An Update from Vincent's Mom

Vincent landed safely Friday morning, March 1st at Tenzing-Hillary Airport to begin his 3 week trek to/around Everest Base Camp.  The plane was full of trekkers and their gear.  The flight into the airport has one of the more spectacular approaches to its runway (I'm sure Vincent will post pictures later.) and probably one of the most dangerous.  Google 'Tenzing-Hillary Airport' or 'Lukla Airport' (as it is also called) to see what I mean.  Needless to say, we were happy to hear his voice once he landed...

Take Two

Still in Kathmandu.

After spending 5 hours in the airport amidst a crowd of trekkers, Everest expeditions and locals this morning due to weather delays our flight was finally canceled. I then proceed to participate in a footrace to the ticket counter with the other travelers in order to get first priority for our flight tomorrow.

We will hopefully be flying out tomorrow at 7:30, but then again who knows.

Done.

I may have for the last time seriously worn a pinstripe suite.

School ended last week.

Lots of emotions, but not a lot of time.

In less than 12 hours I leave to the Everest region for 3 weeks of trekking. Updates will be posted when possible.

More School Photos

Not my school, I wish, but one far to the north where we did a teacher training.

Camp

This past week, one of my life long dreams was fulfilled.

                I was serenaded by a group of 160 Nepali 9^th graders and their teachers to “Call Me Maybe”. (Grandma, please see here)

                I spent last week in Pokhara at our English Micro-Scholarship Program (ACCESS) Winter Camp.  My forty students from Gorkha attended along with cohorts from all around the country.  The ‘camp’ had a myriad of activities which we helped facilitate from story writing, scavenger hunts, morning yoga, leadership games, and my program: English songs.

                I am not a singer.  Those that have been stuck with me on extended road trips or late night Chinese Karaoke binges can attest to this. But that doesn’t stop me from trying.

                Rachel, Sorcha, and I designed a program to teach students simple yet fun English songs.  We started with the Beatles' “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and followed it up by Cat Stevens’ “If You Want to Sing Out”. Then it was my turn to lead Carly Rae Jepsen's jam.  I set the scene having students picture a beautiful or handsome stranger and working up the courage to give them their number. 

                There are very few moments in my life thus far than I have been as happy as while witnessing a conference room filled with students and their teachers singing and dancing with our improvised dance moves to "Call Me Maybe".

                Throughout the rest of the camp, I had 14 and 15 year olds running up to me saying things like “Give me your number so I can call you maybe!” and “I missing you so so bad”.

                But the icing on the cake was during a leadership exercise later that week where teams were tasked with designing and advertising an imaginary product.  A group marketing a ‘Time Controlling Remote’ with the manufacturing name of ‘Vence Company’ (only to later realize that it was a misspelling of my name) wrote this jingle:

Hey I just met you

And this is crazy

But here’s a time controlling remote

So buy it maybe

Apple should hire them on the spot.

Later that week, Ian and I were asked to fill a couple minutes and sing an English song.  When we got onto stage and told them we were singing another love song, the crowd went crazy with joy.  Just before Ian and I were going to begin the first verse of “Aint no Mountain High”, we were approached and told that our “2 to 3 minutes” we needed to fill before lunch had turned into 20! Luckily, we were easily able to break it down into dance moves to teach them. We quickly had the boys and girls competing against each other in a sing off, serenading Ducey, one of the teachers, to see who would go to lunch first.

When a quarter of the boys spontaneously got down on their knees and pointed to Ducey on the line “to keep me from getting to you!”, the competition was over.

Other highlights from the camp include:

-Nepali folk concert which turned into a 3 hour dance party

- Call Me Maybe dance party as we watched the sun rise on the Anapurna range

The Scavenger Hunt which I was a judge for:

The best answers:

-For a Symbol of Peace: a student brought the State Department logo

-For a Gift for the Teacher: a student brought a stick

-For Natural Beauty: boy said “my face”

As I left camp, the students started  “I’ll miss you so, so bad” chant.

