In to the new year...

Sack race during the school's anniversary celebration. I introduced dodgeball to them, and it was a big hit during the trial run a few days before. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to do it during the celebration. If you are Nepali, or have been here long enough, you recognize that things around here run on 'Nepali time', which means everything and everyone is always late.

A few of the boys get after it on school clean-up day. This is toilet is the most disgusting one I've seen since Renton's bout with Edinburgh's worst in Trainspotting.

This is how you cross the river behind the school. In a basket. There are a lot of suspension bridges around, but I've seen quite a few places where this is how they do things.

Green Club Elections.

A game we played on World AIDS Day. Passing the ring of a condom from pen to pen. These girls are Santi and Laxmi, both Green Club Executive Board members.

Sandesh (Sawn-dess) and Rabi (Rah-be), also Green Club executive board members.

Our World AIDS Day Rally.

Our first Green Club meeting. The Green Club is our extra curricular group which help us get our message out to the school and community. The one at our school is quite big, and there's a lot of great kids in it

Group shot of a bunch of us in a closet-sized hotel room. This was the day when we all headed our separate ways, beginning our village stays.

My handkerchief. All the Nepali's carry them, and most of them have Titanic graphics on them. When I was shopping for one, shopkeepers would always pitch them to me, saying, 'Jack and Rose! Jack and Rose!'. Britney is usually found on t-shirts, and along with Avril Lavigne and pro wrestlers (usually John Cena), that's almost all these kids wear. It's pretty funny.

I should mention that when I upload pictures, the first one that loads is the one that ends up the bottom, so my captions may seem a little out of order, because sometimes they just aren't written in order.

I was looking at some old posts of mine and I realize that a lot of them are largely incoherent, so I'm going to work on straightening that out. A lot of the time when I'm on a computer I'm in a huge rush, either because there is a lot to do in Kathmandu, or because I'm in Dhading and don't know when the power is going to go out. Some of the girls have gone as far as writing their blog posts ahead of time, but I don't really have any desire to be that organized. I'll try a little harder, though.

I'm in Kathmandu now, and it's just Andrew and I. My school is in the middle of exams, so there isn't a lot for me to get done in Gajuri, so I came in to have a chance to blog and actually put up pictures. I also need contact solution, which is impossible to find outside of this city because Nepali people pretty much don't wear them. Whenever I'm putting mine in they stare at me like I'm levitating.

Other than a few things being unavailable, and the odd sickness, I'm adapting to village life quite well. Really, it's not quite what I expected when I began thinking about SPW this summer, or maybe it's just become normal to me. I have a cell phone (977 984 900 7241! Holler!), and I can charge my iPod, and everything that is different is getting easier. The tap I shower at in Gajuri is a couple of minute walk from our house, but it's not as popular as it once was now that the weather has gotten significantly colder, so as long as I head to it before 8 in the morning, it's all mine. In that sense I'm certainly benefitting from being Canadian, but things will get much more interesting when March hits and the weather gets stupidly hot. I've even been told that Gajuri and the other highway communities of the Dhading district get especially hot because we're a little lower, so there's no doubt in my mind that the heat will be the toughest thing I have to adapt to.

Fortunately, our house is completely concrete, so hopefully the sleeping is still okay. I may have mentioned before that our situation seems to be among the best ones of the eleven placement villages in the Dhading district. A lot of people are in mud huts, so are house is a definite perk. What I'm happiest about, though, is that I have a host family that didn't have SPW volunteers last year. A lot of the other volunteers have great families, I really can't say that anyone doesn't like their host family, but a lot of the families (and schools, for that matter) have a tendency to mention what their international volunteer did last year, and in many cases that is completely unfair. In some situations the volunteer used their own money to buy a lot of gifts for their family, or to do some very ambitious things at the school or in the community. Any by ambitious I mean expensive. It's hard to say that volunteers shouldn't make those sorts of contributions if they can, but it places certain expectations that just can't be met. What's important is making sure we teach the community groups and Green Clubs to do their own fundraising, which will actually be a fairly difficult task considering Nepal isn't exactly overwhelmed with disposable income. We have some ideas, though, including selling greeting cards made of recycle paper, and tea mats, plates and baskets made of straw and plastic wrappers. The wrappers make the plates colorful, so it's a pretty cool idea that we picked up from a former SPW volunteer while we were on vacation in Chitwan (more on him later). These things are great ideas, because waste management simply isn't a priority for most of Nepal. Garbage is typically burned or thrown in the river, which is a shame considering the beauty of this country.

I want to pause to note that I realize there should be two spaces after a period, but this space bar is sticking, or the computer is taking out the spaces without my realizing it. I mention this because some of my friends, while wonderful human beings, are quick to point out such errors. They know who they are.

I'm going to end this post with a virtual tour of the house. I think I'll do one more post with a bunch of vacation pictures, and then head out of Kathmandu, but I'll probably do another text-only blog in the near future.