In Gorkha

I arrived to Gorkha Friday afternoon after another Mr. Toads Wild Ride bus trip. The six of us were dropped off one by one at our respective host family's houses. As luck would have it, my family's home is four houses away from the badminton court!
This has been a true test of my Nepali, which limited may have been an understatement;  some of the crucial things about language learning is being ok with making mistakes, getting creative, and if all else fails, pantomiming. That being said, there has been a lot of moments of smiling and nodding and some long silences.
Today I begin going to my school. It is K-12 and is about a ten minute walk down hill. For the first few weeks, my primary purpose in the classroom will to be to observe and to assist the teacher in little ways. Then as I become more comfortable in the classroom, there will be a gradual shift to becoming co-teachers which I am truly excited about. I will try and post some pictures soon, but the internet here is very finicky.

Heading to Gorkha

 

Kathmandu Sunset

      It is official - I am headed to Gorka to teach for the next 8 months. I will teach at the first school which I visited while there; it is the oldest school and has grades K to 12th. The past few weeks have been incredibly packed, trying to cram as much Nepali and ELL training in along with prepping with supplies for teaching, and buying badminton gear. Tonight we are packing and in the morning 6 of us make the 5 hour trip back to Gorkha; the other three are teaching in the Southern Kathmandu Valley.  I will be dropped off with my host family who I will spend the rest of my time in Gorkha with and on Sunday we start school. Stoked, but nervous. More to come soon.

 

The Group: Nick, Ian, Sorcha, Ayumi, Rachel, Krista, Me, Julia, and Lara

Diplomacy is Best Served with a Shuttlecock

                As shown through this blog, I have been extremely fortunate with my travel experiences. I know that I am in a small minority of the population of this world that has such types of opportunities and I try not to forget that. When visiting, or in this case, living abroad I always try and learn the local language as a tool for better cultural exchange. But as Nepali is showing me, that doesn’t come as quickly as desired. This can create some difficulty and frustration when it comes to interacting with the host culture. But one of the ways I have been able to overcome this in the early days, besides copious amounts of hand gestures (excessive even for an Italian), is through sports (or as one of our potential future president might say, ‘the sport’). In Italy I played bocce ball with men who had so much precision in their art and were so old that they could have invented the game. In China I was humiliated playing people my grandparents’ age playing in flip-flops at ping pong, and then again on the basketball court by students of mine who were a foot shorter than me. In Botswana I took on my host family and extended family in soccer, where I proceeded to be taught how to truly play, by my 12 year old cousin. Embarrassments aside, these were incredible resource for us to bond over, we were able to substitute the lack of a mutual spoken language through the language of sports.

                After nearly five hours on some of the more treacherous roads I have been on in my life (imagine the recklessness of Kathmandu driving, on roads traveling three times as fast, with even more livestock, more  freight trucks and busses, and sheer cliffs to one (or sometimes both) sides of the road), we reached Gorkha. Perched on what only a country which has the Himalayas could call a hill, the town overlooks an expansive valley, filled with rolling hills, rice paddies, and a big river. Upon arrival, I quickly began to explore, weaving through alleyways until I found myself in the older section of town. I peaked my head around the corner of an ancient shrine to find tucked between the shrine and some small store fronts on cobblestones, a badminton court painted into the square. Four men, all in flip flops, were battling it out. I use the term battling in an entirely serious manner, for those of you that have never seen badminton played before by enthusiasts, not by 7^th grade PE students, it is an intensely fast paced competition, that should not be taken lightly. I stood there and watched for a few minutes, but intimidated by their prowess sneaked off to snake my way through more alley ways.

