Kantipur School

After the festival ended we moved up to Siddhi Lal, teacher at Kantipur School. The first day we spent visiting the two schools we are going to work at; Kantipur and Ayodhyapuri. The children received us with flowers and small half-scared smiles and the teachers were so happy they almost fell over each other to greet us - very nice to be so warmly welcomed! After a small presentation we used a lot of time to debate; the schools wanted us to work alone, so each school would get more time, at it took us the best of an hour to explain that the terms for our teaching was to work together, but we succeeded :)
We have now been teaching in Kantipur for two weeks and have come to love the job and the people there, both children and teachers. We have the fun classes: communicative English! So our job is basically to make the children talk in English. This might seem easy, but be prepared! Even though the children new many words and phrases in English they had never before been asked to think for themselves, only to repeat the teacher! So it was a fight to make them answer our questions! Through games and a lot of drawing though we have been able to accomplish something, and we are proud of ourselves :) The assignment has been hindered a bit by the fact that we teach the whole school at one time: 30 kids! They are on three different levels (class one, two and three) and the smallest one just started school, they don't know any English and have trouble sitting still! It's quite a problem, but we survive, and we believe that we make even the small ones learn just a little :)

Dashain

After a never ending and very bumpy bustrip we reached our destination almost four weeks ago! We were received by a teacher and a lot of kids and other curious people - it was very nice and everybody was happy, smiling :) They gave us flowers and tika's and then walked for half an hour to get to Kantipur - the village that is now our new home :)
We stayed the first nine days at Manoj' house where he lives with his wife, three kids and parents. On both sides of his house, his brothers live - it stays in the family, everyone is nearby! We lived in a small room with absolutely no privacy which was hard to get used to in the beginning, but you learn not to start when some unknown women pops in her head and asks "kani?" (= means eat). We enjoyed the time with Manoj - it was the Dashain Festival (the biggest in Nepal) and so nobody went to school and we spent the days having fun with the kids and helping out a little, cutting grass in the fields, bathing everyday in the nearby river and watching the dragonflies fill up the evening air - wonderful. Every morning during the festival days we sacrificed an animal to the gods which turns out to be a rather macaber way of starting the day, but it was very fun to watch anyway, they are clearly professionals! In the evening we sat in the yard on ricemats, ate dhaal baat (which I have come to enjoy after all), drank ricebeer, watched the beautiful full moon and danced and sang. We had some magic days :)