Diwali

It all started when a dog turned up for breakfast wearing a necklace.
"Yesterday is Day of the Dog." Announced Shamser between Microfinance meetings "And today is the Day of the Cow". Sure enough a steady chain of Nepali women carrying Tika and Roti (fried bread) made their way around to Kalis stall and blessed her with tika, slapped  flour on her sides and muttered reverent words. Kali took it a all in her stride munching thoughtfully on the roti and looking Ramro ( beautiful) in her marigold necklace's.

It is the end of Monsoon,  soon the rice harvest will be ready. Those in the village   that can afford it have been buying in rice for the past 4months and those that can't have been surviving on corn grown for the cows or growing hungry. We arrived a month ago into the festival Dashain, in the midst of animal slaughter. But now I realize that this is the only meat eaten for the year by most castes. Tara asked " why don't we have meat for Diwali?" The answer....simply..... They were all slaughtered at Dashga . Apart from one chicken delt to by Shamser s Father. The first evidence of which was a sack containing chicken feet that he delivered gingerly for the two Beyonces ( cats). The cats devowerd this rare bit of meat hungrily, a nice change from egg and Dahl baht.

Dawali is a four Day festival. After  Cow Day comes Shareloti day,  the day when Bimala arrived with a bowl full of milled rice  to make Shareloti.  " I no good to make Shareloti. Ama teach me. We go now get  wood. Right now! " Bimala does everything at top speed . washing clothes, shouting at Babu ( her 4 yr old ), fetching grass for the cow from the jungle climbing the neighbors orange tree with a bag in her teeth for the oranges. She is feisty and full of character and has the same ADD charm as the children that we teach at the school, full speed and noisily  yelling in our faces. This time I am tailing her up to Shamser Amas ( mothers) place to carry wood and when I arrive she is inspecting lengths of wood and turfing logs onto the road. " You carry this and this and this and this".

Shareloti is basically a rice flour donut. Freshly milled rice flour is mixed into a slurry with water and sugar and bicarbonate of soda and then poured in a circle into oil heated to  deep frying temperature by a roaring fire. All done on a open fire in an enclosed kitchen with no chimney. Actually there is a chimney built by a past volunteer. But Ama has put a teapot on top of the smoke outflow and it is cheerfully boiling , pouring steam into the  already smoke chocked room.

Lukey and Tara watch the process mesmerized. Bamila explains that they cannot have a Shareloti yet as the first ones have to be offered to God. Which sparks off and interesting conversation with Tara about who is God. Eventually we all agree that neither Tara nor Lukey are God and Baba ( Shamsers father ) arrives and starts to break Shareloti s into pieces praying reverently.

Full of Shareloti we become distracted by the other quirk of Diwali. Modern times meets tradition: this Diwali is also a 4 day football tournament with the neighboring village Besisahar. Our guest house is 30 meters from the football pitch\ school playing ground\ only flat spot in the village. Each near miss goal is accompanied by shrieking and clapping and Lukey throws himself into the spirit of the game by shrieking  and clapping too. Then he and  Tara quietly dissapear amongst  Nepali playmates while Daddy watches the game and I amuse myself watching the ball boys retrieve and recirculate the footballs that fly over the bank into the millet fields below. There is no marking s on the football field. If the ball hits the bank on one side or fly's over the edge on the other then it is out :-)

Shareloti day ends with dancing. The dancing is to the same song, a song about sisters and brothers and Shareloti because at Diwali sisters and brothers share gifts. And that evening we were visited by a group of children who belted out this song and we all danced and then gave some sweets and some money. Kinda like carol singing and Halloween and football chanting all rolled into one.

The next day was the most special day of Diwali. We made marigold flower mallas ( necklace's) and everyone got a tika and a necklace and a special treat of banana  Shareloti.  Tara placed q some Tika on Lukeys forehead and Lukey gave Tara a necklace. Very Sweet. We ate a massive meal of Dahl baht and  a taste of chicken at Ama and Papas place and then topped it off watching Gaunshaha beating Besisahar in the final game.

Co Sleeping in sleeping bags

We had a problem. When sleeping in separate sleeping bags from your child,  how do you know when they are cold? how can you easily feed breast milk naturally at night without turning the light on and waking every one up?

When in Kathmandu we spoke to a manufacturer of sleeping bags if they ever made an adult bag and child bag zip together. There said "this is to hard for when once in every 2 years someone wanted it"
So after buying an adult and child bag we got thinking and came up with this simple way to join any two sleeping bags.

We bought 2 extra zips for 50rps each. These were not full length but about 50 to 60 cm.
Spent a couple hours chilling in stunning Nepal country side hand stitching them onto the existing zips
This could have been done by a local in the village for a dollar, but Clarissa wanted to do it.
So now we have two zips top and bottom sewn onto the original bag zips.  Simple to remove and does not damage the existing bag.

It is a little tricky to sew the extra zips on some times as the width on the existing zip base can be rather short. Take your time.

