Mahachap visit one - the way back

The way back

The half of the school that set of early in the rain to get to the leaving ceremony

The children entertaining themselves before the others arrived

Just before we left on Saturday there was time for a quick leaving ceremony. It mainly consisted of a few speeches saying they had enjoyed the time we had spent in the village and were looking forward to our return. I gave a quick speech telling the village how thankful I was for their hospitality and how I was looking forward to returning. I really am looking forward to going back there, it was a great place but I don’t think that my two and a half days really let me see the full picture of the village. Then after the speeches there was a quick dance performance and then the tikka and garlands came out. I think everyone in the village had a go at applying the tikka, especially after the head teacher asked if the children could have a go, which when I said they could then descended with handfuls of tikka. You can see in the pictures how much I got coated in it, bearing in mind it is only meant to be a dot or small vertical line to the forehead.

Good and tikka'd up before the hike to the jeep

We had to walk a bit further on the way back due to the rain and the jeep not being able to drive as far up the roads. The whole village decided to accompany us along with a drumming band leading the way. It would have been a very enjoyable walk, had it not been for the immense heat and me suffering from altitude sickness. We made it to the meeting spot though, with a bit of time to spare. So there was time for a impromptu dance arena to form with some added locals from the village in which we had stopped on the outskirts. I have to say when the jeep came I was a little relieved as the drumming and altitude sickness was giving me a really bad headache. Just before we left, as we were sat in the jeep, there was time for a second round of tikkaing. I don’t have any photos, but I can assure you I was coated in the red powder. I spent almost an hour in the shower when I got back – my hairs is still red now.

Mahachap visit one - teaching

Teaching

The classroom I was teaching in, normally just for Yr5 but I used it for all classes, as my head hit the roof in the other rooms.

So eventually down to the teaching, which is why I am here. This provided a lot of problems in the school, mainly due to the children’s and the teachers’ lack of English. Only one teacher spoke English and even after being assured all the children come speak some I found out that only the year 5’s could be communicated with. However, I managed to get through it mostly with the help of Jyuti, who instead of teaching first aid acted as my impromptu translator. I taught colours to Year 1 and 2, the greatest barrier being pronunciation of the words, but I am happy that every child now knows at least one colour in English – it’s a start. With Year 3 and 4 I taught directions, specifically, forwards, left and right. I’ve don’t this before in reception and it was hard then, but this was a lot harder and to be honest near the end I had to give up and play a quick game, as it was just not working. However, as they left the classroom one child shouted ‘right’ and turned right. It is strange how at least one out of thirty understanding the concept makes a difference. The twinning programme was due to be conducted with Year 5, in the session every child wrote a basic letter to their twinned school explaining who they are, where they are from and asking about the English children.  Now as I said there English was better than the other children, but this simple letter still took a long time to construct. The biggest issue was encouraging children to offer suggestions of what we could put into the letter, i.e. My name is ..., etc. I think that began to get the hang of being involved in the lesson in contrast to the normal listen and repeat/copy down. I’ll have to wait and see if they are more forthcoming on my next visit, as I only had the chance for one lesson with each class, even with Yr 1 and 2 and Yr 3 and 4 being combined. The children here are great though, they love being in school and learning. I just need to get them out of the habit of repeating everything I say.

Mahachap visit one – the village

Mahachap visit one – the village

A village house, the blue door at the bottom led to my temporary bed room.

The very top of the village, a just harvested corn field. The wooden hut was build last year for visitors to relax in.

The rice smashing machine

The village is situated to the north west of Tansen just over a hill. The houses are dotted around all leading up the school, which is almost the highest point is it were not for a small group of house and a corn field just higher on the west side of the school. The people in the village are always exuberantly happy. Seeing if I am OK, if I need anything, especially food or drink I rarely managed to drink half before I was offered a re-fill; however, I found out this is part of their culture, guests shouldn’t want for anything. They have an odd type of rice here, it’s kind of like dried flakes of rice, it is really tasty, a bit like corn flakes. They make it using a machine which is basically a whole into which rice is placed and then it is pummelled with a ‘hammer’ on a wooden leaver, it shells the rice and turns it into the dried flakes; however, I couldn’t establish if it was cooked after or dried out. 

