travels

What has been upsetting me is that lately I’m constantly worried about money. I don’t really have an idea were most of my money was spent on over the course of the last few weeks in Kathmandu, which amplifies those worries. It’s probably on the trips I did with other volunteers for the most part and to a lesser degree on the food consumed while doing those trips. Besides that I haven’t been spending much. While I was not doing any trip I’ve only spent 50 NPR a day on average primarily for eating lunch in Pepsi Cola. Of course being worried is probably very relative, because I’ve spent only 200 Euros for the month I’ve been living in Nepal so far, but I want to live cheaply and expected my expenditures to be less.

I haven’t been eating out for dinner outside of Pepsi Cola at all when I was not on a trip, Thamel with it’s many restaurants required a long bus ride. Pokhara’s Lakeside by contrast has maybe fifty restaurants per square kilometer at walking distance. While Lakeside is quite a bit more expensive than Pepsi Cola the restaurants are also higher quality, and it’s still quite cheap for Dutch standards if main dishes are 350 NPR (3,5 EUR) on average compared to four times that cost in the Netherlands. My samosa addiction which started in Pepsi Cola doesn’t require more expenditures though, if you move a few hundred meters away from Lakeside I can find them just like they’re served in Pepsi Cola for the same price.

So, the conclusion for a food lover like me is that I should stop worrying about money and enjoy the opportunity to sample a massive collection of restaurants. Better do it here than in the Netherlands where it is a lot more expensive. The foster home serves dal bhat which is just as nice as the one served by Sobha and Sugandha, but I’m up for a bit more variation in food. To alleviate my worries I’ve decided on using a daily budget for eating out, I’ve allocated a budget of 430 NPR for the period of Monday 28 March until Sunday 17 April, which means I’ll allow myself to spend a maximum of 9000 NPR during that period. I expect to spend far less than that amount because I won’t be eating out every day.

Pokhara doesn’t have a VSN office which provides free WiFi. Many of the restaurants provide free WiFi though, so I just go there and order lassi or an Indian bread for approximately 70 NPR and use the WiFi there. Considering that you get food or drinks besides Internet access, this is cheaper than the Internet cafes which charge 100 NPR for an hour. The Internet cafes are much cheaper outside of Lakeside however.

At this moment I have already been in Pokhara for two days, which I will be writing about later. First I’ll write about two meetings with some people in Kathmandu in the days before I left.

During the exam period at the CBIA a teacher who was also an invigilator at the exams had a talk with me. His name is Pramod and he teaches computer science at the CBIA part-time. It turns out that computer science is learning children elementary skills on how to use Microsoft Windows and Office. Windows and Office are 100% likely to be pirated copies.

This is such a pity, because this is a deliberate tactic of Microsoft; they prefer people to use their software illegally rather than have them use competing products such as Linux or LibreOffice. Then at a certain time in the future they could request the government to persecute the use of illegal software more actively, in the hope that the people will start paying for it rather than switch to Linux because they’ve gotten used to Windows or because Microsoft has created a vendor lock-in. Only the VSN Office has two PC’s running Ubuntu and are available to be used by the volunteers.

Back on topic, Pramod is the director of the Momentum International Education Foundation (MIEF), which mediates for Nepali students who want to study in a foreign country. When I told Pramod that I studied a bachelor in History in the Netherlands, he mentioned his work and that he wanted to contact Dutch universities to make collaboration agreements with them so he could send Nepali students to Dutch universities. He said that his proficiency in English was not so good and that he had difficulty in figuring out how to contact Dutch universities. Because I had nothing to do in Pepsi Cola in the afternoon during the exam period, I decided to help him out.

He took me to his small office in the center of Kathmandu, where his assistant also works. I started by visiting the Wikipedia page which provides a list of all universities in the Netherlands and contacted the most important ones over the course of the afternoon. I fine tuned the language used in the standard text for sending e-mails to the universities. I noticed that my own university, Utrecht University, didn’t allow for foreign students to study there if it’s not through an exchange program with a foreign university. Other universities do allow foreign students to study independently without an exchange program.

The University of Amsterdam apparently required that agreements be made with the International Offices of every individual faculty, which required me to send a lot of e-mails. For other universities I just e-mailed the central International Office, sometimes because it was not clear if every faculty was to contacted individually or not. In general I was a bit surprised to see that the amount of programs taught in English at Dutch universities is quite limited, and that some universities have a far greater international orientation than others. At the end of the afternoon a power cut prevented me from doing any further work, which provided me the opportunity to chat with Pramod.

We talked about the politics of Nepal. Currently a committee is designing a new constitution, a process which has been ongoing since the peace agreement with the Maoist insurgents had been reached as far as I know. However, they have already missed multiple deadlines and extended with new deadlines. Many people expect a new extension, Pramod included. Besides managing MIEF, Pramod also works for an NGO called National Effort for Education & Health Development (NEEHD). He showed me a few advertisements which were calls for proposals by the UN and the World Bank to implement development aid programs in Nepal. He told me that he was currently working on submitting proposals so that NEEHD might be awarded with implementing these programs. Life is difficult in remote regions of Nepal where people have limited access to health care for example and that’s why these remote regions are targeted by NEEHD.

After discussing poverty we continued talking about politics. What was new to me is that he told me that the people of the Terai, the southern half of Nepal bordering India, are discriminated against by the people of the northern half (such as those who live in Kathmandu) who feel themselves to be superior over this group. This is illustrated by the difficulty the people of the Terai have in getting a job in the government. The newspapers are also contributing to this discrimination by being biased in their reporting. That’s the reason why Pramod is contemplating to start his own news magazine which could report news in a more balanced way.

I mentioned that I would also take a look at his websites to fix up the English used there, but unfortunately I had no time to do so the next few days due to other commitments, such as leaving to Pokhara. While the work I did on that afternoon was not for a non-profit organization, I don’t really care because the alternative was doing nothing and remaining in Pepsi Cola. It was very interesting to meet Pramod, and I certainly admire his tireless activity he displays in pursuing his three jobs.

The following day I went to visit Druk Amitaba Mountain, which houses a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. We were invited to visit it by a few monks living in a monastery in New Baneshwor, were Aline taught English. Aline is another Dutch volunteer with whom
I shared my stay in the house of my host family, and she invited several other volunteers to come with her. The monastery on the mountain provided an excellent view of the valley again, but more importantly the monastery itself was a beautiful complex of buildings adorned with Buddha statues.

