Mud Roads and See You Tomorrows

           "Eota hapta matra bawki" our teacher reminds us. "Tinjana Gorkha jaane ra tinjana Lalitpur jaane." Only one week left and three of us will go to Gorkha and three of us to Lalitpur. We won't be continuing in our routine of lessons and trainings and cooking together in the evenings. Instead we'll be stepping into completely different worlds with different families and a school of our own. "I've only just now figured out the way from our apartment to the Fulbright office and back," Caitlin sighed. It feels like a very short few weeks for me here too. Especially this past one as we made a trip to Lalitpur to visit the last three schools and did two days of teaching practice in a nearby government school for Tibetan refugees.
           To begin with, Lalitpur is a beautiful area. It is very close to the city (maybe only a 45 minute drive) and yet it feels very secluded and rural.
One of the schools is all the way up on top of the nearby mountain, a very big mountain. Nepali people, or at least the ones I've met, seem to have a tendency for predicting the period of time a walk or hike to be much shorter than it actually is. Everyone seemed to think the walk from our apartment to the Fulbright offices would be only 15 to 20 minutes - when in reality, even walking fast, it took us an hour the first day and 45 minutes once we had found the best route. For the mountain school, they told us we might have to walk to school each day from a home stay at the bottom of the hill; a half hour walk they said. After zigzagging back and forth up an extremely long and sketchy mud road to the school, it's obvious that this is a horrible calculation. The climb could easily take an hour and a half, though maybe it'd only take a half hour down the mountain if you decided to do somersaults off the side of it instead of walking. Either version would probably be safer than slipping and sliding through the mud like we did in our Fulbright Jeep (This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I was terrified at the time). Lucky for Caitlin, who will be going to this school, there is another home stay option at the top of the hill.

            The other exciting part of this week, as I mentioned, was doing our teaching practice at a nearby school. Elsie and I made paper fruits and vegetables and a simplified version of "The Hungry Caterpillar" to read to our class. Though the class was a little big and wild at first, the students loved the games and songs, and of course, it was a great joy for us as well. In between periods older students came to ask us our name and begged us to come teach in their class as well. After a successful two days, Christine (our teacher trainer) took us out for coffee and we laughed about how the students had all asked to go to the bathroom at the same time and wouldn't reenter the classroom unless we had given them permission. I can still hear the sound of the students singing the song we had taught as we left the classroom, "Goodbye, goodbye, see you tomorrow; Goodbye, goodbye, have a nice day."
          Getting to teach was all the more exciting now that we have figured out which school each of us will be going to. Though we've only seen our schools and home stays just briefly, its nice to be able to envision and dream about where we will be living and teaching for the next seven months. My placement is in a larger Higher Secondary school at the bottom of the Gorkha valley. I will be just a short ride away from the Gorkha Bazaar and two other ETAs. I'm looking forward to exploring the rice fields, meeting all of my students, and playing with the three year old granddaughter at my home stay. Only three weeks in, it has already been an incredible journey. Below are a few pictures I have from my school.