26 and Counting

Today one of the Nepali Volunteers asked me what countries I have been to and I told her many. However she was not satisfied with this answer demanded that I give her a list. I sat there racking my brain trying to remember my life and honestly it was amazing to think about all the places I’ve been. However it also made me realize the trouble with traveling is that every time I go somewhere new I add more places I want to see. While through globalization it is clear that the world is getting smaller, traveling contradicts this by creating an endless list of places to go.

So Far I’ve been to (in chronological order):

1. America
2. Canada
3. France
4. England
5. Spain
6. Ireland
7. Scotland
8. Switzerland
9. Germany
10. The Netherlands
11. Romania
12. Italy
13. Greece
14. Hungary
15. Czech Republic
16. Austria
17. Jamaica
18. Peru
19. Israel
20. Turkey
21. St. Lucia
22. Grenada
23. Hong Kong
24. China 
25. Taiwan
26. Nepal

Thanksgiving

This week is thanksgiving and for the third year in row I am missing it. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and this year it seems to be making me more home sick then normal. I assume it’s because in the past while I have been abroad I have been with at least one other American who can empathize while this year I am living in a house of all international volunteers and am the only American in my village. A week ago I told my roommates about thanksgiving and that it would be really wonderful if we could make a nice dinner and make our own “thanksgiving”.  While everyone agreed still no one really understands what it is. I tried to come up with ideas of what we could make that might resemble thanksgiving. Regardless of the fact that we are all vegetarian, in order to have turkey we would have to kill it our selves. So that was obviously not happening. As I went through the available produce in my head the only thing that mildly resembled something I might see at thanksgiving was pumpkin. I began to create a menu that revolved around pumpkin. To start we could have a cabbage raddish salad with roasted pumpkin seats, for dinner a Pumpkin, Potato Soup, and for dessert crepes filled with a sweet pumpkin pie like concoction. PERFECT!

     Now the only problem was how to get the pumpkin.  While many of our neighbors grow and have vegetables we have not figured out exactly the bartering system. Therefore being able to obtain a pumpkin was a more complicated matter then just asking my Nepali neighbor. But I was determined and I had 4 days to make it happen! I asked the Nepali Volunteers if they could help me on this matter

and of course they said they would do their best. Well word spread fast that I wanted a pumpkin and everyone jumped on board to help get me one! However on Wednesday I still seemed to not have a pumpkin. I was starting to doubt the success of my thanksgiving meal when at lunch a few of the Nepali volunteers showed up with a pumpkin!!! I was so happy! I immediately went home to show my roommates but when I got home there was another pumpkin waiting for me!!! I was so excited about my two pumpkins that when my neighbor came by with a third pumpkin I was beside myself. Needless to say that night we feasted on pumpkin and celebrated a really special thanksgiving.

It’s the Little Things

This is our drying rack/sink made
out of bamboo and a bucket

As mentioned earlier there is a huge issue with garbage. Therefore as a group we are constantly attempting to be as inventive and creative as possible in order to reuse material. For example, if you were to walk around our house you would see that our flower pot is in fact a plastic water bottle, that our bathroom curtains are maid out of a potato sack, and that our “sink” is made out of a bucket.

            My favorite thing, however, is that I have learned how crochet using plastic bags. There is a special way to cut the bag in order to turn it into a long thin piece as if it were string. When crocheted together you can create bowls, bags, wallets, baskets, etc. Nevertheless, ever since I have learned I can’t stop. I find myself picking up plastic bags on the side of the road, organizing them by color, and spending all my free time crocheting plastic bags into a variety of things. And I’m not going to lie, I’ve gotten pretty good!

            While crocheting all around the village many women and children have stopped to watch. Many people are shocked and very impressed. I decided one day to sit with one of the girls who had been following me around and show her how I was doing it. Immediately I was surrounded by children all curious and wanting to learn as well. I was so excited by the interest and decided that I wanted to organize an official class. I asked all the children who wanted to learn to meet me the following day at 4:00 and to bring a plastic bag and pair of scissors.

            Based on previous stories other volunteers have told me in regards to organizing people I was not expecting a very large turn out. Nevertheless at 4:00 the next day I walked up to the tap and waited for my participants. To my surprise I saw 7 girls walking down to meet me, all with plastic in their hands! I spent one hour teaching them how to cut the plastic and how to start. It was  very hard because only a few people understand English so it involved a lot of repetition and hand gesturing in order for each participant to understand. When it started to get dark I told them that it was time to go and told them that if they were interested in continuing to learn to meet me in three days at the time and same place.

       

While I was really surprised by the initial turn out I expected that the second meeting would not be as successful because of the significant gap between lessons. However regardless I realized that I would need to have crochet needles for everyone because as of that point we only had mine and there were clearly to many people to share just one crochet needle. When I went home I explained the problem to my roommates who helped me come up with the idea to make needles out of bamboo! For the next two days worked endlessly making crochet needles out of bamboo sticks, which actually work quite well!! By the end I had make 27! When the day came to meet the girls I was once again surprised with everyone’s arrival plus additional participants!  At the end of the class I was able to give each girl her own stick in order to practice at home.

