HANGING ON For dear life

It's never a boring day here in Nepal! Today has been yet another interesting day!

We were up at 7 am for tea and biscuits (though we were actually awoken much earlier from the loud banging noises.. Nepalese people get up so early, like 5.30 am!). The girls had no biscuits, so I 'took one for the team' and had a few (really I just wanted them) ... But I later regret it when we had an absolute mountain of rice, dhal and beat for breakfast at 9 am. We had to wash up after, so we didn't leave until 9.45 (we were meant to be at work for 10 am but our family couldn't understand ... So VIN said they would ring them and ask to do breakfast earlier!).

The bus stop is a fifteen minute walk from the house. The bus was 60 rupees for all of us (so cheap!) and was about 30 minutes. We were first on so got a seat....but WOW it got SO rammed. The people standing had NO room - it was so cramped... There must have been DOUBLE the capacity on it, with people hanging out the doors.

The office was a fifteen minute walk from the bus stop...through a LOT of mud (a bad day to wear sandals!). We were at the office from 11- 2 planning our lessons. We met Shweta (the local volunteer) and Om (our project leader) went over the PowerPoint with Hope as she was ill on the day we did it. Hope looked like she was about falling asleep hahaha as Om was literally repeating the same stuff over and over, and her English wasn't great!
We made lesson plans for the life skill: 'self esteem' which we decided to do as our first lesson, 'communication and public speaking' as our second lesson, and 'stress management' as our third. The annoying part is that the project we chose was 'women's trafficking' yet apparently the first area that we are teaching our women's group in (all three lessons on Wednesday, Thursday, friday) does not have an issue with women's trafficking ... so it is quite annoying and makes our project seem pretty pointless. We wished we chose one that teaches english, but hopefully the life skills lessons will still be interesting, and we can still write on our CV that we taught about women's trafficking.

We finished about 2 pm after both being asked by a Nepalese man if we are models (lol)! Then decided that we didn't want to go straight back to the host family, so got a 350 rupees taxi to Thamel and had some chips and nachos, and 2 sex on the beach cocktails from a terrace bar (which turned out to be so expensive!!! Like 2200 - ridiculous!) We looked at some shops, then got a taxi back to the bypass bus stop to get the bus back to Kravesthali.

And wow what an experience this was! So a bus turned up, and we definitely thought it was full... but oh no ... we are asked to get on. We were literally HANGING ON FOR DEAR LIFE! It was so funny ... we were laughing so hard but it was making it so much more difficult to hold on. The journey is uphill and so bumpy, yet we felt like we were almost hanging out the door!! In the end a lady offered to hold my bag. It is mental on there! No wonder it's so cheap. There was one point we felt so uncomfortable from how close people were to us, and it stunk of BO which wasn't ideal! We were glad to get off.

We met a few of the volunteers at a cafe, then walked back to the house with Sheri and Melanie.

As we had eaten at the restaurant, and there are no bins anywhere in Nepal (no wonder pollution is so bad here!), we still had our full lunch boxes. So in a panic, just before we get back to the house, we poured the food in to a carrier bag ... then the dad comes zooming past on his motorbike... so in a panic we put a bag full of food (which has a very strong smell of CURRY) IN MY BAG!!! And we had to keep it in our room overnight because we couldn't let Anita see as she would be so offended ... it was not cool! (I am now writing on the 19/07/17 as we got distracted yesterday)

When we got in, we had tea around the table and waited for dinner at 8 pm. Anita showed us milking her cow in the garden (we felt so sorry for the cow in a small barn) and the kids were non stop shouting 'SISTER TAKE PHOTO TAKE PHOTO' at us haha! Then we went to bed after dinner!Read more