                But I was drawn back to the court and seeing the much less intimidating kids play, I decided to ask to join. I had some experience with racket sports from countless sunny Saturdays spent at Grandma and Papa’s house playing paddle board and thought how hard will it be to play some little kids? I was very wrong in my judgments, their small stature was incredibly misleading, their quickness and precision of accuracy was humbling.  Surprises aside, I was back in my element. No longer did I feel like the awkward foreigner wandering around the town, being able to speak with others with not much more than a “hello, how are you?” and “how much? Too expensive!” Now it didn’t matter that we couldn’t speak each other’s respective languages, we were united through competition, which is almost universal.  This quickly opened us up to each other as we had this commonalty. More and more people from the town came to watch this foreigner take on various locals, and we in turn we able to practice the others language.  It became an afternoon tradition; some ETAs and I each afternoon would head up the hill from our hotel after class and play badminton with whoever was there. Not only did I play with kids, but their fathers, and some of their grandfathers, who also put me to shame, although by the end of our trip to Gorkha, I was able to hold my own at least for some of the rallies.

     There were a lot of great times spent on that court, and it was some of the most comfortable moments I have felt thus far in the country and interacting with Nepali. Although it was for the most part a happy situation it did shine some light onto the culture I will be immersing myself into. Over the several hours spent on the court playing or just watching, we only ever saw one Nepali women play, and it was only after Julie offered her the racket. There is definitely a stronger gender binary than in most of the circles I find myself back in the states, and it is something that I will be adjusting to throughout my time here.

            We returned to Kathmandu last night after another harrowing bus ride (which just getting the bus to start was another story itself, this is best shown through one of my favorite movies, Little Miss Sunshine: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/mv-8B97a/no_one_gets_left_behind/). As I write this, I sit in a cafe in the Thamel district, where I before this met a family friend Jenny Putt, who is currently in the early stages of her 6 month world tour and you can follow her at http://avoidingtherealworld.wordpress.com/ .

During this writing process, the monsoon rain has been pouring down and a selected mix of the Titanic soundtrack has been on repeat. Tonight, we are keeping it low key and going to the Cinema to watch the Bollywood film we have been seeing advertisements posted up everywhere about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FfBzyiU0ZU

I also intended this to be a short blog post, but 3 milk teas later, two plates of momo (surprisingly  after the challenge, I am not sick of them yet), and an order of naan, I am still writing. Looks like I must be enjoying myself here. 

 

The old royal palace on the top of the hill above Gorkha. If the fog wasn't there the Himalayas would be visible. The district that Gorkha is in goes all the way to Tibet. 

View of the valley from our hotel room.

One of the placement schools.

View from classroom of one of the placement schools.

The 'Access Students' we will be working with outside of the classroom.

View of town from the old Royal Palace.

Ringing the bell at the Temple.

One of the countless intricate wood designs at the Royal Palace

Advice from a Nepali Turck Driver:

Just returned from our visit to Gorkha. We visited possible school placements and host families and even climbed to the old royal palace. More to come on that, but along the way I learned the three things you need to drive in Nepal:

11)      Good Brakes

22)      Good Horn

33)      Good Luck

7th of July: a taste of America

        I write you this as I sit in an internet café a few blocks from the flat which Ian, Nick, and I (the male portion of the Fulbright English Teachers) currently reside.  To say that writing this is a struggle would be an understatement. Not because I have experienced so much over this past week that it is difficult for me to determine where to even begin (although on any other day this would be the case), but rather because I am in a Mo Mo coma. These divine dumplings are a Nepali staple, but when Nick and I were challenged to eat the family size portion of fifty in one sitting, we naively took on the challenge for this lunch.  So please forgive me, the challenge is over, the Mo Mo are in our bellies and are paid for by our friend, but with the way my stomach is feeling I am not sure I would call us ‘winners’.

      After getting the run down with various offices of the US embassy and other NGOs this past week on how to stay healthy, what to do and what not to do to stay safe, along with a plethora of other information including how to get married or divorced here, we also were invited to the Embassy’s 4^th of July event at the US commissary (which is run by a Canadian…).  This event was held on Saturday July 7^th and was only for US citizens and their friends. It felt like I was in America. It was the first time that our group, outside of the Embassy, had been surrounded by native English speakers. As we were offered BBQ and Budweiser, it was easy to forget that we were in Nepal.  I think an event like this, which I associate more with family and friends rather than patriotism, would have been much more difficult to attend had I been away from all of you longer, but I am still in the tourist or honeymoon stage so the event was more bearable. 

