Living in a Mud House

Sorry it has been so long since I have been able to write. We spent the past week in a village without internet and when we got back I spent 5 days in bed getting over something i caught in the village....It has been quite the party!

We just found out where we will be volunteering and I will be in Kalimati (in the capital)! Its a great group and I'm really excited
Anyway, the village we went to is called Sundarwati and it is about a 10 hour bus ride from Kathmandu. Technically it should only take 8 hours to get there but crazy bus drivers, insane roads, and a ton of roadblocks can add a good 2-4 hours to the trip. Sundarwati itself is stunning- its high up in the mountains and there are waterfalls and streams running throughout the area. At points it just didn't seem real.

While we were there we stayed with local families. My friend Ayala and I were together with a family that lived as farthest down the mountain by the road. It's hard to explain the experience we had there but I'll try. The first night was very hard for us because of the language barrier. The parents spoke no English whatsoever and only one of the six children spoke even a few words. They served us our first Daal Bhaat (rice and lentils) of the trip and around 8 they started yelling "sutnus!" (go to sleep!) and shooed us upstairs. Our room was right next to the chickens which were gracious enough not to wake us up too early. The next morning we had our second Daal Bhaat along with fresh milk from the cows they owned. That night I started singing a Nepali song we learned and suddenly the whole family joined in singing and dancing. We had finally broken the ice and it made us feel so good. Staying with the family made me see how unbelievably different we are. We are just as strange to them as they are to us. The day we left (after having Daal Bhaat 6 times) we told them how warm and friendly they had been to us and how much we would miss them. The mother responded by saying she was so sad that the house would be quiet once again and that she hoped we would come back to visit. This interaction could happen in America or in Israel but for it to happen in a rundown mud house in Nepal really touched me.

Me and Ayala 

Our room

The shower/sink

While in the village, we got a first hand look at the effects of climate change. Its not supposed to rain in Nepal in the winter but it rained everyday we were there. The villager's entire lives are based on agriculture- its their source of food and income. Because of the rain they couldn't harvest their crops and a lot of the fields were ruined. We also saw a primary school that sits on top of a hill that won't make it through the next monsoon season. The government won't provide the school with the funds it needs to rebuild in another location. It was pretty powerful stuff.
This week we will be learning about our volunteering sites more in depth and then we will be moving out of the house next Sunday. Just have to be able to eat more then bread and bananas and then I'll be good to go....