I was surprised to learn that Buddhist monks don’t live secluded from the world like in Christian monasteries, but that they get the opportunity to take a holiday and visit their family and friends now and then. Even if they’re not really allowed to listen to music for some kind of reason, they also enjoyed the music of Linkin Park in the car we used to visit the monastery in the mountain. Their own monastery is situated next to Bagmati river, which functions as streaming waste dump as you can see on the photo. Be glad you can’t smell the river behind your computer.

Before I leave to Pokhara tomorrow, I felt thtat I should dedicate a blog post to the neighbourhood Pepsi Cola where I have been living for a month now.

As you can see on the photos, almost all houses have three flours including a ground floor. Some have two floors or four floors, and are often shared by different families on the basis of the floor or one of the two vertical halves of the house. Many also have (multiple) balconies and a roof terrace. Sugandha’s and Sobha’s house has a nice balcony which allowed me to take the shot of the football field and white mountain tops many kilometers away, on a day with exceptional visibility.

Some of the houses look a bit plain, but you can also see some very nice ones with nicely decorated gates and doors. Most of the people living in Pepsi Cola are relatively wealthy compared to the average Nepalese person, possibly even compared to other neighbourhoods of Kathmandu. However, I should note that the recent earthquake in Japan created awareness in the valley of Kathmandu that people are living here with Damocles’ sword above their heads.

In one of the English Nepali newspapers I read at the school a letter to the editor discussed the danger. Japan is one of the most well prepared nations on earth for coping with earthquakes, yet it still faced massive destruction when the most recent one hit. Nepal is also located at the border of two tectonic plates, and unlike Japan building codes which serve to mitigate earthquake damage are not followed here because the government doesn’t inspect the buildings. I imagine there would great destruction and loss of life in the Kathmandu valley here if an earthquake hit, which is only a matter of time. I don’t want to think about it.

This football field is quite large and lies in the center of Pepsi Cola, and serves as nice orientation point. My host family’s house, the CBIA, the orphanages, the VSN office, the bus stop and other places of importance lie relatively close to the center, only the health clinic where some volunteers go lies a long walk to west of Pepsi Cola.

There are quite a few curiosities I noticed when I compare Pepsi Cola to life in the Netherlands. Cows can roam freely and graze everywhere. And this is not restricted to Pepsi Cola, but also in many other neighbourhoods more distant from the center of Kathmandu. And besides cows there are also goats and chickens. There’s not many of them, I haven’t seen the blocking traffic yet. Cows are holy for hindus and killing them is punishable by a prison term, so they don’t eat beef and only use the milk. Besides cattle you can also see fields of crops here and there besides the houses.

More alarming is that people don’t care about their environment. As seen on the photos, trash is just thrown around everywhere, even though the trash is collected if you hang it on your gate in a plastic bag. Some people They haven’t heard about separately collecting waste and recycling here yet, even batteries are not collected separately! Pepsi Cola is cleanroom compared to Bagmati river which runs through Kathmandu however, I’ll post a photo of that river later.

I mentioned the dogs before, but I mention them again. I’m developing such an intense hatred of these beasts. While their barking and fighting at night can’t disturb my sleep much, the idea that the two dogs of my host family run through all the trash when they’re outside and run through the interior of the house as well is disgusting. At night the dogs like to follow you around and bark at you. They’ve never been aggressive yet, but I would so much like to give them a good kick to vent my frustration on them.

Even though I’m allergic to dog hairs, I’ve only had an allergic reaction (just a runny nose requiring me to use my handkerchief thirty times a day) a few days after my arrival, but my allergy doesn’t really seem to bother me. Sugandha told me the dogs are useful for guarding the house when everyone is at work during the day. Besides dogs with owners there are also many stray dogs which are attracted by the food included in the trash thrown around everywhere.

I’ve heard that they’ve tried to put down the populations of stray dogs in the past, but they keep coming back because there’s a food source here. If it were up to me I’d start killing them for their meat. At the start of this week I ate water buffalo brains and testicles at a barbeque party here, espcially the fried brains were quite nice. If you can eat those parts of a water buffalo, why not eat a dog? It’s popular in many parts of the world, and if they’re stray dogs it’s a free source of meat. Don’t get me started about the morality of killing dogs, if you have no moral problem with eating chickens you should not have a moral problem with eating dogs.

What also deserves mention are the Nepali speed bums. If you already thought the Dutch speed bumps were bad, think again. These are so small and steep that you have to slow down to a crawl to pass them comfortably.

A lot construction is going on in Pepsi Cola right now. It is notable that you can see many women doing the heavy lifting for the construction work, which is quite unlike the Netherlands. There are also a lot of unfinished buildings. The construction is caused by the population growth in the valley of Kathmandu. Many people leave for the valley from the smaller villages were life is harder. Of course this increases the environmental problems and the pressure of the population on the Kathmandu valley even more. Fuel prices here and food prices globally have been increasing. I think population growth is at the root of a lot of problems Nepal is facing and that it is necessary to control it. The population growth can’t go on forever and had better be limited through policy instead of waiting for poverty and famine to solve to problem.

A week ago, before the start of the exam period now, I was still teaching four classes a day to the second, third, fourth and fifth grade. I already mentioned this in a previous post, but there is one thing I should also mention here because I had never expected I’d ever be doing it. When I taught them English during the last days before the exam period I sang a song, ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’, and had the class sing it sentence by sentence after I did. They did quite well with pronouncing it, and because they liked the activity more than writing sentences or something else it also helped with keeping the level of unrest in the class low. Two days later I tried ‘I gotta feeling’ by the Black Eyed Peas because it was one of the songs recommended for use by a Spanish teacher of English on her website which I found through Google. I felt silly doing it because getting the rhythm with this song was harder, but it wasn’t a failure.

I’ve already made some remarks about the level of English of the schoolchildren at my school, but the education system here continues to surprise me. The Dutch women from Heiloo recently wrote on their blog they noticed a child in the school writing ‘I go to the toilet’, with a Nepali teacher then ‘correcting’ the sentence to omit the indefinite article ‘the’. No wonder I noticed the children I’m teaching writing ‘I go to zoo’. The training of the teachers really leaves something to be desired.

