi delek!

I have now been teaching at the Tibetan refugee school in Tinchuli, Boudhanath, KTM, for nearly a week...and what an experience it has been!

On the first day, I was woken up at 5:30 am by the chanting of the boarding students saying their morning prayers. I was a little bewildered at first but then decided to embrace the new day and get up straight away to make the most of it. So I opened the back door, stepped on the balcony, looked to the left...and realised I could see Anapurna 1 (I think) starting to light up in the rising sun...Quite a way to start a day!

Feeling very energised and excited, I started fiddling with my Chupa (the traditional Tibetan dress) and it took me just about 20 minutes to figure out how to put it on. After I was satisfied with the way it looked, I headed to the staff room for breakfast, where all the female staff immediately jumped on me to dress me properly whilst laughing (at me most probably) and giggling unashamedly. I can't have been that successful at putting on the chupa after all... As for the breakfast itself, I had been warned - it's the same every morning! "Tingmo", i.e. solid flour, or boiled flour. not completely disgusting but quite bland and truly boring after a while, especially as we also get them for dinner. But they are filling. and considering they have 270 boarders and about 25 staff to feed three times a day, it is understandable that they seek cheap and easy feeding options. Then I poured myself a cup of tea and was about to have a sip when Dhondhen, one of the teachers and dorm warden, stopped me and informed me it was Tibetan tea. Now, for those of you who know what it is, you might understand why I immediately put the cup down. For the others, imagine warm butter with water and salt and a strange, bitter-sweet aftertaste. That is Tibetan tea... thankfully, we get sweet tea every second day. So one in two days is tea-free!

Anyway - after breakfast (it was still only 7 am) I headed back to my room, very excited about the day to come. Suddenly, I hear a lot of noise coming from the classrooms opposite my room so I step out to have a look..and have a small heart-attack when I see half a dozen students walking on the outside window sills with cloths in their hands, cleaning the window, on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd floor! Health and safety Tibetan style I guess... I have since become completely accustomed to this sight and the aforementioned students greet me every morning on my way down to the staff room...!

I then went to meet the Principal, Lama Jampa, thanks to whom the school now has many sponsors and has evolved from being just one dingy classroom in the middle of KTM to a fully equipped boarding school with over 25 classrooms, 4 dorms and a Kindergarten building. Lama Jampa is both a loveable and very scary man who believes in the gift of education and the importance of speaking English fluently - quite ironic when you know that there is a running joke amongst the staff that Shakespeare cries in heaven every time Jampa La speaks English! As I asked him what I should do that day, he informed me that as many staff were off ill, I would have to cover their lessons. Ok - no problem, What do I do with the students? "Your wish!". Oh. Ok. My wish. No frills. Great.

So I headed to the playground, where Assembly was about to start. Imagine 750 students in impeccable uniform, lined up army-style, some with drums, flutes and other instruments, praying and singing as one. Then dhondhen, who is also in charge of assemblies, shouts out a few orders and they all step to the left. One more order, they step to the right. Another order, they sing the Tibetan anthem. The Lama Jampa introduces three students who read the same text, first in Nepali, then in Tibetan and finally in English. He then introduces me to the staff and students and refers to me as « he » throughout his speech: « he will help learning the English, because the English very important to speak, very important the pronunciation for the work and for the future life, so he will help » !!!! Afew students giggle and one of the members of staff winks at me, but the matter is never openly discussed. After a few more anthems and prayers, one of which is dedicated to the Goddess of education, the students stand still and present their hands for cleanliness inspection: all the members of staff walk through the rows of students and check their hands, hair, clothes etc... If a student's cleanliness isn't up to scratch, he or she gets a little whack on the hands and is sent to the bathroom. After the inspection, the students are dismissed row by row and march, onetwo onetwo, in complete silence, to their classrooms, where the first lesson begins. And now it is time for me to meet my first class, 5B if I remember well...

