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Main road to Kathmandu

Inside the house

I’m writing this off line during a planned power cut. I have a load-shedding schedule which currently shows 4 hours a day of intended cuts. This is ok so far – it is far better knowing when electricity won’t be available than it going out half way through a film. But apparently it gets much worse from here on in and may reach between 12 and 18 hours a day – and often it is not enough to recharge a laptop. Obviously my hair is a primary concern and I will have to draw up contingency plans for hair straightening. If only I’d brought my gas powered straighteners…

The last few weeks have been busy as ever. I have been meaning to post about a pre-Pokhara trip that I took to Hetauda in Southern Nepal to visit a project. I went to see the families of some of the children in the refuge (many of them are from this area which is extremely poor). Visiting the more rural communities was eye-opening. The pictures above are of a one-roomed house (the room on the second storey is for storing produce), both inside and outside. It is located in a field and the family are farmers. 4 people live in this room, along with two goats and a buffalo. I was shocked to see the animals inside. A few different reasons were given – they were young, it was too cold for them outside… One of my colleagues tried to explain that this was normal and the animal waste isn’t so bad since cow dung is often used for cleaning, and for insulating houses. But this is a bit different to having animal’s live in the house and leaving waste in the same room that food is prepared in. I remained unconvinced and felt somewhat vindicated when my language teacher laughed as I tried to describe what I'd seen in Nepali. She thought I was just trying to say that the family kept pets and asked for photographic evidence.

The other thing I was surprised about was the quality of the road surface between Kathmandu and Hetauda which was terrible. While travelling to assess a some local schools the day before we journeyed for a few hours in a fairly remote village down a single track road. We were in a 4 x 4 and despite it being a road I would have said we were 'off-roading'. There were so many twists and turns, dips, pot holes and rocks to negotiate. The main highway back to Kathmandu however was pretty much exactly the same thing. But with a sheer drop down the valley factored in for good measure too.