some traditional dancing by village members

Me being taught the group dance

The favourite past-time in the village must be dancing and singing; they love it! During the time I was there they danced and sung along to traditional folk songs; however, they do have for recent music but that necessitates a CD player and there was no power during my entire stay. The singing is accompanied by handclaps, drumming and occasionally a tambourine. The drums come in two sizes, small and large, they can be seen in the photographs but basically consist of a cylinder with a little drum at one end and a big drum at the other. They are really difficulty to play as you need to hit the little drum just right to produce any sound. Now I don’t dance but these people were insistent, they just dragged you up there, especially the children. I managed to get the hand of it in the end after they had given me some lessons (and hired the tarp roof because I was too tall). The dancing falls into two basic categories: group and individual. The group dancing was the easiest, this is the one I normally indulged in when encouraged to get up there. It starts with several people in a circle holding hand and you just step to the side, but a foot in the middle and lift your arms up, then continue with this increasing speed with the music. It is a very simple dance but still took me a day to get my head around. The individual dance is just as simple but at the same time much for difficult. It only involved spinning around and oscillating your arms up and down, there was also some hand movements but I could work those out. The problem is that after about two minutes you are extremely dizzy even with consistent rotational changes. There was dance that combined the two with an individual in a the middle a group circle, I only did this twice and had to stop both times because I was going to fall over from dizziness.  After awhile I noticed that the songs did not increase in tempo as much when I danced. Normally the song started slow and built until the dancers couldn’t keep up with the music and stopped; however, I noticed that the tempo never increased beyond a certain point when I was dancing – I was grateful for that. 

Drumming in action

Group drumming

Mahachap visit one – getting there

Mahachap visit one – getting there

 Part of the Village, the blue building with the tarp is the school

We eventually set off to Mahachap (I’ve encountered many different spellings, but I’m sticking with this one) village after some initial delay, due to rain, but made it there on time. Most of the journey was off-roading on dirt tracks, and I mean serious off-roading: the car didn’t always fit on the narrow roads so part of it was hanging over the precipice of the cliff, also at one point the road had to be repaired as the holes were too deep for the jeeps wheels. Eventually we made it to a point where the mud was so bad the jeep couldn’t continue. From here we walked about half an hour until we ran into a congregation of children, which to me resembled a walking day parade. It was a parade, but its purpose was to welcome us to the village. And so began the’ tikkaing’. All the ‘senior’ (I think) members of the village presented us with a garland of flowers and put some (alot) of tikka powder on our for heads, although I also seemed to be getting a much heavier dose than everyone else. This is a traditional welcome in Nepal and is very fun. We then set off on the ’10 minute’ (forty minute) walk back to the village, during which I got told off for walking too fast, but I was walking at the front and only had children running ahead to set my pace.

When we got to the village there was a welcoming ceremony for us, during which there was snacks, drinks, speeches, music, demonstrations of local dancing, a lot more tikka and garlands and I even got given a Topi, which is a traditional Nepalese hat; however, I had some hat size issues. It was a very interesting introduction to the village, even if I didn’t understand most of what was being said I got the general gist from Jyuti, who was acting as my interpreter mainly it was people talking about how excited they were for us to come to the village, what we were here to do and that they were going to make us feel welcome. I also had to give a speech myself which got some laughs when I mentioned my head being to big for the hat. After this we had some time to relax, eat, clean the tikka off and change clothes due to the large amount of bugs that had gathered on me because of the nectar in the garlands. 

Me in my Topi (it is mean tto cover your entire head, like a beanie).

fifth day

Fifth day until today (12/9)

Tansen, the green area at the back is rice paddies and it is the second largest flat space in the entire Palpa district.

I have spent the last few days at Mahendra’s house in Tansen, relaxing mainly and getting used to living with the family. I have had a short class in basic Nepali, which is easy and hard at the same time. Easy because none of the words resemble English so there is no way to get them confused. It is hard though because it is very difficult to distinguish the individual phonemes in the words and many of the words are used in different contexts, or there is lots of words for the same thing, for example three different ways for saying yes, depending on the context (saying yes to someone calling you, saying yes to doing something and saying yes to having something). I’m slowly getting the hang of it though and should be more fluent after visiting the villages where there is far less English used.

I’ve also had a motorbike lesson yesterday, with a very friendly and nice chap; however, he could only speak very little English, strangely though I managed to understand the controls and what to do and it went very well, I never even came close to falling off. He even felt comfortable enough for me to give him a seater some of the way home, until I the roads became more confusing and directions would have been a problem, also from my point of view – the traffic.

I’ve had a little explore of the place and it seems very nice, I’m just about to go and have another look around now. So I’ll stop rambling on now. I will try to update how progress in schools went on Saturday, which should hopefully not be as much information as this and more relevant to the school programme. 

For some reason my pictures won't upload, but I'm giving up now. I'll try again another day.