May 2008

A week in the countryside - Chaukot Village!

Namaste and greetings from Nepal. I have been here nearly 2 months now and our language and cultural training will soon be coming to an end and then it will be off to work. As part of our training we (the other volunteers and I) went to stay in a village an hour away from Kathmandu so that we could experience how Nepali people live and practice our language skills.

The majority of people in Nepal still live in and farm the countryside - only about 12% of the population is urban - and so the stay in the village gave us the opportunity to practice our language skills, gave us an insight into and an understanding into the lives of Neapli people and the opportunity to make some Nepali friends (and yes given the opportunity our new Nepali friends will phone every day for a friendly chat on their mobiles!).

Chaukot village where we stayed is in the hilly region between the plains and the Himalayas where Kathamandu is located. A lot of the area is farmed and made up of terraced fields growing potatoes maize rice wheat and mustard and green veggies as well as kitchen gardens growing herbs and chillies. All of the families had their own land for subsistance farming - for their own consumption with small amounts to sell on the local market as a source of cash. Some of the families also had day jobs as teachers, civil servants or traders too. The area is also surrounded by forested peaks of around 2300 metres where leopards and baloos (baloo is nepali for bear- like the jungle book bear) and even tigers according to the villagers are supposed to live. It was quite lovely and you could hear cuckoos and other loud 'whooping' birds, hear crickets and at night see fire flies flying around. The village is home to about 1500 people - there are also a few small shops where we had tea and snacks, a tailors, a government school and a health post.

My family and their home

I stayed up on the hill above the village with the Mahat familiy - where an extended family of 5 brothers all had their houses close by to each other. Orla another volunteer stayed next door. In my family Shri Hari Mahat - Dad was a civil servant and walked about an hour into town each day to work, Mum - Ganu -farmed the fields helped by her children 2 boys 18 and 11 Rupak and Rupas and a girl 17 Rupa. The children all went to private school. Unless familes are really poor their children don't go to government schools. My family also had a cow - used for milk and because the cow is a holy animal - several goats for meat and a couple of hundred chickens that they were farming for meat that lived in the roof. By rural Nepali standards my family were not badly off. Despite this their home was a very traditional Nepali home - a three story home with rooms in the roof - floors made from mud and clay as they have been made or hundreds of years before, steep wooden ladder like staircases between floors, wooden shutters and low door frames! I bumped my head a few times! The kitchen was on the ground floor - there was a wood fire for cooking on - very smoky as there was no chimney -as well as a couple of gas rings all of the cooking was done sitting on the floor. In Orla's house next door, as with many homes, the goats also shared the kitchen with the family in the evening. Upstairs wooden panels divided up the area up into bedrooms and the chickens lived up stairs in the roof (poor things!) You could hear them scuttling round at night when you were trying to sleep. The beds in Nepal are also rather hard - a wooden plank / panel with a thick cotton duvet on it - and one to put over you. My family did have an old black and white TV in one of their bedrooms - there was electricity several evenings a week just like in Kathmandu. Upstairs They also had a cupboard full of colourful and sparkly Saris for special ocassions and they dressed me up in one of their Saris too! The family like many in the village also possessed a couple of mobile phones too! I found it quite strange whilst digging up the fields by hand - as has been done for hundreds of years to hear Nokia ring tones and people chatting on their phones. But why not - at first It did seem a bit strange that the locals people have such basic homes but happily embrace mobile phones! They were very surprised I didn't have one!

There was an outside charppy (squat loo) and a hose pipe stand which were both shared by several families - the hose pipe was busy as it was used for collecting water, showering and washing your clothes - infront of our house there was a very well maintained mud yard which goats and people gathered on.

As extended families often all live near each other they are always popping in and out of each others homes to say hello, share news (If Orla hadn't eaten her dinner or got up late then I'd soon know about it!) or come and have a good look at or chat to the foreign visitors -also there were children from 3 years to 18 years old in the surrounding homes who found us foreigners a great attraction particularly the younger ones.

Everybody was keen to play, chat, show us around and have us help out with their work - so it was quite full on - especially as most of this was done in Nepali - only the teenagers in my family spoke a few words of English!