These errors in English show up in many different places outside the school as well. The official health warning for smoking you see in a lot of places where they sell cigarettes is ‘smoking is injurious to your health’. On some restaurant menus I noticed they write ‘milk schack’ instead of milk shake or ‘posed egg’ instead of poached egg.

The most extreme low point regarding mistakes made in English is that not only the English books used by the students contain mistakes, but some teachers also made mistakes in composing the exams the students have taken this week. For example ‘the peacock mocked at him’ or ‘Ploughing brings lower layer of soil to ‘. Patrick, a volunteer from New Zealand who has been living here for years, was annoyed by this because he asked all the teachers to let him proofread their exams. He noticed mistakes in past exams as well, but not all teachers submitted their exams to him. Fortunately there are also teachers which do not make these mistakes when they write exams, ironically they were the only ones to let Patrick proofread their exams.

Nevertheless, because only English is spoken in the school (except for a few Nepali songs during the morning assembly) the level of English is quite high compared to Dutch schoolchildren. In the Netherlands dual language education is the exception rather than the rule, but in Nepal it’s the other way around.

As an invigilator during this exam period I had to explain to students that their exams contained mistakes. They also ask a lot of questions during the exams, most of which I and the other teachers refuse to answer because they shamelessly ask you to give away the answer to the question. Because of the lack of space many students have to take their exams in the hall, which is not a room but merely a space outside some rooms covered by a roof. With the temperatures here sitting in the hall is not a problem, but due to the limited amount of benches and space students sit practically next to each other. This is an ideal environment for cheating and talking and as an invigilator it’s primarily my job to prevent that.

The exams started on Sunday 20 March and will stop at the end of Monday 21 March. Exams are taken from 10:00 until 13:00, after that I spend time on teaching a small group of students who need more help. At least, that was the plan. On the first day due to a communication error they had left already because they arrived earlier than I was told and found no one to teach them. The second day I was told that it was not possible to teach because there were no students who needed tutoring anymore because they already had their English exams, or something like that. At that day I tried to make the best of it with some bored students who were hanging around in the school and did some small English exercises, I played hangman and a word game with them.

The next day all I could do together with the Dutch women from Heiloo was tutor a few students who needed extra preparation for their mathematics, physics and ‘social’ classes. My knowledge of these subjects is quite rusty since it has been such a long time I had them myself in high school, and in high school I chose a profile (we can choose from four profiles which focus on different subjects in the later years of high school) which didn’t focus on these subjects. I tried to understand their physics book and example exam questions they gave me, but I didn’t have a clue.

The Dutch women fared better than me because they just finished high school a year ago with some of them having specialized in maths and physics, but even they don’t know what to do with the ‘social’ subject, which concerns questions like the population of Nepal, the mother of Buddha, etcetera. It’s very centered on Nepalese culture so you can’t help students effectively with it if you don’t know much about Nepalese culture.

Just like the Dutch women I’m disappointed I can’t tutor English during the exam period, tutoring English is how we can contribute best at the school if you ask me. Being invigilator is something which might just as well be done by a Nepali person, and it doesn’t give me the feeling that I’m utilizing my unique skills. On the second day the job became a little bit more attractive to me because I turned it into a game to catch the cheaters and talkers, warn them and eventually send them out. But I’m merely doing it because I have no alternative work to do in the mornings now. I’m also disappointed that this was another surprise, because I was told by the vice principal that I could teach English the entire exam period.

Because I had and have nothing to do in the afternoon of the exam period for the past two days and the upcoming days, I decided to help out a teacher who works at the school, Pramod. I’ll discuss him in a separate weblog post which will follow.

Some arrangement is going to be made for the school holiday which starts after Monday at the behest of the Dutch women, possibly giving them the opportunity to teach English to students during the holiday. Sugandha also told me that with the school holiday, I can’t work at the school in Kaskikot, the small village near Pokhara. Four days ago two Norwegian women arrived who also intended to go to Kaskikot and work there. Yes, one them has the stereotypical Scandinavian female physical appearence with blonde hair and blue eyes, which is quite nice. The most important fact is that they’re not Dutch.

They leave to Pokhara this Saturday (tomorrow) and I will be joining them. This might have accelerated my plans to leave for a different place in Nepal by a week, but it’s more fun if we can keep each other company. The four Dutch women can do all the extra classes here in Pepsi Cola after the exams, so I think I’ll be more useful in Pokhara where there are no volunteers (of VSN) at this moment.

The three of us go to Pokhara itself to work at an orphanage there rather than one of the smaller villages surrounding it. Teaching at the schools in the villages is not possible with the school holiday starting after the exam period. I’m not sure if I like this turn of events, I thought the opportunity to work in Kaskikot or another small village near Pokhara would have provided me with the opportunity to see the life in small villages in more remote regions, which would have given me an experience totally different from life in the busy capital city Kathmandu.

I’m not sure what is going to happen next, Sugandha still needs to hear at which host family I can stay and he is going to inform me of the possibilities later this afternoon. As far as I know the Norwegians can stay at the orphanage, but because there is no more room there I’ll likely stay with a host family. Both the orphanage and probably the host family as well are located in Lakeside, the tourist district near Pokhara’s large Phewa Tal lake. From everyone who has been there, both volunteers and Nepali, I hear only positive experiences about their stay in Pokhara, which is a lot nicer than Kathmandu with it’s smaller size and surroundings according to them. So I’ll probably be content with working in Pokhara itself as well, I’ll see what happens.

I decided to join Dan, the Dutch women from Heiloo and our Nepali language trainer Bishal for the rafting trip I talked about in my last post. I won’t be going along with the other volunteers who are going to do rafting and bungee jumping next Saturday, it’s both too expensive and not worth the money for such a short jump, plus I’ve already done rafting now. The only expensive activity I intend to be do sometime during the rest of my stay in Nepal is paragliding, I’ve never done that before and I think it’s a lot more exciting than bungee jumping. I had never done rafting either until last Saturday.

