It's been a little while since I've done a proper blog entry, so I apologize. I'm hoping these next few entries will be a nice balance of pictures and text, but I've gotten a little lazy with the picture taking of late. I didn't write a proper entry about our Christmas festivities, but I can sum it up by saying it was an absolutely fantastic weekend that however felt nothing like Christmas. I'm not complaining, though, as we saw cool things and ate great food.
Not only were we able to spend Christmas together but New Year's, as well, as our monthly District Meeting was held over three days in Dhading Besi, the district center. On New Year's Eve we stocked up on Pringles, party hats (that read 'Happy Birthday'... close enough) and booze and hung out with all the internationals in the hotel room of Andrew, Andy and I. To get an idea of how cheap it was compared to your New Year's, we guys each bought three bottles of Bullet Whiskey (probably 8 oz or so) for 40 rupees each, along with an 80 rupee 1.5 liter bottle of Coke, totalling 200 rupees, or a little less than $3 USD.
The next day we had a picnic with all the volunteers to celebrate. The picnic, combined with typical SPW Nepal disorganization helped stretch the meeting from a two-day affair in to three days, although I'm not really complaining. It is difficult to make any NGO run like clockwork, particularly in Nepal where punctuality and firmly established plans don't ever seem to be expected, and are rarely even considered. That said, we international volunteers were quite pleasantly surprised when Guru, the SPW National program co-ordinator, responded to our suggestions for future language training by immediately promising us another week of classes.
Not knowing when or where the language training would be, I went in to Kathmandu that weekend with Andrew so that I could put some pictures online and spend an iTunes gift card that I'd gotten for Christmas (on the new Killers and Bloc Party albums, 'Trashcan' by The Delta Spirit... and the Music Man soundtrack). On the first night in town we hit a pizza place called Fire and Ice, which used to be a favorite of the crown prince and his girlfriend, before he allegedly massacred his family in a drunken rage in 2001. You can read about that here. What is interesting about the prince is that no one in Nepal seems to believe he did it. The version I've heard is that the King's uncle, who succeeded the prince as king (the prince sat as king for mere hours while reportedly in a coma, although it is believed he died at the scene) was behind it all, and that's easy to believe seeing as that his immediate family, who were also at the picnic during which all this occurred, left with their lives. Whether I have that summary correct or not, I don't know, but I do know it was reported by all news outlets that the prince was the gunman. Nepalese disbelief of this had a lot to do with the revolution that happened over the following years and eventually lead to the elections that saw the Maoist party coming to power last year.
Undeterred by history and motivated by the delicious greasy pizza, we returned to Fire and Ice the next night. I had decided to extend my stay because our students in Gajuri were in exams and thus I had no classes to teach the next day. It worked out extremely well, because Andrew found out later that afternoon that he had been accepted in to Cambridge's medical school. He chose Fire and Ice for the first portion of the celebration, and Cheer's for the rest. Cheer's and it's Tongbas have already been mentioned in this blog, and it has become our favorite Kathmandu hangout where, appropriately, they know our names.
I returned to Gajuri the next day to discover something quite surprising: a volunteer was sick, and it wasn't me. Saroj had come down with something at the picnic three days before, and wasn't feeling any better. Our aama (host mother) pulled out a Nepali home remedy, having Saroj sit on a brick that had been heated up in the fire. Many Nepalese seem to believe that when it comes to being sick, hot is good and cold is bad. In fact, when Elizabeth caught a cold, she was told by many different people that the cause was surely all those oranges she'd been eating, what with oranges being a 'cold' food. When our aama pulled out the bricks, I asked Rajesh, who studies health, what he thought, and he was pessimistic. Indeed, it didn't work, and Saroj was off to the hospital in Kathmandu the next day. Rajesh went along, but our district co-ordinator said only one of us could join Saroj, so I stayed home without them for two days. While I love Saroj and Rajesh, those two days of privacy were awesome. When the guys got back and we were out around Gajuri again, people were always asking where we'd been for the past week. It was funny, because when we'd explain that Saroj had been sick and had to go to Kathmandu, everyone would ask, 'Not Ryan?'
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