Teaching, 🏫 talking 🗣 and learning a lot! 📚
Our “accommodation’’
After about a 4h drive with our guide Subin (president & founder of the association Looks Nepal) we arrived in a tiny village lost in the mountains, 🏔the village in which we would stay for a week to do some volunteering. We had quite a few expectations of course but let’s say not all of them were exactly positive. 😅 For example we knew that they were all very poor that we were not going to take showers 🛀🏼 for a week and get dirtier than I would want to be, but on the other hand we would be living an absolutely unique experience and learn a lot. So we walked up to the school and as I said in my previous blog, we were receiving curious looks from the villagers all around us. After all that la di da in nepali and quite a lot of fidgeting (I was a bit bored) we went up to the family’s house who were going to feed us and set up the Yes, the tents🏕.
Mum hates sleeping in tents and the most she has ever done is glamping (it was in England so the weather was trash but I was only 5 at the time) so we did not really know how everything would go. To be honest none of us knew how this was going to turn out, not even the guide as we were there first volunteers wanting to go and help in the village…
Teaching: As bad as you think your teachers are… Rethink it, it is really really hard and I have had experience! 3h every day from 10 am to 1pm plus our daily homework 📚for school, gosh it is exhausting. Especially if you have to sing the ABC, "Old Macdonald had a farm", "head shoulders knees and toes" and "if you are happy and you know it" 30 times a day! 🥵 No, actually it wasn’t all bad, the kids were cute and some really enthusiastic. 🤗
I think 😬 that they learned quite a few things which would include the ABC, the animals, a few actions and the body parts. What was kind of disappointing was that in one of our lessons about animals we were playing a board race (in our case had flashcards with the animals we had learned about and they had to put them in the category land sea or sky) and a kid took the lion flashcard the wrong way round and without noticing wrote "noil" 🤣. But anyway we did our best!
Eating: During this week, I think it was the first time in my life I had eaten practically the same thing about 11 times in a row. 😦Luckily, I liked It otherwise I would have starved to death with only a few mars bars to eat! The ‘’thing’’ was Dal Baht. Now the name sounds like a really elaborated thing with loads of stuff an’ all but it is not. It is rice with a sort of lentil soup. 🍛 It is nice but after few times I got a bit bored with it. There is also a lot of do’s and don’ts so you have to concentrate 😓 really hard so that you don’t do something wrong that would offend them. Believe it or not it really tiring!
Site visits: 😞
Subin was always keeping to his schedule, which had two site visits per day. At first, I dreaded the site visits as It was only going and seeing people and them talking in nepali and not being able to communicate much. But afterwards they got better and better. we began to participate a bit with the housework for example cutting grass 🍃for the goats/buffalos peeling the corn 🌽and the best bit; taking tons of selfies with the adorable baby goats! 🐐
Oh wait I forgot one… We actually milked a buffalo, it felt really weird but in the end, we drunk the milk and it was sooooo good!
We went to see a shaman. A shaman is a person who is believed to be a witch doctor. To my surprise he was dressed in normal clothes and looked like a normal person. In the village nobody really believed in scientists and doctors like you or me, they thought that when they had any aches or pains it was because someone had cast a spell on them and that they had to go and see a shaman to take the spell away. The shaman’s ceremony lasted for a long time as there were a lot of people in the village that wanted to be cured. Personally I am not very sure about this but I felt quite privileged to be invited to this kind of thing. This was quite an unusual thing (as many other things we have done this week 😜) and I do not think I will forget it!
So I think you’re sick of me babbling on about this but on the whole this week was amazing, very tiring but worth not washing for a week!
Hope you guys liked this article and for more info check my last article and Eleonore’s one. Thanks 🙏🏼for taking the time, if you did not already do not forget to follow me and clap 👏🏼for this article
Love from, 🤗
Apolline 💜💜