We went rafting with Royal Beach Camp. Because we are volunteers we got a discount for the rafting, it was 3750 rupees. This included all transport, spending Friday night in a tent near the river, dinner, breakfast and lunch. After gathering at the VSN office in Pepsi Cola we took the bus to the parliament building in the center of Kathmandu where the bus taking us the rafting location would pick us up. However, this bus suffered a delay of almost two hours because of a traffic jam I was told, so we left around 19:00 instead of 17:00.

We were the only Westerners in a group of maybe fourty persons (we were on the second bus ride of that day as far as I know) doing rafting the following morning on Saturday, the rest of the group were all Nepalis. This made for some interesting conversations in the bus with a Nepali guy and his friends whom all studied a Master of Business Administration program. We talked about cultural differences among many other subjects. The bus ride took another three hours, probably more because we were in an epic traffic jam. The traffic jam was caused by a checkpoint on the way out of the Kathmandu valley because they checked the license plate of every vehicle passing there. Fortunately there was no traffic jam near the checkpoint when we returned tomorrow night.

After the long bus ride which took us to an altitude a few hundred meters lower to a river valley, we arrived at the camp site. The camp site had tents were we slept, a large beach of sand on the shore of the river were we would go rafting the next morning, the opportunity to play beach volleyball and a beach hut made of wood and straw where food was served. The rest of the night we enjoyed ourselves on the beach were they had a DJ playing music for us to dance on and they also lit campfires there. When we were confronted with the long delay of the bus from Kathmandu I was wondering what I had gotten myself into, but when I arrived at the campsite at night with a full moon and the mountains surrounding the river covered in fog I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it. With some imagination it could indeed pass as an inland environment on a tropical island.

The DJ continued until deep in the night and the tents only had mats and sleeping bags which were not comfortable for sleeping. Maybe I got three hours of rest. The following morning I was woken up a bit too early by an overtly enthusiastic crowd of Nepalis. Because Holi is celebrated on Saturday we started decorating each others faces with colours and some started throwing water balloons, so called lolas. After breakfast we started rafting, the starting point was at the beach near our campsite. I had never done rafting before so I was surprised to learn that we would have an instructor to make sure that we could steer the boat properly. Our group occupied one boat and there were three or four other boats leaving with us.

The rafting was fun. Our instructor judged our group to be proficient enough for taking the exciting path on the river. The river had some wild rapids which shook up our boat heavily, and our instructor told us to get inside the boat a few times so we didn’t risk falling out. And this is just the dry season, it’s also possible to do it in the monsoon season but the river will be far more ferocious by then. The temperatures were reasonable, even if during the first part of the day we still had some fog over the valley blocking out the sun. We swam in the water a bit during the journey downstream, but not for too long because the water was on the cool side. After traversing approximately three kilometer in three hours we exited the river, carried the boat onto a truck and were driven back to the camp site.

It was the beginning of the afternoon so we still had to wait a few hours before the bus would leave at 16:00, but of course the bus was delayed again for half an hour. Some of us did some beach volleybal, and we relaxed near the side of the river, but I was getting a bit bored. When the bus took us to Kathmandu it dropped us of in the New Baneshwor neighborhood from where we had to take a taxi to Pepsi Cola, buses don’t drive after 19:00 anymore. Because of that and because it was Holi the taxi wasn’t cheap, 500 rupees which I bartered down to 450. I was mentally preparing myself and considered what I would do if this taxi driver turned out to be crooked and would deviate from our agreement during the taxi ride, but fortunately that wasn’t the case.

The following Sunday morning I started working at the school again as an invigilator (that was a new word for me) during the exam period which started that day and lasts until next Monday. I had to abandon my plans for that day, being invigilator and tutoring a group of four to five weak students when the exams ended at 13:00, because I got an acute attack of diarrhea. I’m not sure if this was caused by the failure of my ‘experiment’, i.e. I had contracted food poisoning, or the fact that I was constipated for almost two weeks continuously right after I arrived in Kathmandu (somehow I always suffer from constipation after moving away from home for a longer period of time).

Whatever caused it, I don’t intend to give up on eating street food like panipuri, I like it too much for that. The Nepalis eat them without any problems, and eventually I should gain a certain degree of immunity to food poisoning just like the Nepalis if I expose myself sufficiently. If I get sick, so be it, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger like Nietzsche said. This attack of diarrhea stopped just as suddenly as it had started. I had to visit the bathroom three times over the course of an hour, but after that I seemed to be totally fine again. I was very fortunate to feel alright again so soon because during the evening we had the opportunity to visit another wedding because a relative of Tej (pronounce the ‘j’ like a ‘zj’), the director of VSN, was getting married.

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to enjoy the divine food served at wedding parties! All volunteers were invited and as far as I know everyone came along. No effort was saved for the wedding party, it was similar to the first one I visited but the food was even better. They served all kinds of snacks, an elaborate buffet and even ice cream which persuaded me to break my rule to not eat junk food. I ate a lot of it and skipped lunch altogether today, because I ate so much during the party that I’m still not really feeling hungry.

First off, I haven’t shown any photos of my hosts Sugandha and Sobha yet. Most of the other volunteers I have met were already shown in photos accompanying my previous blog posts, but my hosts were not yet shown. Below is photo of them before we left for the wedding I talked about earlier. For this occasion Chelley, Safia, Alia and Crissie also bought saris, so I photographed them as well. All for of them have left by now, and the volunteers I’m living with now in Sughanda’s place are Alien, Freya and Jessa.

Sugandha spends most of his time working for VSN, Sobha sells gas cylinders. Both cook our meals, but Sobha seems to do most of it. Gas cylinders are necessary over here because there is no network of gas pipes, so they are absolutely necessary to cook and to get warm showers. Sugandha and Sobha are relatively wealthy, possessing a TV, a DVD-player. Their house is like many other houses in Pepsi Cola, it has three floors including the ground floor.

To summarize the other volunteers, most are from the Netherlands, and those from the Anglosphere come second. None are from other nations. Alia and Safia originally come from Malaysia, but they’re studying in the Australia. The majority of the volunteers are, will be or were educated at a university, a lot of volunteers who work in projects related to health for example study or have studied medicine or a related program.

In this regard I’m quite similar to most of the volunteers. The difference lies in the financial situation. When I decided to work as a volunteer in Nepal, I expected to be able to loan some money from my parents. My parents were a lot more generous than I expected though. They paid my flight ticket (a round trip ticket) which cost € 800 and they paid for my stay with VSN which cost approximately € 550 for ten weeks. Their reasoning was that I stayed at home when they went on winter sport holiday in Austria with my brother and sister for the last 5–10 years, and several other holidays, because I didn’t want to go.