So I step into my first class and am greeted by 35+ 10 to 12 year olds standing up and shouting "Goooooood mooooooooorniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiss!" As I stare at them standing there, I realise that they are waiting for me to allow them to sit down. What a surprise! Imagine that at Latymer? Precisely... after the initial excitement of introducing myself, explaining that in France and most Western countries, your second name is your family name, transmitted to you by your father, and that it is the one they should use for their teacher (very different in Tibet where thenotion of « Family name » simply does not exist), I ask them to make a little name card. I immediately realise that Tibetan names aren't male or female and that Pasang, Tsewang, Tsering, Dolma, Tseten, Jampa, Dechen, Lama, Sonam, Kelsang and all the others are both for boys and girls. So I explain that in France for instance, it is very different, and that if a boy was ever to be called Florence, people would find it very amusing. So we spend a few minutes discussing whether Michael, Angelina, Brad, Justin and Britney are more suited for boys or girls, and I then decide to try and start a lesson.

I ask them what lesson this is supposed to be - English. Great. So I borrow one of their exercise books and quickly discard it - black and white, very old fashioned, not my style. I start to write a couple of words such as "tip, tape, tap, type, true, through..." etc on the board, in different categories of pronunciation difficulties, as I had already noticed that most of them pronounce words such as "tape" more like "tep" or "tip", which sometimes makes them quite hard to understand. The 40 minute lesson goes very quickly, and as the bell goes, all the students get up as one and shout an enthusiastic "Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaank youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiss, Goooooooooooooooooooooood Byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyye Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiss!" and that's it. Next lesson. 7B. 2nd floor. English lesson. Start the whole process again. After 4 lessons like this, I am exhausted yet totally energised by so much enthusiasm and positivity. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah the joys of teaching!!!!!!!

Lunch was all but a surprise - Dhal Bgat Tarkari - i.e. lentil soup, rice and tarkari, which is just curried vegetables. It's filling, tasty enough and actually very healthy. Just the same EVERY SINGLE day! Until then, I had always been almost alone in the staff room at lunch time, so I do as usual and pick a plate, a cup for the soup and a spoon and start helping myself to rice from the giant bowl and pouring some Dhal from the bucket (yes, the bucket) into the cup...what a mistake! I hand't realised that each person had their own plate, spoon (if they were using one at all) and cup...which causes great hilarity amongst the staff. So I am told I should wait until everyone has taken theirs and then see what is left - probably leftovers from previous volunteers or staff who have left. No problem. I am now the proud user of a dented metal plate, a bent spoon and a tiny, red plastic cup. Hurray!

The afternoon goes by very quickly and as it is Games and Sports week, the last two periods are spent playing football and basketball in house teams. I am being grilled about life back home by all the teachers, including the Headteacher, during the whole game. I also find out that the average pay of the teachers here is about 10,000 NRP a months, i.e. just under 100 euro or 70 GBP... To send a child to school costs a minimum of 2000NRP a month, even in a state school, and a very basic flat with two rooms costs about 2-3000 NRP/month to rent. No wonder Dhondhen said that Flavor's Café, the one I am currently sitting in, is very expensive! A cup of tea costs 45NRP, which is 0.45euro or about 35 cents, a meal such as grilled chicken with rice and vegetables is 285NRP, less than 3euros or 2.5 GBP...a small fortune for them. The computers they use in their "ICT suite" are about 10 years old and the monitors are so heavy that I can hardly lift them. But...at leastthey have an ICT suite, an admittedly very slow internet connection and some basic software. Of course, neither the ICT teacher nor any of the members of staff own a laptop, as they represent about a year's worth of salary...

That realisation made me decide - and I hope that all of you who contributed to the money we raised for Peru- to use part of the money raised to sponsor a student in the school. Sponsoring a student means that we pay all their school fees, stationary, uniform, food, transport etc (about 18GBP/month) so that their parents no longer have to do 4 to 5 different jobs in order to be able to meet the cost of a month's education. This then means that their health can improve as they should then be able to sleep a few more hours a night and have more than just one meal a day. It obviously makes one think twice about spending 400 rupees on some tacky souvenir when you think that it could feed a family for a week... But then, most of the shopkeepers are Tibetans who cannot get a Nepali citizenshipcard, i.e. no bank account, no passport, no official job and therefore rely entirely on tourism and souvenir sales to feed their own families..

Like I said, it is now nearly a week since I started. Tomorrow , Friday, is a half day, like Saturdays in French schools, then Saturday is off and the week starts again on Sunday. Since last week, I have started to discover the rules and behaviour codes of the various teacher cliques, who is liked, who is not, who is popular, who is not, who to talk to, who not to talk to. I have also realised that not all students are angels - quite far from it actually - and that most of the teachers have almost no teaching techniques and rely solely on the textbook and chalk-and-talk techniques. Lessons are almost exclusively teacher led and involve some sort of reading out, then questions and answers (almost only cloze question) which the students then have to learn by heart by the following lesson...Hardly inspiring...