One of the many team building activities

Some of the ACCESS students presenting their proposal for a time controlling remote

How we began each day

Ayumi and I at Fewa Lake

All of the students

During the Nepali Folk Concert. The two men in glasses are the head of the ACCESS Program and the head of the Nepal English Language Teachers' Association

The object of this activity was to pour one bucket of water into the other

Downtime with the teachers

Ayumi, Ian, and I after our morning hike to see Anapurna at sunrise

 

With some students from Gorkha

Gorkha students

My Quest to Watch the Super Bowl

                The No Fun League lived up to its name the other morning.

                For Super Bowl Sunday (my Super Bowl Monday morning), I rose in time to catch the 2^nd quarter, ran downstairs and turned on the tv hoping to be as lucky as I was for the baseball playoffs. But it was not to be my day.

                The gods were not on my side. 3 stations, I repeat 3 stations, were playing the same British cricket replay from the previous night - 1 in Hindi and 2 in English…  ESPN, was digging so deep in their programing that I kid you not, they had one of the hobbits narrating the best English Soccer Premier League saves of all time!

               

I turned to my last chance, the BBC, hoping by chance that I would find refuge and that there would be some cross cultural exchange going on. But as I feared, it was just the news. I proceeded to watch the ticker at the bottom wanting to find out at least what the score was. I waited through the endless riveting Premier League scores of 1 – nil, 2 – nil, and nil – nil, then the cricket scores from the night before only to discover that America’s biggest holiday was not even to be mentioned.  Obviously someone is still holding a grudge after the Revolutionary War…

               

                Although this was a major setback, I had prepared a backup plan and dashed out of the house with my emergency backpack in hand. 

                I sprinted down the hill past my neighbors doing morning prayers. Past the Gurkha soldiers practicing their marching. Past the two-size, too-small Angry Bird t-shirt wearing bus conductor who has to this point yet to realize that the pin stripped suit wearing white person he sees every morning and yells at to go to Kathmandu actually lives here and is not modeling off some new North Face formal trekking wear.

                Just as I arrived to the hotel, sat down, got out my laptop and was ready to watch the game, the all too familiar grown of the shutting down of electronics and the quick fading of the lights occurred.  As previously described in a blog post, this is one of the more inconvenient things about Nepal, but I was prepared to wait it out.

                When the power finally came back on, it was well into the 3^rd quarter and I scrambled to find a feed to watch the game.  I  navigated the labyrinth of a website and enrollment process NFL.com has just to watch their “free feed” passing their Terms and Conditions page which resembled in size more a West European County’s constitution than a disclaimer telling me they would sue my ass if I reproduced any of it.

                After all that, my dreams of seeing the red and gold were abruptly crushed when I was informed that only two levels of quality were available, 3D and IMAX. Or, at least with my bandwidth connection, they might have well as been.

But all hope was not lost. I could still listen.  I repeated the labyrinth of a registering process, but this time for the radio broadcast.  By this time a good deal of PTSATD (Post-traumatic SAT Disorder) was setting in. When I reached the end of the forms a pop up appeared asking me for my credit card for the $14.99 fee! With a subtitle stating “includes all playoff games live!” Does it include a time machine? With only one quarter left in the game, no guarantee of actually being able to work, and unemployment looming 3 weeks away, I passed on the splurge.

               

                For some reason SFGate would not load and for some even more inexplicable reason I chose as my back up the LA Times’ live game summary. Whoever was writing it was obviously a Dodgers fan and hated everything about the bay area. They made the 49ers triumphant comeback sound as interesting as the time one of my co-teachers read a passage about the beauty of Nepal to the class spelling out each letter as he read: “T-H-E ,The  B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L,  beautiful…” Acting as if the scoreboard was just malfunctioning.

                I do not need to relive what happened in the game next, but as I sat there in anguish and disgust the manager of the hotel, a friend, and whose kids I teach, approached me, asking me if I wanted to try some new tea they just got.

“Sure” I said, “What type?”

He replied, “English Breakfast.”

“On second thought,” as I began to pack up, “I’ll pass.”

Justly confused he asked, “Why?”

“They know what they did to me.”

                In other news... After seriously considering skipping school, I dragged my body down to the campus only to find that the majority of my students had red powder covering their faces and most of their clothes. Were they all 9ers fans?

No.