Other volunteers had to work hard for their money by contrast. The Dutch girls from Heiloo took a gap year to work in order to pay for their stay in Nepal. One American volunteer can depend on a scholarship to pay for the expenses, but she is also an exception. I can’t help but feel a little bit privileged, spoiled. My parents shouldn’t get the wrong idea though, I think they’re awesome for being so supportive.

I noticed is that many volunteers combine their volunteering work in Nepal with having holiday. I’ve heard a lot have visited or will visit India, or that they made trips to places in Nepal far away from Kathmandu such as treks in the vicinity of Pokhara or a visit to Chitwan National Park. Shorter trips of one or two days are also popular. Some volunteers plan to go rafting and camping this weekend to celebrate Holi. The next weekend some other volunteers plan to go rafting and bungee jumping. This is all relatively cheap, respectively € 40 and a bit more than € 100 if I recall correctly but I’m still reluctant to go along.

My intent before I left for Nepal was to work here strictly as a volunteer and cover the remaining expenses with the amount of € 400 which was approximately remaining on my bank account. This is still easily possible at this time, but it means that I’ll have to be selective with the more expensive one- or two-day trips. Visiting Nagarkot was already a bit expensive in my opinion, maybe a bit more than € 15 for the hotel, transport and food. Another reason I have is that I want to use the next Saturdays as a day to relax instead of doing trips and read the truckload of books I’ve brought along. Or is that reason in reality an excuse for being stingy?

In hindsight I might have chosen to reserve more money to do these day trips or to visit Chitwan and India. I’ve never done a bungee jump in my entire life, but on the other hand I’d pay a lot of money for a jump of less than one minute and which doesn’t seem like an experience which is so special I can’t miss it. However, I can always do that later if I wish. I’d prefer not to have to borrow money.

Our breakfast is around 9:00, dinner is around 18:30. Because we work on projects during the beginning of the afternoon and Sugandha and Sobha are also working and often away from home, we don’t get served lunch by our hosts. So around 13:00 we have to choose where to get our lunch.

The dish I’ve been eating practically every morning and evening while I’ve been staying in Nepal is dal bhat. This is the staple food of the Nepalese cuisine. Sugandha and Sobha’s version of dal bhat uses a large pot of rice as the base and a vegetable curry and a pickle which vary from meal to meal. The lentils (dal) which give the dish it’s name are not present at all most of the time, but that doesn’t bother me because the vegetable curries are very tasty.

Some (Western) volunteers don’t like to eat rice every day, which I can certainly understand. That’s why we made a continental breakfast for ourselves once with toasted bread. We did this a few days after I arrived in Nepal, so I contributed the supply of Dutch krentenbollen I still had with me. The other volunteers (at that time Collin, Chelley, Crissie, Alia and Safia from respectively Wales, Ireland, the USA and Malaysia, with David being the only other Dutch person) loved them. I’d like to do this again for a change, so maybe I should get some bread at a bakery in Thamel, Kathmandu’s tourist neighborhood.

However, I’m fine with having rice twice a day, just like I’m fine with eating bread twice a day back in the Netherlands (only the dinner in the Netherlands doesn’t have bread). Dal bhat twice a day might seem monotonous, but the variation in the accompanying pickles and vegetable curries keeps it interesting. I had hoped to encounter more Indian food though. For example the northern Indian cuisine also has many kinds of flat breads like chapati, naan and paratha, has interesting dishes with paneer and a greater variety of vegetable curries. In southern Nepal, which is close to the Indian border, the cuisine becomes very similar to the Indian cuisine, but that is not the case in Kathmandu.

Once Sugandha and Sobha (both of them do the cooking) made momos for us to show us how they’re made. I thought they don’t make momos more often because of the time involved, but I was told they can make them in half an hour. It was simply because we, the volunteers, were slicing the vegetables that it took a lot more time to make them. They don’t eat momos more often because according to Sugandha ‘dal bhat is our food’.

A Tibetan dish, momos are pieces of dough filled with either vegetables and/or meat. Sugandha and Sobha steamed and fried them, but it’s also possible to merely steam them for a slightly healthier alternative. Our hosts showed us how to fold the vegetables (we didn’t use meat for the momos at that time because Alia and Safia are muslims and only eat halal meat) in the dough of the momos, which they are very adept at, but it was difficult for us unexperienced volunteers. Their version of momos was served in an absolutely delicious tomato-based gravy with vegetables, and was better than the version I’ve eaten in the restaurants for lunch.

So for lunch I eat at one of the restaurants close to the school. Among the favorite places of the volunteers to eat, there are two restaurants I like a lot. They are the ‘samosa place’ and the ‘tandoori place’. They serve a wider variety of dishes. The samosa place is a roadside fast food restaurant consisting of some open space beneath a building near one of Pepsi Cola’s busiest intersections. They don’t have separate space for a kitchen so you can see them prepare all the food in the open. It serves, as the name suggests, samosas. Samosas are deep fried pieces of dough filled with vegetables and served with a delicious sauce. Another favorite of mine at that restaurant is aloo paratha, a flat bread called paratha filled with a mixture of potato and spices, accompanied by a little bit of chickpea curry. The tandoori place (I’m not sure if they really have a tandoor though) is a better equipped restaurant and serves a considerably wider variety of dishes. For example chow mein, but also pizza which tastes okay but not much more than that.

Also notable are the different eating customs. While our hosts have cutlery available for us and I like to use it, the Nepalese don’t use it and eat with their hands. They eat only with their right hand, because the left hand is used to clean the rear end after visiting the bathroom. When you use spoons to take some food from a pot and put it on your plate, make sure not to touch the plate with the spoon if you get a second serving, otherwise the spoon will be considered unclean. This also is the case when you drink water from a drinking vessel which is not your own glass. They have these in some restaurants, and when the Nepalese drink from it they pour the water in their mouth without their lips touching the vessel. They can do it without any effort, but when I tried doing that for the first time, I poured more water on my clothes than in my mouth, but I’m getting better at it.