But I got a new wave of enthusiasm yesterday when I had to cover the French teacher's lessons. All the students wanted to learn a song (they do seem to spend about 50% of their time singing or praying)and the only relatively easy song I could think of was « L'araignée Gipsy », a kids' nursery rhyme about a spider named Gipsy who climbs up a gutter, when the rains starts to fall and she falls to the ground but the sun comes out and makes the rain go away, so Gipsy the spider, climbs up the gutter, but then comes the rain...etc etc... The gestures that go with it are relatively entertaining and I couldn't believe just how excited the students got about that song! As the bell signalling the end of period 7 rang, none of the students moved so i asked them why they weren't going outside to cheer their house team, and they all replied they wanted to sing more and play more French games! Two of them left, only to get their friends who should have come period 8 and introduce them to the joys of Gipsy the spider. Soon I realised that we also had quite a large audience outside the classroom's windows and door and that some of the students who were meant to sit and cheer their team were standing outside, copying the gestures and humming the tune with us. I suddenly pictured my Year 9 or 10 classes at Latymer singing the same song and laughed to myself atthe thought of the expression on their faces.

After the day ended, I left the school for Thamel, aka Tourist-town, to post some parcels, get my laundry and use the internet (I hadn't quite figured out by then that all of this was also available in Boudhanath) and set off with my anti-pollution mask and the determination not to pay more than 200 rupees for the cab ride.

On the way back, I asked the cab driver to drop me off at Bodha, the stupa, rather than at the school, and walked along candlelit streets (the electricty goes off every evening between 4 and 7 and it is pitch black from 6 pm onwards) where random stalls selling just about everything, from cut-price Tshirts to buffalo liver, from chicken to vegetables, from popcorn to samosa chat, from diwali paraphenalia to Tibetan prayer flags, had suddenly emerged. I could just about make out the shape of the stupa on my right and let myself be immersed in the night-tim hussle and bustle of the street, the chanting of the monks in the temple, the barking of the dogs, the gentle quarelling of the sellers, the ringing of the temple bells, the sound of the prayer mills and all the other weird and wonderful noises around me. I passed the smallest shops, all lit by myriads of candles, where whole families were busying themselves with pieces of wood, metal, fabric...As I was walking past a tailor's shop, a dingy little room where about half a dozen people were bent over their sewing machines working incessantly with deafening energy, I suddenly felt overwhelmingly sad. Sad for all these poor people working in such miserable conditions for hardly any money, guilty for all the « stuff » I own, for all the money I « waste », sad for the little lives of so many hundreds of thousands of people...when one of the girls in the workshop noticed me-she looked up and her face broke into the most beautiful and heartwarming smile I had seen in a long time and she waved at me excitedly. That is when I realised how silly I had been to feel sad for these people - it is only us with our vision of the world and what a « happy » life should be who seetheir situation as bad. For most of these people, the very fact they have a job, as opposed as being reduced to begging, the fact they have a roof over their heads, however precarious it may be, the fact they have somewhere they can call home, as opposed to sleeping on the streets, however small and crowded it may be, is enough to make them happy. It reminded me of a text we had read in class that day, about a fisherman and his greedy wife, the moral of which was that one should not be greedy, that one should be satisfied with what they have and not wish for more. That satisfaction is the key to happiness... And I felt happy and optimistic again and waved back to her. It may all seemvery simplistic and naive, yet it made me realise, yet again, that these people, even though they have nothing, have everything. And how wrong we are, and how constant desire, for more,more, more just makes us incredibly miserable and unsatisfied.

Next week, we will have a three day public holiday and Sonam, the Sponsorship Secretary, who is regularly in contact with the Club tibet in Strasbourg and knows Michel Jermann and all the volunteers who have come in recent years, has offered to show me around KTM, Pashupathinath, Patan and Bakthapur -Mum, stop reading now or you won't be able to sleep at night- on his motorbike and I am obviously incredibly excited, if also a little scared when i think about the KTM driving technique...I sure hope he has a very loud horn indeed!

On this note, I better head back to the school before Tinchuli turns into a crowbar youth and stray dog infested ghosttown!

tbc...