barefoot monster

Time in Nepal wrapped up, and I have arrived safely in the United Kingdom where I am spending some amazing days with great friends and my amazing boyfriend in Wales. Here are some shots from today and the past couple of days here. :)

On my last few days in Kathmandu my good friend Ana from Colombia came into town. I know her from when we worked together years ago in Lake Tahoe, California. I took her and her friend Rani, from New Zeland,  to Pashupatinath, the Hindu temple for Shiva where cremation ceremonies take place.

Here are some of the kids at Arunodaya Academy in Swayambhu, Kathmandu. Amazing kids, they love showing off and posing for photos. I had a really good time with some of them. 

Photos from my daily walk up 336 steps to the monastery in Swayambhunath where I taught 10 young monks English.

Well, this post isn’t going to be as positive as the last few, unfortunately.

These past weeks in Nepal have been really hard on me. 

While I can say my experience in Kathmandu volunteering was incredibly rewarding, it was also a massive challenge. Teaching 50 kids English with zero teaching experience, and no written curriculum given from the school was exhausting, though I do feel like I made an impact. My days in Kathmandu were mostly spent in my room alone, and for the social being that I am, it grew tiresome and intensely lonely. 

Since finishing my project in Kathmandu, I left the city and returned back to Pokhara, where I have a bundle of local friends, in hopes of enjoy company again. Despite the slight increase of social interaction I have here, my mental state isn’t much improving. Homesickness is lingering heavily over me after a series of unfortunate events, and the loneliness I haven’t been able to shake with playing music. The rain fall is heavy, leaving me restricted to the indoors lately (not the drizzle keeping you inside, more like walls of water and a river where the road was).

I hate to spend an entire blog complaining, however between a few unfriendly locals, being followed home by strange men, accused of stealing, a bacterial infection in the flesh of my nose, and a shipping store in Kathmandu scamming me out of not only my shipping fair, but about 250$ of gifts I had bought for people at home, I am not feeling so positive about my stay at this time, which is reflected in my writing today.

On that note, this is where I have to bear unfortunate news and an apology to everyone who supported me in getting to Nepal and volunteering here. I purchased loads of goods, about 18 kilos worth all together, for those who supported me on my journeys and good friends of mine, and a shipping store in Kathmandu has scammed me. I have contacted the US Embassy and plan on contacting the tourist police when I return to Kathmandu to try to recover everything I can, but it isn’t looking bright, and I feel really terrible to have nothing to show for all that I have promised to bring back for you, and even worse to have spent a summer volunteering my time to a country to have people from the very same country scam me for goods that I had planned on gifting at home. It definitely doesn’t help aid the homesickness I have hanging over me lately. I am intensely sorry if I can not recover the gifts I had promised to bring back for you, and appreciate everything you did to help. Should I not be able to recover the goods, please let me know if there is anything I can do to make up for what I promised to bring for you.

Sorry again for the downer post. I will load some photos soon to hopefully brighten and change the mood of my blog.

Pheri baytola

(See you later)

Here are some shots from my last day in Chitwan and bits of the trip in Pokhara, I should have some new shots of the school and monks up soon. :)

It’s been some time since I updated my blog, I guess I got too busy enjoying myself that I really didn’t want to spend my time on the computer.

Since I have last posted, I have finished my project working at the orphanage in southern Nepal, spent some time in Pokhara, just under the Annapurna range, and returned back to Kathmandu to send off my wonderful travel buddy as she carries on in her adventures across Asia, and I went back to work on two new projects.

While I miss the kids at the Orphanage in Rampur, Chitwan very much, I am intensely happy to have left the heat behind. The heat my last two weeks there was boosting up to 125 degrees Fahrenheit (52 c). With power for around 8 hours a day, on a good day, and being surrounded by 4 inches of standing water in the rice paddies around the village, the heat was becoming unbearable. 

When our projects wrapped up in Chitwan, myself and Jillian, my fantastic Australian travel partner moved on to Pokhara, where the temperature dropped a solid 40 degrees from Chitwan. Our first night in Pokhara, I discovered my home away from home. Located in Lakeside Pokhara, just a three minute walk from the hotel we were staying at is the Old Blues Bar.

From singing the blues, to hulahooping at the bar, making friends, and cooking for friends, I haven’t felt so much at home in Nepal as I did in Pokhara at the Old Blues bar. The people who run the bar are amazing. On a first glance they appear to be typical bar folk, drinking, playing music, relaxing, but upon getting to know who they are underneath it, it was really unbelievable. Some of them teachers, drug rehab counsellors, and women’s rights workers. They took Jillian and me on amazing adventures on their motorcycles to beautiful lakes, and spent so much time with us teaching about who they are, their home, and playing music. 

All good times come to an end though, and Jillian and I had to return to Kathmandu. I stayed for a night in the center of the city with Jillian before seeing her off as she headed to Thailand, and I traveled back to our hostel in Kalanki to move to my new host family and projects. 

I am living with a small family in their apartment near the bottom of the Swayambhunath Stupa, also known as the Monkey Temple. I am working for part of the day teaching English to ten young Buddhist monks, from 5 to 12 years old. In the afternoons I work at a school teaching conversational English in a much more hectic environment. I have a class of around 50 kids from 6 to 14 years old. For my first couple of days it was a really intense challenge for me, I was not given any direction as to what kind of curriculum the school wanted the children to learn, or any reference point as to what the kids knew to start. Beyond the limitations in preparation for the project that I had, I was faced with a class of 50 loud kids against myself, with a quiet voice and very little teaching experience. 

A few stressful days at the school had left me feeling down, and lonely since my friends who I have been traveling with and working with up until this point have all left the country, but I had a great breakthrough the other day and I am feeling much more faithful that I can have an impact on the kids and make a difference.

I am happy to have had the turn around that came together this week, and I am looking forward to continuing my project for the next few weeks before I leave Nepal. 

A cluster of photos from the past three weeks. :)

Enjoy

I have been in Chitwan for about three weeks now, and it is hot. Hot is actually an understatement, its been peaking at 125 degrees F daily, with the humidity of several rice paddies surrounding you (about 3 inches of constant standing water). The heat has made it difficult to keep motivation high for the past week, but I am drinking as much water as possible, savoring cold showers, and keeping the kids at the orphanage in mind every day. 

The strike is over, and schools have opened up, giving me much more to do these days. I leave Chitwan on Friday, so I am not transferring to teaching in a school until I reach Kathmandu, but with the kids from the Orphanage going to school again there is fresh material to teach them and help them with. The kids are amazingly beautiful and smart. 

A couple of weeks ago we organized a game day for the kids that was amazing. While the strike was going on there was very little variation in their lives from day to day. No school, no new home work, and no new experiences, so they were incredibly excited to participate in the games we organized. We grouped them into teams and made activities like Tug-of-war, bobbing for apples, sack races, and other races. It was amazing seeing their faces light up. 

I am really excited for what the future weeks bring, though I am already feeling sad to leave the kids I have been spending my time with. Their positive attitudes and warm hearts are hard to come by in western civilization these days, and I will miss them loads.

Some photos of where I live and who I am living with.