I often see the other volunteers eating snacks which are also common in the West, but which are relatively expensive. Potato chips for example, which are sold in almost all the shops selling food. I decided to live as the average Nepalese person here, so I imposed a junk food prohibition on myself. The only exception I’ve allowed myself are cookies, for example the lovely coconut cookies available here cost only 10 rupees.

Because I haven’t gotten ill for probably more than ten years (I only have allergic reactions because of grass or dust in the interior of my house maybe one or two days every two months) I decided to start an experiment. I’m curious to know what it takes for me to get food poisoning. So far over the last weeks I’ve eaten unwashed grapes once and panipuri twice, all sold by street vendors in Pepsi Cola. Panipuri is an Indian snack popular in Nepal as well, consisting of a puffed up fried bread which is then filled with a mixture of mashed potato and some spices, they’re quite nice. I’ve been warned that I shouldn’t eat them if I want to avoid food poisoning because the street vendors have lower standards of hygiene, but nothing happened to me so far. I’m not going to drink the unfiltered water though.

Because potatoes, spinach and eggs are well available here, I’m also planning on making the Dutch dish with these ingredients which I often eat at home, a so called mash pot of pureed potatoes mixed with finely chopped spinach and eggs. I wonder if my hosts Sugandha and Sobha and the British and Australian volunteers Freya and Jessa would like it.

Last Friday some volunteers decided to visit Nagarkot, a village located on a mountain at an altitude of 2175 meters at a distance of 32 kilometer from Kathmandu. For comparison, Kathmandu is located at 1337 meters. It is famous for the great view of the Himalayas it offers. Including me the group consisted of nine volunteers, with me being the only male. The other volunteers were Alien (Dutch, lives in Utrecht, also stays at Sugandha) Freya (British, lives in Sheffield, also stays at Sugandha), Kassie (American, from New Jersey), Jessa (Australian) and the four women Kim, Franne, Charlotte and Rineke who all live in Heilo. They also have a weblog.

Whe departed in the afternoon at Friday, which worked out for me because Friday’s school day is only half a day, with classes stopping at 13:00. We took the bus to Bhaktapur, then walked to another bus stop there where the bus taking us to Nagarkot departed. We met a Dutch guy in the bus. The bus ride was long, and because the Nepalese don’t take into account that Dutch people can be 1,90 meters tall, the seat on the bus was cramped. I was very glad when I got out.

Nagarkot is packed with hotels, but we had already decided to stay in the Hotel at the End of the Universe. This was recommended by other volunteers from Pepsi Cola whom had visited the place before us and is also recommended by the Lonely Planet guide. It certainly deserves the recommendation because it offers nice rooms and a great view of the surrounding mountains. We all decided to share the room which was located at the highest point and offered the best view. We ate dinner and breakfast at the hotel as well.

This hotel wasn’t cheap. The room cost us 4.500 rupees in total. My dinner, just chicken biryani as a single main dish to save money (I refilled filtered water for free and didn’t order any drinks), cost me 290 rupees and breakfast was 200 rupees. Yes, considering that 100 rupees are equal to 1 Euro it’s not expensive at all, but in Pepsi Cola I can order three samosas for lunch at the price of 20 rupees. Pepsi Cola is my standard of comparison, and consider that I’d like to able to spend my time in Nepal from now to my departure in the first week of May with no more than the 300 Euros which remain on my bank account. Of course I possess a lot more money, but that is ‘stuck’ in stocks right now. I also noticed when I read the menu that the hotel added a 10% service charge to both the room and the food. The hotel manager hadn’t told us about the service charge when he mentioned the price of the room, which didn’t include the service charge.

I’ve commented on service charges and autograts when I discussed my holiday in the USA’s West, but I want to mention it again. While the hotel manager and the personnel were very friendly – they returned me my wallet when I had forgotten it – these service charges, even if they’re a common practice in the places popular with tourists I’m told, are ultimately deceiving. Especially if you mention the price of room without mentioning the service charge. At least be upfront about it, but the best is to include the service charge in the price so customers aren’t surprised by additional costs. Service charges are unknown of in Dutch eating establishments (don’t know about hotels) and tips are optional. It’s the same in Pepsi Cola.

At the hotel I saw four other white people. Curious as I am, I decided to have a chat with them. The first pair of two women were volunteers just like us, one was French and the other Swedish. The second pair of women were also volunteers and were, inevitable as it apparently is, both Dutch.

During dinner we had a lot of interesting conversations, with the Dutch people talking Dutch to each other. Personally I imagine it is very annoying if you’re English and surrounded by people talking in Dutch, but Freya isn’t bothered by this and can apparently understand some Dutch. Dutch is closely related to English. We shared a good laugh. Kim definitely has an endless sense of humour, teasing me with my boiled eggs and suggestions of pyjama parties. The boiled eggs joke started when we were eating at one of our favorite restaurants in Pepsi Cola with a large group of volunteers. I ordered boiled eggs with the assumption that they would be served with some kind of interesting sauce or ingredients to accompany them. What I got were two plain boiled eggs and nothing else, all I was able to do about it was pouring some tomato-based sauce over them.

The following morning we rose at 5:30 to get on the bus which would take us to the highest point of mountain where Nagarkot is located on. From our hotel this bus ride took ten minutes, and we climbed the watchtower on this lookout point to witness the sunrise. The visibility was not as good as it could get, it was a little bit foggy, but the view was still great. We took the bus back to the hotel and left after breakfast, to travel down to the Kathmandu Valley by foot. Our trip ended in the afternoon at the Changu Narayan temple, a UNESCO World Heritage Site we visited. A bus stop with buses going to Bhaktapur is close to the temple.

This trip downhill was comparable to our earlier trip in Shivapuri Nagarjun National Park in duration. However, there was almost no tree cover this time, and we were walking almost continually in a western direction. The weather was very nice and clear, so the sun hammered the left side of our bodies continuously. This resulted in some of us getting burned and others getting irritated skin. The skin on the left side of my neck still feels a little bit irritated when I rub it, but fortunately I didn’t get burned.