The days started quite early in the village with most people up at dawn - by 5 am - I managed this one morning and went to dig the field with the family ( turning over the ground from cut mustard seeds so that maize could be planted) It took about 2 hours to do a terrcace- mum, the eldest boy a friend and me - manually digging - I didn't do too badly but had big blisters on my hands afterwards (mum was keen to show my blisters to all her friends!) - and I also had a huge appetite for braekfast after all the digging - which I didnt usually have! Breakfast was at 9 am and like the evening meal is Dhaal Bhaat - bland lentil slop, mountains of rice, a few vegtables (potatoes and other) and ocassionally an egg. Other mornings before breakfast we'd go for a walk round the fields or up the hill with the children (except the teenage girls who were usually on cooking or other work duty) have a cold shower at the hose pipe - wrapped in a sheet to maintain your modesty, or help out with cooking and washing up chores. In the afternoon / evening after school it was quite similar. Berry picking / going for a walk with the kids - cutting mustard seeds and grass for the animals or potato picking - helping out with a bit of homework, cooking dinner (dhaal bhaat again!). We'd often sit outside on the terrace to chat as it went dark fire flies flew around and the nights we didn't have thunder and rain there were lots of bright stars.

Nepalis are keen to entertain - and be entertained - they are good singers and dancers - and one evening on the terrace they sung a few (very long) songs and did some Hindu dancing - Orla and I were then told it was our turn - we managed jingle bells and demonstrated some country dancing! Orla also managed an Irish Jig. Our colleagues in other homes were doing similar things too.

I found dinner time a bit of a test! In typical Nepali style my family ate their food - liquidy sloppy rice - with their hands - they also don't chew their food so they eat very quickly and they eat mountains of it! I started off trying to eat with my hands but was just too slow - mum / big sister -whoever cooks the food - in typical nepali traddition waits until everybody has finished before they eat- so I thought it was only fair that I resorted to a spoon so they didn't have to wait too long! At times in the kitchen it was a bit smoky and there were rather a lot of flies - plus a fair bit of snuffling and spitting goes on round meal time too!

Community project

We were the 2nd group of volunteers to go and stay in Chaukot village - and as part of our stay in the village we did a project to benefit the community - after much discussion the village requested that we helped to improve resources at the local government school which children aged 4 - 14 attend. So we cleaned up the grounds and with a small budget and some creativity bought and made indoor and out door games and resources with the help of teachers and students - some of the teaching volunteers then demonstrated how to use them. We made puppets brought skipping ropes, made learning cards (numbers roman and sanskrit alphabet plus others) - brought the old table tennis back to life, brought balls, made skittles. The children loved it. As many of the teachers have fields to tend to, homes to clean, animals to tend to and families to feed and do not have the convenience of all our western modern labour saving devices they do not have time to work long hours plan lessons and make teaching resources.

The community also wanted us to hold some sessions so that they could talk to us about life in our countries - and they asked many questions - for example the lives of widows overseas - in Nepal women until very recently have had no property rights and if her husband died she was (and still is) very much as the mercy of her husbands family (in fact it was only about 80 years ago that the law was introduced to stop women having to join the funeral pyre of her dead husband!) So we explained how things were in the UK - retaining property - opportunity to have a new partner - which the women thought was a very good idea. -

Understandably the teenage girls also liked the idea of dating before getting married - so that they can find a 'suitable' husband - many of the marraiges - especially outside of Kathmandu are still arranged - even the teenage daughter Rupa who I stayed with who was very confident and joked a lot with other young men in the village - was still expecting an arranged marriage.

Overall we were not saying a western way of life was best - (given our society's problems) but highlighting what it was like living in a society with more choice and equality.

On our last night we had a community get together and party - A lot of the community turned out -some of the local girls danced for us - and of course we had to perform too! We wrote and sang a simple thank you song for the villagers in Nepali (to the tune of jingle bells!) and did a short play about how we had been transformed into nepali people throughout the course of the week!

On the last day we gave presents to our host families- my family also gave orla, Udai (the school director) and I a small leaving ceremony outside the familiy home - giving us local sweets, bangles, flowers and braids in our hair and Tikka (the red dots on your forehead showing that you have been blessed). Then we had another good bye ceremony in the village with more flowers tinsel and tikka!

Overall my family were great to me and accommodating (even if they did talk about me infront of me and think that I couldn't understand! - Orla found the same!) they liked to joke and were usually fun to be with - also - it must have been rather strange for them having us in their homes too! We have all been invited back - and I plan to go in the next month or so on my mountain bike when I have started work.

I also felt much healthier after a week in the countryside too - Kathmandu is so polluted busy and chaotic - and although I might sound like I was complaining about the food it was very good for my tummy - I'm still suffering - if the food bugs aren't enough - the geasiness and spiciness of food in Kathmandu gets you! Some of my colleagues are suffering too! Hope to move into my apartment at the end of May - so can start cooking for myself!

Well it'd be lovely to hear from you - I will aim to get some photos on my blog site shortly of the village stay too - http://www.offexploring.com/mandyinnepal

Bye for now

stay in touch

love and best wishes

Mandy