It was actually the last day for the teachers in training and the students were giving them tika to give thanks. I only realized this when I entered my 4^th grade class to teach them time telling when I was surrounded and pinned to the wall as they attempted to spread this powder on anything that was mine.

I can only imagine what will happen when I actually leave. Two weeks left….

 Tomorrow I head out to a village, about 5 to 8 hours away depending on how harsh a toll the recent rain did to the roads, to conduct a teaching training for a primary school that is switching to English medium. 

  

The lil' man throwing up the gang signs has better dance moves than you.

The teachers in training. I have, no exaggeration, over 50 variations of this photo.

School

3rd Grade

The classrooms here are barren.  When I arrived, besides the last remnants of chipped paint dolefully remaining since its last coating 60 years ago when the school was founded and the white board nailed on top of the old black board, nothing covered the brick walls of my classrooms. 

                A few months back I started coming to terms with the fact that this posting was temporary and that eventually, whether or not I wanted to, I was going to be forced to leave. The countdown is at three weeks now…

 Although I have helped facilitate some improvement in both my students’ and co-teachers’ English, I wanted something that will last longer. I began looking for ways to create a positive impact in my students long after my visa had expired. I immediately wanted to combat the bareness of their rooms while providing them exposure to English outside of 40 minutes I see them each day.

To do this, I stated making posters of topics which we had covered. ‘I – am, She – is, They – are etc.’ ‘days of the week, months of the year. For 4^th grade, who somehow struggled more with distinguishing between months and days than 3^rd, I created a chart of 60 seconds = 1 minute, 60 minutes = 1 hour all the way up to 12 months = 1 year. 

As a class, we design these posters together, which helps us review those pesky prepositions (a must for all levels) with me asking things like “what goes below Tuesday?” along with the conditional  “what could we put beside ‘play?’”. Preposition work is then emphasized as we as a class chose where to paste the newly made poster.

After designing the poster, I or my co-teacher, Kalpana, outline the posters in pencil in order to get the dimensions correct. Then we pass the posters around the class making sure that every student is able to trace some of the letters in marker. This not only has the students practice their cooperation, but also has them create ownership over the final product which leads to them taking extreme care over the poster and has thus far kept vandalism to a minimum (although in order for 3^rd grade to reach even the bottom of one of the posters they would have to pull some acrobatics feats that would impress even Cirque Du Soleil).  I nearly had to break up a beating after a 2^nd grader had scrawled his name on the bottom of 4^th’s Day of the Week Chart.

Using this same process, minus the pencil tracing, I also created the alphabet with 3^rd grade on half sheets of paper. Many of them still struggle with the letters and this was good practice. At first they had to draft the letters in pencil before we gave them the marker for the final product.  As a class, we had them create three sets, one for their class and the other two for 1^st and 2^nd.  Before we pasted these above the white boards, we used them for a few weeks outside.  The first time I lined up 3^rd grade outside with these cards, 1^st and 2^nd got so jealous (and their teachers curious) that I ended up having nearly enough kids for all three alphabets to be made.

Some of the activities I conducted with the cards (with poorly worded names):

-          Alphabet Construction: Distribute cards randomly, and have the students reconstruct the order. Practices not only the alphabet but also practices team work.

-          Step Forward: After alphabet construction, I will say a word like ‘cat’ and the students who have those letters will step forward, then create the word. For bigger words which repeat letters like ‘tomorrow’  I simply have the student step forward.

These posters have helped provide some character to an otherwise plain room. They have allowed students to have access to materials that have not been available in the classroom.  Plus I think we had some fun doing it.

Kalpana

Class Three

Here is another project I conducted with class 3. Connecting the dotted alphabet to create an elephant. They then proceeded to color them in a manner that would have made the Merry Pranksters proud.

Class Four

Don't let their innocent looks and quirky fashion sense fool you. These three girls are the biggest trouble makers of the school, you let your guard down for  5 seconds, and one of them will have stolen your pens and tied your laces together and the other two will be treating you as a jungle gym.

In other news, to combat my inevitable depression from leaving Gorkha, I booked my flight to Solu-Khumbu last week. Three weeks trekking in the shadow of the world’s tallest mountain, here I come!