Field Trip!

(actually written a day previously) I am having major internet angst today. It all started yesterday (when it got so bad that I had to email my friends and give them my passwords to get my credit card bill paid because I couldn't get it done here). Today, however, it took me a solid 30 minutes to be able to send a simple email. Frustration! To prove my dedication to the blog which, after 45 minutes has refused to open completely, I am writing this entry on an email that I will later cut and paste. I almost half wonder if the internet places around here make the internet service slow on purpose so you have to sit on the computers longer, thus having to pay more money. Luckily, everything here basically costs me pennies compared to what it would in the US, so at least I'm not annoyed about the financial burden of staring at the little green squares forever updating at the bottom of my computer screen.

The students have school six days a week, from Sunday to Friday, with Friday as a half day and Saturday as the national holiday (our equivalent of Sunday). The sad part about Saturday is that it really feels no different from any other day here. Everything is still open and runs on the same schedule, and no one really abstains from any specific activities because it's a "holy day." (Usually I can't tell if their telling me it it's a holy day (sacred) or holiday (vacation or bacation---they switch their b's and v's around all the time just like in Spanish; saying their f's like p's is another big one). One thing I do credit Hindus for though, is the fact that religion doesn't seem to be something that they set aside for one day a week. They stop by their temples and shrines everyday---they're just about as commonplace as our Mormon churches in Utah---where they mark themselves with the tika (the red marks on their foreheads, I'm still trying to figure out what it all symbolizes) and walk around their statues and pray to their relics. Just for your information, 0.15% of the population here (about 26 million) is Christian. There is essentially no mention of Jesus Christ here in any kind of discussion. People know of Him and it's not even that I feel like it is frowned upon, but I think it doesn't even enter anyone's consciousness as being relevant. I think this fact alone might be the reason why I continue to struggle with my feelings of isolation and loneliness---because I am truly alone out here.

Well this past holiday/holy day of Saturday, I had 9 EXTREMELY eager and giddy 6th/7th grade girls escort me on a fieldtrip of some of the local sites. They asked me to go with them the first day I came to the school---Tuesday---and I think I was reminded no less than 20 times a day that they were going to come to my house to pick me up at 10 in the morning. The main place we were going was called Naghada, a local pond. It is a very serene and beautiful place, with a lot of local religious superstition surrounding it (I guess a lot of people routinely die there.). We walked around admiring the flowers (throughout the course of the day I received 3 handfuls full of flowers from the girls---flowers that most of us can only find at the florist (or Costco, ha ha) and the lily pads and lotus flowers.

Then the girls pointed to a hill a fair distance away and said that that there was a Hindu temple that we could hike up to. I was totally game, but was skeptical looking at the girls that we had assembled at the pond. (Imagine a group of young young teenage girls who speak only very broken English taking you up to hike the "Y" with no water, wearing sandals, etc.) It had only been about a 20 minute walk to the pond and some of them looked pretty feeble already. Knowing full well that I'd want to poke my own eyes out in a few hours, we set out to tackle the temple Santaneashor.

We walked through the beautiful countyside---I am fascinated with the terraced rice fields and paddies on the hills. I see it everyday from the house where I live and I still can't be anything but in awe of it. Everything is so green and wet. Including the dirt road. I was only wearing flip-flops and so I was basically sliding through the mud. I probably would have had better traction going barefoot. It was so humid and the girls had the luxury of being able to drink irrigation water or random water from a random hose. . . I can't even brush my teeth with tap water, so I can't even imagine how sick I would get if I drank that. They kept pushing it on me but it was basically lost in translation why I couldn't drink it. Eventually, we reached a drier area, but it was mostly uphill. We hiked through little village settlements and watched people bathe from wells (well, not WATCH,watch, but you know what I mean. . .) The sky was looking very ominous and I was worried about rain, especially considering the already existing state of the paths and roads we were taking. And of course, the girls wanted to sit and rest every 5 minutes.

We finally reached the 5 million, I mean, 357 steps ("ladders" as the girls kept calling them) for the final ascent to the temple. Again, it was much of the same thing---some of the girls were racing up tothe top and climbing trees and hanging off the edge, and others way down at the bottom, hanging onto each other and looking like death. I think I was somewhere in the middle, being the "mom" (being a teacher has killed whatever fun I used to be able to have and now my maternal instincts have kicked in and I need to make sure no one is talking to strangers or getting run over) and trying to keep track of everyone despite the major language barrier and my all terrain flip flops.

FINALLY we all got up the top. I thought it would never happen. The breeze was SO cool and refreshing, and the view was pretty spectacular. One amazing thing about Nepal is that you can be in the tropics one moment, and then the next second, you're walking through a high altitude forest with pine trees. Then we came down the hill from the other side. We saw some boys from our school and you should have seen these girls: they literally shrank into nothingness and could barely acknowledge a hello as they passed. So funny. (Give them 6 months and that will all change.) On the way down, I actually misjudged a step and fell down right on my wrist (and man to I have a nasty bruise there!), breaking my watch that I had gotten a week earlier in Kathmandu. I was really okay, (I think thanks to my watch) but these little girls were so scared that I was angry with them because they had allowed me to fall. Of course I wasn't, but they were probably subconsciously picking up on the fact that I was a little worried that it was already drizzling and we had a long walk back in the mud.

We made it back home, again at a teenage girls' snail's pace---I'm learning to relax though (because I obviously didn't learn the lesson when I lived in Italy), nothing is very hurried here in Nepal; simple pleasures, like a beautiful walk, are to be savored and enjoyed---and without major incident or weather emergencies of bibical proportion. That happened about 2 hours after I got home and it poured for like 12 hours straight. Despite my joking, it was so fun to be escorted around by a very attentive, well-intentioned and sweet group of students. I don't know how many students in America would necessarily do that.

A low-key group of very nice girls from the older classes, 9-10, approached me today and asked me if I wanted to go to see some of the famous temples and pagodas (did you know that the pagoda style of architecture you see in buildings all over Asia was actually exported from Nepal centuries ago?) in the nearby city of Patan on Friday. I am already excited at the prospect of less drama, and am relieved to know that it won't take me 2 days to recover afterward.