      Living only with other Americans, and spending the majority of my time with other Americans has quelled, or at least subdued the major culture shock so far.  We are at the Fulbright Commission 5 days a week, 9 to 5 studying Nepali and receiving teacher training. But we are easing in, with every new Nepali lesson we acquire more vocab and confidence. A similar thing happened to me in Botswana when for the first 10 days we were staying in a hotel and receiving a crash course in the language; it wasn’t until I received my piece of paper which had my host families information that my heart started to pound and I really began to feel like I was getting out of my comfort zone. That experience would repeat itself in various manners throughout the rest of my stay in Botswana, but it only happened once I began to truly immerse myself in the culture.  I expect that to be the same for Nepal; it is easy to head back to our flat after a day of practicing Nepali and check out of Nepal for a while as I respond to emails, make my own food, or read a book, but living with a host family is going to provided me with an incredible opportunity to enhance my language skills and help immerse myself into the culture. I am totally excited for it.

     But until then, I am enjoying the tourist life. Checking out the sites and embracing my little knowledge of the area has been exhilarating. I have been exploring the different shops and restaurants, finding out the ‘true’ prices of goods and not just the tourist prices. I am becoming more and more acclimated with the city and can walk myself to most of the necessary places without a map. Finding shortcuts through alleyways is the next step though. It is disorienting (to say the least) to navigate through the tightly weaving alleyway systems which make up a good deal of the city, which provide no visual reference points, due to the height of the buildings, all while dodging motorcycles, little children, and stray dogs. Soon though, soon.

     After the American Club, we met up with a Nepali who went to school with Julie (a fellow ETA). He is back this summer in Nepal through the Anne Frank Project. When he went to college in the States it was not only his first time hearing about Anne Frank, but also the Holocaust.  Astonished to find this out only when he left the country, he began to come up with a way to teach Nepali about the atrocities which took place in Europe.  This is the second summer he going to Nepali schools to teach about the Holocaust through the story of Anne Frank. He is also in the process of petitioning the government to cover it in the world history textbooks. 

     He took us out to the countryside of the valley. After exiting the ring road which surrounds the majority of the city, rice patties become more and more prevalent, until they surround you on every side, with houses dotting the road or in far off fields. After trekking down a muddy path which wound through the paddies, we reached a trout farm where, with other Nepali, we caught our fish with nets and enjoyed the trout fried in a bamboo bungalow perched on top of hill overlooking the paddies as the monsoon season rain pounded down. After days of weaving through traffic, inhaling lots of dust, and coping with the ever present sounds of honking, this was a much needed breather.

     Tomorrow we head to Gorkha, outside of the valley to receive some in classroom experience and see one of our possible placements.

Our welcome to the American Club

Wouldn't be a real 4th without the King

Sorcha, Ayumi, and Rachel

Fishing

The first few days

Traffic in Nepal

                The  past few days have been a whirlwind. We, the Fulbright English Teachers (ETAs), have been pinballed around the city doing everything from getting safety talks at the embassy with our Regional Security Officer, creating a local bank account, buying clothes and toiletries which we were lacking, all while learning Nepali and taking ELL (English Language Learner) classes. But don’t worry though, although we have been busy with official work, we have found time to relax some and enjoy a variety of restaurants and sample the local brews. I even was able to meet up with my good friend Keiko from Pitzer who had just finished her study abroad and was trekking around the country with her parents. She introduced me to two Nepali beers, Everest and Gorkha. Speaking of Gorkha, starting Monday, we are headed there for a week.  It is where half of our teaching placements will be. It is a hill village/town outside of the Kathmandu Valley to the west. While there we will continue to take our ELL and Nepali classes as well as meet and interact with our potential students and fellow teachers. If we are not placed in Gorkha we will be placed south of Kathmandu, still in the valley, but in a rural region outside of the city.

                4^th of July was less festive than what people in the states experienced as many of our systems were coping with the new environment and food.  But thanks to the Dollar Store, I was able to wave my American Flag around a little and give a few good “USA!” chants.