Volunteering in Nepal: entertaining orphans

When I first got here to Pokhara I asked myself the question how I’m supposed to entertain the orphans living at the two orphanages were I work in the best way. In Pepsi Cola I worked for one afternoon at an orphanage when there was a holiday and there was no other volunteer to play with the orphans, but before that I’d never worked in an orphanage before. And that was just for one afternoon, which was easy to manage. I took them to a small field behind the orphanage where they played football and managed the application of the rules by themselves, which is good because I don’t know the rules of football. All I did was watch over them and especially the youngest orphans to make sure they weren’t doing any crazy stuff. When they got tired of football after an hour or so, the power came back on and they used the opportunity to watch TV. At that point they didn’t need me to entertain them anymore and I left.

From when I got here in the end of March and until when I leave Pokhara again at the 30th of April, I will probably be working with at least D.B. and Rekha’s foster home here. I intend to keep working at the other orphanage I just left as well, but that depends on if I find any other work that needs more time and how well I can cope with C. All this time the children have a school holiday which ends somewhere near the end of April as far as I know. So most of the time they’re around the foster home and orphanage for the entire day and they appreciate it much if I can spend some time with them, even if in principle they can entertain themselves.

Volunteers can take them to the park or another playground near Lakeside where they have a lot more room to play, doing things such as football and badminton which are not really practical to play in the very confined exterior space of the orphanages. I’ve accompanied them to the playground only once so far, when I wanted to take the iniative for a second time the weather didn’t allow it. When I accompanied them to the playground I decided to teach some of the children some basic kickboxing moves, which I practice myself. They liked to copy my moves.

An important improvisation which I came up with myself and which I’m quite proud of is my idea to read them fairy tales. I remember being read the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm by my parents and caretakers when I was a kid, so I decided to use that to read to the orphans as well. The advantages of using Grimm’s Fairy Tales include that it (the original and some older English translations) is very old and that copyright no longer applies to it. This means that you can simply go to the Project Gutenberg website and download an English translation legally. So there is no need to buy a book which I need to carry around, which is convenient, but it might also be available in some Nepali bookshops which I’m told can be surprisingly well-equipped.

Another option is the Russian Fairy Tales which I downloaded just to be sure, in case Grimm’s Fairy Tales might not be enough. I learned about this work when I read the article about fairy tales on Wikipedia, and downloaded it as well from Project Gutenberg as I thought they might come in handy. However, Grimm’s Fairy Tales contains 210 fairy tales already, which would mean that I would need to read more than almost eleven stories every day if I wanted to finish reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales to them before I leave. So while some stories are very short and some are not suitable to be read, I think Grimm’s Fairy Tales alone will suffice to provide enough reading material.

With not suitable I mean that some fairy tales feature Western culture quite heavily, so that they cannot be understood by the children over here, especially if you need an additional step of translation to Nepali by the oldest children because the very young orphans can’t understand English. For example the third fairy tale, Our Lady’s Child, requires some knowledge about catholicism to understand. The first fairy tale, The Frog King, by contrast, is suitable for a multicultural audience.

My method of reading the fairy tales so far has been to take my notebook to the orphanage, open the HTML-document of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and start reading fairy tales sentence by sentence while pausing in between so the oldest child can translate to Nepali. It is quite distracting to follow the text with your eye while pausing and keeping up the tempo of reading at the same time. What makes it even more difficult is that the English used can be a bit difficult for my translator, so I had to simplify the English as I was reading it. Nevertheless, my first attempts so far were reasonably succesful and the children liked it. But to avoid these problems I think that from now on I’m going to read the fairy tales in advance and memorize them, so I can tell them without having to read at the same time.

When the two whiteboards I bought for both the foster home and the orphanage were ready another opportunity presented itself to me to play some games with them. As I had already written, I use them to play some hangman, but I also play a word game which was suggested to me by Patrick when I was teaching at the CBIA. First the children have to make up a three-letter word, and then they need to think of another three-letter word which starts with the last letter of the previous word. Then the next word has to be four letters, et cetera.

Most recently I also practiced the alphabet with the children, because some new orphans apparently didn’t get much education yet. I practiced pronunciation of the letters with them and asked them to give words starting with specific letters, which was a good exercise.

However, I want to play more different games with them, but unfortunately I don’t know any more. While I will search for ideas on the Internet, suggestions here in the comments would be appreciated.

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