Changu Narayan temple isn’t a place which is very popular with tourists, most visitors were indigenous. After paying 100 rupees you have to find your way through a street filled to the brim with shops first, which defaces the character of site as both a temple and a UNESCO World Heritage Site if you ask me. The temple is beautiful with very detailed decorations. The only drawback is the huge amount of pigeon dung covering the temple. I already noticed the abundance of pigeons on Kathmandu’s Durbar Square. While I have seen birds of prey as well, they don’t seem to be able to keep the pigeon population in check. Why not shoot some of these pigeons so you can have pigeon curry and clean temples?

Speaking of food, I was punished for being stingy again at the restaurant near the temple where we ate lunch. I ordered a green salad for 80 rupees to save money and to eat something different than rice. I expected something like the salad my mother makes back home in the Netherlands. She makes it with lettuce, tomato, onion, cucumber and adds a yoghurt dressing as a finishing touch, occasionally with some delicious roasted pine nuts as well. The Nepalese interpretation of a green salad turned out to be quite different, merely consisting of slices of carrot, cucumber and radish (radish back in the Netherlands is quite small, but here they are huge, the daikon variety I believe). Fortunately it was at least covered by an interesting paste of herbs.

When we were waiting for the bus to take us back to Bhaktapur, a non-local bus arrived first. They are a bit better equipped than local buses and charge more, a lot more. The guy asked 700 rupees to take all of us to Bhaktapur at first, and lowered his offer with a few hundred rupees when we told him we thought it was to expensive. We still didn’t take the offer, but as soon as the conversation ended the local bus arrived, which charges 20 rupees for one person. The bus to Nagarkot and the buses arriving at the bus stop near the temple had people on the roof. I hope to be able to experience a bus ride on the roof as well some time in the future.

I used the story about our trip to Nagarkot as a base for teaching my English classes today. I told the fifth graders (10–11 years old) that I was the only male in the group. One of the girls asked if we had shared a room at the hotel. When I confirmed that, the entire class was quiet for a few seconds, which is rather unique. The faces showed expressions ranging from surprise to shock. I guess it’s a cultural taboo for the Nepalese to share a room with members of the opposite sex who aren’t family.

Concerning my English classes, a nice turn of events occurred. When I went to the school to wait for my classes to begin, I ran into Tej Shresta, the director of VSN and the principal. He told me they had decided to create English classes for small groups of five weak students at maximum, to be given during the period of examinations which are held from Sunday the 20th of March until Sunday the 28th of March. I will teach those classes for two hours a day, which means I won’t be unemployed during that week as I had feared. Tomorrow I will be teaching the second and third grade again, along with a Nepalese teacher who is more able than me to keep the second graders from hell under control.

Thursday the 10th of March was the first day I have been teaching English at the school in Pepsi Cola, the CBIA (Career Building International Academy), all alone. A few days ago I watched how Collin and Peter did it. Peter is veterinarian from England, Collin hails from the USA. I should definitely mention he comes from Oregon, as he very proud to be an Oregonian. Collin has a lot of experience with teaching children and that clearly showed, he knew exactly how to keep order and as you can read on his blog he knows quite a bit about learning processes. The content of his lessons was interesting and he knows very well how to improvise. I’m no Collin, but I did try to copy his methods of teaching today.

For a first day I think I was reasonably successful. First from 10:30 to 11:15 in the morning I had to teach the second graders, kids which are 7–8 years old. These are certainly the most difficult to teach, because it’s hard to keep order in their classroom. They weren’t quiet when I was talking and it was impossible (on my first day at least) to get them all quiet. When I was writing something on the whiteboard, one child was apparently fighting behind my back and another child was in tears. I switched the apparent culprit with another child’s place elsewhere in the classroom and threatened worse if he’d continue,

The second grade was followed by the third grade from 12:10 to 12:55. Then I held a lunch break and went to one of the volunteers’ favorite restaurants in Pepsi Cola to get three samosa’s for 20 rupees. From 14:10 to 14:50 I teached the fifth grade and from 14:50 to 15:30 I finish the day with teaching the fourth grade. There was some extra resentment to their English classes in all grades in general on that day because they were supposed to get physical education (mostly football and badminton). That class got canceled by the school management because they needed more training in English for their upcoming examinations. The third to fifth grades are a lot easier to teach than the second grade.

What caused trouble for me were the constant questions of the students if they could go to the bathroom. The majority of those asking don’t really need to go, they just want to waste time outside of the classroom. I heard different signals when I asked the vice principal, a few teachers and Collin abut their bathroom policies, so I decided to reward the second graders with permission to go there if they completed one of their assignments. The consequence was that half the class streamed out of the classroom after they finished their assignments. It was chaos. Later I decided to allow a higher grade to do so only at the end of the lesson, when the next teacher still had to arrive. Again over half the students went to the bathroom at once. After talking with Patrick – more about him later – after giving all the classes, I settled on his policy to never allow it, because they should do so before school, during the break or after school, unless I saw facial expressions which indicated a real need.

Another notable event was that one child became unconscious and fell on the floor. I didn’t notice it myself at first, because I was occupied with the other children in the class. She remained unconscious, not responding to any voices. I hurried to the vice principal, Binod, and alerted him of the situation. He carried of the child, still unconscious, and I continued the class. Later I heard the child was taken to the hospital and that it could have been an epileptic seizure. At the end of the day no further status update was provided to the school, of course the event worried me.

As I said, I copied Collin’s methods to teach the classes that day. I told the children that they had no school yesterday because their teachers went on strike. Then I asked what they had done yesterday, and write some sentences about it. When they finished writing the sentences I asked every student to pronounce it, after which I would pronounce it and if necessary correct the pronunciation. This individual treatment bored the students who had nothing to do until it was their turn, which resulted in more unrest. So I’m not sure if this approach was right. I also practiced the past tense of verbs with them, because they often make the mistake to write sentences like ‘Yesterday I watch TV’.

When I taught another grade I told them about Collin’s departure to teach at a monastery, and how he had to walk to a few days to get there. Then I asked them questions about what Collin would need during his trip, like spending the night in a lodge with a sleeping bag or blanket. Then I asked them to make sentences with those words. I tried to turn it into a game about who could use the most of the words we came up with in sentences, but this didn’t work out so well because they didn’t completely understand the exercise. In one grade a did a game of hangman at the end, which they loved. When teached one grade I tried reading a passage from Alice in Wonderland from their books, Nepalese schoolbooks which are full of grammar and spelling errors and too difficult for their grade. The passage of Alice in Wonderland even mentioned croquet, which I never heard of before. I thought it was a spelling error, and told them cricket was meant.

