Bandipur

4-day Christmas trip to Bandipur, a 4 hours bus ride towards Pokhara. Hill-village with great mountain views - if only you could see through the fog!

Pashupatinath

One day trip to the temple area of Pashupatinath, featuring Helena, Jakob and Susanne.

Piaro Sukrabar II

The success of the first Piaro Sukrabar was repeated the next friday.

Piaro Sukrabar

"Piaro Sukrabar" means "Good Friday" or "Funny Friday" and it's the day where the school puts on a show by and for the children.

3 weeks with Susanne

Susanne came all the way from Stockholm to visit us! And she is 5 months pregnant! She says she feels totally recharged now.

Interview filming

Filming an interview for Spanish television.

First we had to wait for 3 hours, then we went somewhere else and waiting for one hour. Then a guy turns up with a tiny handheld camcorder, no lights and no microphone.

Ok, so we go home to Vicky's place and wait another couple of hours before this team of professional film photographers turn up with the whole stash and continues to record the whole thing with the highest amount of professionalism I've seen in this country to date.

Impressive.

Nepalese wedding

Anil is the son of the 'didi' (translates to 'older sister', all adult women are 'didis') who owns the house where we are renting our flat. His family decided that it was time for him to marry, so they found a suitable young woman among the family of some friends. After seeing her a couple of times Anil decided to accept and last Saturday they were unified.

Arranged marriages are still the most common practice, though maybe 20% of people in the city are now doing the "love marriage" thing :-)

That is to say, the terms "arranged" and "love" can be misleading as the festivities of a "love" marriage will still be arranged by the families and and the "arranged" marriage usually ends up with the involved parts loving each other, for some reason...

The festivities start with all the friends and relatives of the groom gathering at his house Saturday morning, receiving brunch and blessings, then embarking en-route to the bride's family's home lead by a brass band or similar.

Click on the photo to see the rest of the story.

Sunny winter school

It is getting colder day by day as winter is nearing. As the days get shorter, well, days REALLY get shorter!

Let me explain:
In summer, Nepali people get up at 4am and go to bed at 10pm, cause that is when there is light. In winter, they sleep until 6 or 7 and go to bed at 8 or 9. In other words, the day is only as long as the daylight. In a way it is true, as electric light is not always available due to frequent power cuts. For children and teachers that also means that there is less time for homework and preparation, so students and employees at the school requested that we cut the school day shorter. It took some time for us to realize that the day was not always 24 hours long...

But in the end we cut one lesson off the schedule and skipped the teachers' training in the mornings. You would think that 2 hours extra of free time per day would be a thrill but the next request is that we close the school completely over the winter. It is true that most schools have a winter holiday of a couple of weeks, maybe longer if there is no heating facilities in the school, like in ours, because the days can get down to zero degrees. On the other hand, with all the interruptions and delays the school has experienced this year, we think we should try to push everybody to study as much as possible. After all, 10 grade students have the (for them extremely important) SLC (School Leaving Certificate) exams in early spring.

Let's see what we'll do. For now the temperatures are reaching down to 10 degrees, so with proper clothing it is still possible to live through the day.
At lunchtime in the sun it is like a nice Danish summer :-)

Free, modern education

Nepal Catalunya School, where we are busy making schedules and routines, is the place where around 150 children from poor and marginalized families. They cannot afford to send their kids even to public school, and what's worse, public schools are infamous for their ridgid, unimaginative teaching methods, where fear and punishment drive the children to copy and memorize books.

November misc.

Wandering the streets and alleys of this city never fails to offer interesting sights. Like orange pigs on display, sheep munching on festival decorations, temples with peculiar decoration, cows with surprising body limps, colourful shops etc.
Click on the photo and enjoy. You can write comments too.

Sinamangal slum

In the middle of Sinamangal, a neighbourhood close to the airport, a slum city has popped up on the unsupporting shores of the river. The families living here must be amongst the poorest in Kathmandu, having no access to running water or sewer facilities (except the river).
Vicky Subirana (aka. Sherpa) has had her eyes on this area for a long time, picking up kids and letting them attend her free school.
Now she is setting up a center for pre-primary kids right in this neighbourhood.