Does this make you want to go to the dentist, or run away from it? Quite a lot of dentists in Nepal have signs like these outside.

Day 56  – Location: Besisahar; Nepal.

25/10/12

My sleep was disturbed early by hawking and vehicles on the main road outside who enjoyed beeping their horns at 6am. We read on the balcony in the warm morning sunshine drinking tea. Cheti was ill so Rezham was doing all the cooking and cleaning, which he seemed to be pretty good at. Rezham’s unemployed (he used to work for an electrical company), so he spends a good deal of time doing these sorts of things anyway. Cheti is the principal of a local school. We watched people in the fields below about their morning tasks, carrying massive bundles of grass on their backs for their animals, washing and doing dishes under the outdoor taps, and people walking from house to house.

Rezham’s kitchen, compare it to Shibas a few posts ago and you can see the difference in wealth

The shared bedroom for the volunteers

Me and Anja walked into Beshisahar a few kilometers away. We passed a big river with rubbish in big heaps down the banks. There were still people washing and doing laundry in it. In the unremarkable town almost everything was shuttered due to the festival. People milled around chatting and kids played on swings in the doorways. Many people were wearing their nicest clothes for the festival. We popped into a local internet café, which looked more like a house, and spent a few hours catching up. Then Anja led me up the hill through the countryside to her school.

The main town of Besisahar viewed from the hill. Anja’s house is about half an hour from here more in the countryside

We climbed stone steps like the ones I’d seen on trekking. All the way along we passed people who we greeted. A lot of the kids we passed knew Anja from school. We passed some really big bamboo swings for the festival, where the kids were going dangerously high.

Now that’s a lot of grass!

The path up to the school

Up the hill stood the school. Like most local schools it was very basic, bare buildings with wooden desks and blackboards with basic posters on the wall, only shuttered windows, no glass, and a bare playing area. Anja said she was trying to raise money back home to buy the kids some sports equipment. On one of the school walls the motivational message about learning was spelt wrong!

Anja said that at her school most of the teachers can’t even speak proper English so the kids get taught a lot of mistakes, hopefully something she can help with. We went down steps through a wood to reach Anja’s house, where we drank tea in the afternoon sun. When the sun moved around it got cold fast, and we took a walk to relax at the temple again. We saw people cutting grass with sickles, and a crazy lady who seemed to be collecting stones came by but didn’t speak any English. We saw her shouting at no-one as she walked off.

Back at the house we read and caught up on our diaries. A family was visiting and the teenager came to chat to us but was acting very strangely. He watched Anja writing her diary, fascinated, and tried to take it from her, and was moving in very close. I told her that we could get rid of him but she was alright and let him continue. Eventually his mother appeared and shooed him off. As he walked away it was obvious he was totally wasted as he staggered away!

Later that evening we chatted to Rezham and Chita and some other visitors and watched amazing Nepali TV. They have a mixture of Indian programs and Nepali. Both are of terrible quality with the Nepali shows being the most hilarious, filled with awful acting, terrible camera angles, stupid sound effects to convey feelings and definitely so bad its good. Me and Anja couldn’t stop laughing! We turned in soon afterwards.