Over the next week I met with the girls 2 more times, however I was still unsure of whether everyone was understanding the different concepts. While I kept asking everyone to bring to me what they had made at home, everyone kept throwing theirs away because of the mistakes. However yesterday I passed by one the girls and she called me over. She asked if I wanted to see what she has made and I said “of course!” The young girl reached into her bag and pulled out a little basket!! I was shocked! This whole time I was very unsure of my teaching abilities and whether anyone of the girls were catching on and learning, or whether they just liked having something to do after to school regardless of their progress. However this confirmed that they not only were learning but also practicing and getting better.

While life in the village is slow and at many times it’s hard to see the effect we can have here, it’s clear that if you put in the time it’s 100% worth it. More importantly, it’s the little things in life that count.

Dirt, Mud, and Buffalo Shit.

The amount of dust in our house has been a constant problem. Even if you sweep, the dust will return in a matter of minutes because our ground is made of dirt. In our bedrooms we could not walk around without shoes, and if anything were to fall on the ground it would become dirty instantly. The floor in our kitchen seemed to be cracking and overall everyone was very confused on how to approach the problem.  Discussing it amongst ourselves we began to find out own solutions. In two rooms people decided to lay rice shelling’s on the floor in order to suppress the dust.  While this seemed to be a solution for their bedrooms, it was not a solution to our kitchen. Dirt seemed to be getting everywhere. Cleaning the space and ourselves didn’t seem to matter because no matter what everything was covered.

            Yesterday the conversation was brought up in front of one of the Nepali Fellows and she simply explained that in order to maintain our houses we had to consistently “repair it”. This process involved creating a mixture of water, clay, and buffalo poop and laying it across the floor. At first, my thought was that obviously there had to have been a better solution to this problem then laying rice shelling’s all over the floor which had turned our house into a Gymboree.  I also couldn’t help but think we were ridiculous for not asking a Nepali person to begin with. Everyone here lives in mud houses and clearly we could not be the only people suffering from this problem and that obviously there must be a solution. However then my mind jumped to my second thought, which was “excuses me? You want me to lay cow shit on my kitchen floor?!”

 

    Today I decided that I had enough with our floor and that I needed to see for myself how this would work. I asked one of the Nelpali girls to come over and help me so that in the future I could do it by myself. As soon as Kritika came over she said “so where is the nearest buffalo?” I pointed down to my neighbor and we began to walk down to his house. As we approached the buffalo Kritika simply bent down and began picking up it’s poop and putting it into the bucket. Once it was a quarter of the way full she switched to mud. Once she was satisfied with the proportions we headed back to our house. I carried two buckets into the house, one with the poop mixture and one of water. Kritika  then instructed me to take out handfuls of the mixture and place it in scattered locations on the floor.After that I was instructed to take the water and pour a small bit over each spot where I had placed the mixture. Once that had been done we both knelt down to the ground each with a rag in hand and began spreading it across the floor.  

While I was shocked at the fact that I was actually spreading shit across my kitchen floor, I was more shocked at how well it worked! The cracks in our floor began to disappear and the dust settled. I also learned that in rooms where the dust is only a moderate problem you can just wet the floor and it will re-harden. Immediately I wan't to hit myself and say DUH! Clearly When your mud house turns into dirt, add water to turn it back to mud! Once we were done I immediately went to my room with a bucket of water and rag and wiped the surface of my floor and watched how the floor magically turned from a dusty uneven disaster to a smooth surface!                                                                                                                         

Our First Week in the Village…

Our first week in the village has been dedicated to setting up house. This has consisted of cleaning, building, making our compost, setting up our kitchen garden, and overall making it feel like a “home”.

            On our first day we focused on setting up our common space/kitchen. This required a lot of man power because we needed to build shelves, un pack, and organize. Our first challenge was cleaning. When living in a mud house, the dirt never seems to end. Once we got the dust under control we began brainstorming where everything was going to go. It was amazing to see how creative and resourceful my roommates are. If you have ever seen the game show “whose line is it anyway” then you can have a better idea of what this process was like. There is an imporov game that is played on the show where each contestant is given one object and they have to come up with infinite possibilities for the use of the
object. We would look at rocks and see shelves; we would look at a plastic water bottle and see a flower pot. It would have been easy to look around and say “we have nothing, we can’t work with this.” But instead everyone rose to the occasion and created a space that I believe is really special.

The rest of the week has been dedicated to creating our kitchen garden and setting up our own rooms. I really have enjoyed the kitchen garden because it’s an extremely useful skill that I have never been introduced to before. Because we are planting things out of season we first needed to create a nursery. This is a small space to grow the seedlings in a controlled environment

which we will then replant in our garden. In order to prepare the space we needed to first dig up all the soil and turn it over. We then created a mixture of compost, dirt, and sad that we would use for the nursery. Once we had developed the space we drew small horizontal lines across the 
space to place the seeds. We planted cabbage, 
cucumber, tomato, basil, and onion. Once everything was planted we placed straw over it and then created a plastic dome around it to create a green house effect.