Even though I was reasonably succesful in improvising the lessons, I still needed more ideas for (simpler) games I could play with the students and how I could keep order. Fortunately Patrick, an older and more experienced volunteer, was there to help me out. He lives in Nepal for fourteen months now and had been teaching in the school before Collin, Peter and I got there, and was taken out by lengthy stay at the hospital because of kidney stones. While he doesn’t feel fit at this moment to teach at the school, he was able to help me out and we had a long conversation in which he answered my many questions. This gave me a lot more inspiration on how to teach.

Many other volunteers don’t like to teach full classes because it is so exhausting. I can perfectly understand after teaching alone for one day. But this doesn’t demotivate me, I want to persevere, gain experience and become a more effective teacher. However, the opportunity to teach is not available all the time.

This day I, a single person, could teach all grades. The difficulty is that there are more volunteers in Pepsi Cola who want to teach. Why, you’d ask? Because VSN apparently didn’t consider that there might be too much volunteers to teach English in a single school. Two or three weeks before I departed to Nepal I e-mailed VSN that I primarily wanted to teach at schools and that I wanted to stay in Pepsi Cola for at least a few weeks, before considering to work at another location in Nepal.

However, a week or so after I arrived four Dutch girls arrived, and they were told by Het Andere Reizen, a travel agency in the Netherlands which sends volunteers to VSN, that they could teach in the school too. I makes no sense to teach one grade with five persons. Rather than cling on to the principle of ‘first come, first serve’ I decided to agree with their proposal to give them two grades to teach in the morning and early afternoon so that I would teach the last two grades in the afternoon.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to surprises. From Sunday (Saturday is a free day, and school ends at 13:00 on Friday) the 20th of March to Monday the 28th of March, examinations will be held so I can’t teach anything during that period. After the examinations the schools have a holiday so there will be no teaching then either. What also happened is that in the evening when an ex-prime minister passed away, the following day was declared a holiday. When there was a planned holiday, we were only the told in the evening of the day before that holiday. When there was a strike by a teacher’s union (so the school was closed), they decided to start the strike the next day.

Sugandha told me that even though there are examinations and a holiday, I could possibly teach English as an extracurricular activity, in smaller groups with more motivated students, if I’d decide to go to Kaskikot, a village near Pokhara. There are no other volunteers active there at this moment. I was still thinking about doing this during the month of April, but I might accelerate my plan to the 20th of March when the examinations start at the school here. I’m still not sure about this and I should talk it over with Sugandha.

In the meanwhile me and the Dutch girls have also been doing some other work, we have been readying a second location of the CBIA which will house the preschoolers so more space will be available at the current location of the CBIA. The girls liked to work on painting the interior. I have been working in the garden of the new building. The Nepalese are not conscious about keeping their environment clean, so I had to clean out a lot of trash there. I’m in the process of planning how I could decorate the garden with Sugandha.

I’m disappointed with the unreliability of VSN, but other volunteers who are more experienced, including those who have worked as a volunteer in other countries, told me I should accept this as the Nepalese culture, and that it is a fact of life. However, I’m won’t let loose of my positive attitude and I will find other ways to contribute if I can’t spend all days teaching English.

Today, on Friday the 11th of March, I will leave with around nine other volunteers to Nagarkot and spend the night there. Of course I will write about it.

Now that my language class and sightseeing have finished, I’m working at the school to teach English. More about that later, because I want to write about last Sunday first. This was a free day again as usual, and I thought I’d follow some of the other volunteers again. This time Brigitte (New Zealand), who doesn’t live with me in Sugandha’s house, decided to to visit some kind of forest. Some other volunteers such as Collin (USA), Alien (Dutch), me, Franne (Dutch), Charlotte (Dutch), Rineke (Dutch), Kim (Dutch) and Didi (Dutch) (yes, Pepsi Cola is really a Dutch enclave in Pepsi Cola) decided to follow.

First we took the bus to Thamel so some shopping could be done. I bought a nail clipper, as I had forgotten to take one along, and took a look at some maps of Pokhara because I might want to travel to Kaskikot which lies not far from there. I’m considering to teach at the school there in the next month, because I’m interested to see a different part of Nepal, more authentic than Pepsi Cola.

Then we proceeded the journey to this forest. Things didn’t go smoothly, and after some surprises it turned out that we couldn’t find this forest. Brigitte apparently improvised to visit something else which was interesting, and we continued on a long walk through Kathmandu’s dusty streets. At this time I was getting annoyed and hesitant as to where this trip might lead to, but at the end of the day I was so glad I didn’t decide to turn back.

After a long time of walking, we arrived at the entrance to Shivapuri Nagarjun National Park. We had to pay 250 rupees for entrance. We decided to take the shortest trip, six kilometers to Shivapuri peak.

This trip turned out to be at least five kilometers of stairs. While we climbed the stairs we saw some Nepalese workers not far from the entrance who were repairing or expanding the stairs, which are made out of blocks of stone. Apparently they carried the stones all the way to up themselves.

Climbing these almost endless stairs is not an easy task. I, Rineke and Collin could manage, but most of the others had to reduce their pace, so we split into two groups, with the second group reaching the summit a bit later. Brigitte was the exception however, not even breaking a sweat while she was taking the lead of our first group. I suspected Brigitte wasn’t the average person, and when I inquired about it she confirmed my suspicions. She is a marathon runner, and every morning, including the one of that day, she runs a few kilometers in the vicinity of Pepsi Cola to practise.

The trip to the summit was tough and long, but finally we arrived at the watchtower and the Buddhist temple at the top. We were able to see Mount Everest from this location. This temple had a lot of prayer flags flowing in the wind, as you can see on the photos. The top provided an ecstasy-inducing view over the Kathmandu valley, which easily surpassed the view from Swayambunath, with this top being much higher. The weather was great on summit during the afternoon, and we took our time to enjoy the experience completely. I have never seen anything like this before in my life.

After the sour comes the sweet, as some Dutch politicians like say, which is so true in this case as well. It wasn’t an easy trip and early on I became quite demotivated, but when I got the end result I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it. It’s also good to feel exhausted again, because last months I haven’t done much strenuous physical activity.