Photos to come once we have better internet connection!

Todays view

Luke giving Boyd an early morning cudle.

The view is nearly always stunning first thing in the morning.

Lukeys Enjoys.......

Feeding chickens with Kalpana

Carrying Beyonce around until she scratches him... That is one VERY tolerant cat!

Playing with kids on the football field

Feeding Kali the cow with Bimala

Cuddles with Bimala who is Shamsers sister in Law.

Tara Enjoys

Spending Time with Robin
Doing homework with Pojon
Making a face for the coconut with David
Discussing the business of buying and selling mangos to make a living with Darleen... Amongst other things :-)
Computer class.

Gaunshaha school II

School has a registered name "Heaven Hill Academy"

Building layout and non standard building construction.

NB: bottles to insulate floor, thatching for sound absorption.

Land layout and boundary, nothing accurate in Nepal,  they just bought 3 tiers which look like this.

Garden layout

View from office door. Currently covered in millet.

Just waiting on the millet to be harvested before construction begins so we are off trekking in the Langtang region for a couple of weeks.

No Pants Lukey

Lukey and Tara are asleep.
Daddy Boyd is lying awake, brain a buzzing, trying to solve our clunky Blog app that freezes whenever we add photos. Foiled by Nepali internet speed. Rolled back 20 years to the dial up age when we used to take our novels to the computer lab to read as the pages up loaded. :-)

Tara is content. A new volunteer called Britney arrived yesterday and Tara settled her in explaining everything  from our Trip in Thailand and then took her on a tour of Tara's imagination. Conversation with interesting adults has become Tara's favorite pass time.

Lukey on the other hand likes playing with kids .  9 yr old Pujon and his friends seek him out and call " Chase me  Lukey " Lukey shrieks with laughter and races after them catching them and climbing onto their backs . Two days ago  spotted him catching and kissing all the Nepali children much to their surprise:-)

He still wets his pants on a regular basis and so has been given the nick name "no pants Lukey" by the volunteers here. In Asia everyone leaves their shoes at the door and recognizing peoples shoes becomes as useful as knowing folks cars back home to know if they are around However Luke has just started  making it to the door to do his wee WeeS and ends up liberally spraying every ones shoes.  Oh Lukey!

Mt Bike into town

Lance from the UK is planning on biking the Annapurna circuit and therefore has a mountain bike. My eyes lit up when he arrived, he read me like a book and said if you ever want to go for a ride please go!

We heard there was cheese for sale in town and everyone started talking pizza. So I volunteered to go get everything on Lance's bike.

I set off at 6.30 am for the 800 M vertical drop in about 8 km ride.
My day dreams of cruising through the country side at pace was dashed by the track full of sharp rocks. It was complex, rutted, and came across buffalo walking who absolutely freak out at seeing a bright bicycle.  At one stage I came around the corner suddenly confronted by with a stand off of 3 buffalo. The local walking them was tense, the buffalo swaying his head as if he was choosing which side of me to bold for. With the help of another scared local we gingerly carried the bike down a bank into the bush's. We waited and watched the bulls pass.

I figured the bike was almost silent and was far quicker down the track than any motorbike or 4x4 jeep. So I kept surprising people and animals as I turned up. On the way up I surprised a group of monkeys feeding on the sides of the road. I slammed the breaks on and counted 6 run across only meters in front of me.

In all it was a 40 minute ride down and a 2 hrs 10 up. I had about 12+ kg of fruit and vegetables in the pack including a whole kg of yummy yak cheese. Whole shopping trip took 6 hrs as each stall would only have one thing I needed or try and charge me double.

The pizza that night was fabulous!

Fixing a PC

Shamser came to and said "I need you to fix a PC, its for an important man, please come?"
Sure I said, so off we went to a stone house typical of the village, inside the bedroom with clay mud floor and walls with a cieling hi enough for me to sit on the bed just in between the wooden ceiling beam, there was the PC on the floor.
First it gave me a small electric shock from the case, but that is all it did.
So I said "I needed to take it home" not knowing where to even start.

I spent the next 45 minutes listening to Shamser talk passionately about his new school and drinking sweet tea pulling faces at a 1 year old baby.

Once home there was a power cut for 24 hours so I helped my self to the radio repeater shed which has a good UPS. Check the array of car battery's!

Without going into step by step, I found 3 faults.

*RAM was faulty 

*Keyboard wire had been cut and someone had stripped all the wires to make a good connection and taped them together. Eg shorting them all together.

*The 4 way power box had a surge protector and somehow had  faulted in such a way it made the chassis give a small electric shock. This I don't really under stand, the houses have no earth and the neutral has a fuse as well as the live circuit. None of the cabling is colour coded. Blue for everything sometimes yellow for the whole house.

So robing some parts from another old computer it was all go.

Under the monitor is a Radio transmitter reading 240watts at 101.5 MHz FM

A small digital receiver was hanging on the wall.