Namaste, Saathi-hura!

Hello friends! After 32 hours of 3 plane flights, I arrived in Kathmandu last Saturday around noon. What an incredible culture I have immersed into! It’s nearly the completely opposite of "Amereeka!", but I am loving it so far.

This past week has been “Nepal Orientation” as we (me and another SALTer) have spent time getting our first tastes of the Nepalese culture. What better way to see the culture than to trek through the Himalayan mountain foothills and its villages? So that we did within 2 ½ hours of landing on our first day! Forget about jet lag! I can’t imagine a better way to initially see the culture. We followed windy stone roads between small houses, random temples, and beautiful Nepalese people. Other than logisticals, orientation has mostly consisted of getting to know the Nepalese culture while still living with an American family (MCC Nepal Reps). It’s a way of slowly taking away all our comforts rather than all at once!

On Tuesday I got a slice of my next 11 months. We visited Elim Kids Academy and talked with the principal. The school really is an incredible school. Public Nepalese schools are rather messed up because teachers are not adequately trained, are underpaid, have inconsistent teaching material, and are completely disorganized. So many private schools have popped up to provide better education. However, these schools are only affordable by those high in the caste system. Also, Maoists will go to the schools and make the schools pay them money… or they will attack. A program formed called “Icthus” (they pronounce it ik-tus here) that sponsors a series of Christian schools in Kathmandu. These schools provide scholarships to help those lower in the caste system to be able to go to schools while providing a great education. This is why the Icthus schools are awesome: they fight the caste system by mixing children of different socio-economic classes, base teachings around the Word of God, and constantly find ways to serve others in the community. I’ll get to that last part in a second. So Elim Kids Academy started in 2002 and is one of the schools sponsored by Icthus, primarily MCC. 

We discussed what work I will be doing for the year. They fall into 4 different jobs:

• English teacher for several classes at Elim Kids Academy
  
• Coordinator of a teacher’s group
  
• Worship team for Saturday service (Saturday is the typical church day)
  
• English teacher for young adult Somalian refugees

This last job is where the “constantly finding way to serve others” comes into play. Somalian refugees are temporarily displaced in Kathmandu right now. They are in a waiting period for who knows how many years in which they do nothing, which is very negative to their development. So Elim is providing a few classes so they can make productive use of their waiting period. This will then help them make positive use of their life. I will help them learn English while also living and loving in a way that shows what Christ is all about.

Tuesday was also filled with meeting my host family and starting language classes. My host family consists of a Nepali Buddhist father, Filipino Catholic mother, and a young son and daughter. Interesting family dynamics, eh?! They seem SO incredibly nice! They even fed us a surprise lunch as we were visiting. I’m excited to become a part of their family for a year and so grateful that they’re willing to take me in! The language classes will continue for 4 weeks, 5 days a week, for 3 hrs each. This is an intense study! The language is so completely different than the English language by words, sentence structure, word order, word meaning, and script. I feel like I’ve already learned so much, but oh boy, my mind is overwhelmed! I hope eventually the language will come naturally so I do not have to constantly translate it in my mind!

I will finish this post with some random tidbits about the Nepalese culture:

• There are street dogs EVERYWHERE! Most are not kept well and just wander the streets. But luckily they do not show any anger towards humans, so the chance of getting rabies is slim to none!
  
• Friendly goats are a normal scene around here.
  
• I saw an elephant walking down a busy street today! Ha, so unreal!
  
• The ice cream situation is sad here. There’s not much of it, and half of it is probably unsafe to eat. How will I survive?!
  
• A KFC and Pizza Hut just recently opened in Kathmandu! These are the first Western fast food restaurants here! They beat McDonald's to Nepal!
  
• It is very offensive to show the bottom of your feet to someone. Therefore your feet are always kept away from people. Ahh, finally people will not take advantage of my feet-phobia!
  
• Hiccups are normal here! Now I’m really fitting right in!
  
• I celebrated my 23^rd birthday today! Birthdays are not a big deal or even usually celebrated here. Why? Well because most people don’t know when their birthdays are, sometimes the day, month, or year! Hospitals have just recently started keeping better track and people remembering. So my birthday wasn’t really celebrated, which is fine with me. But during the evening we went rock climbing J And that was a fabulous treat!
  
• It’s monsoon season! That means it’s raining almost ALL the time. It’s a nice refreshing rain that cools off the heat of the day. The only bad part is that I’m constantly soaked. The streets are filled with potholes, so we’re constantly skipping around trying to avoid the ginormous puddles and always failing. Puddle jumping could be fun… except that this street water is not the type you want to get splashed all over you, especially since feces normally get dumped into it! But the monsoon weather, in my opinion, brings a fun freshness to the day.
  
• There is a huge lack of public transportation here. There are a few “bus systems” in which micros (small minivans) and tempos (small 3-wheeled auto) take people on certain routes around the city. There’s also taxis, some vehicles, lots of motorbikes, and bicycles. People drive on the left… well they’re supposed to. Maybe I should rephrase that. There’s really no driving rules except try not to run into others including pedestrians and try to pass on the left.
  
• It’s more scandalous here to show your knees than your stomach!
  
• There has been a lot of political unrest here for awhile. About 2 years ago the king was overthrown and now there is a democratic republic government. However they’ve been trying to elect a prime minister but it has gotten nowhere. They've failed five times now in electing a prime minister. Since the government is at a hault, it puts the rest of the country’s development at a hault too.
  
• When a man’s father or mother dies, he has to wear white everyday for the following year. Yes, everyday. I went to a festival called Gai Jatra (Cow Festival). It is for those that lost a loved one in the past year. One of the family members dresses up as the one that passed. Kids get food, people paint on the ground, Buddhists pray, and there's lots and lots of music and noise. All the men who had lost a father in the past year were there in white.
  
• Street lights rarely exist here, even though it’s a big city of 1-4 million (yes, this is the official count). So take a flashlight with you at night!
  
• I tried buying new flip-flops because mine have been completely destroyed from the monsoon weather. But I can’t find any that are big enough!!! I only wear a size 9, but Nepalese shoes in size 9 are still too small! Speaking of which, I feel TALL here. It’s just nuts!
  
• The typical Nepalese meal is Dhaal Baat which is rice and lentils. I’ve also had water buffalo momos (dumplings-ish), mutton (goat), rice, rice, and rice!

I move in with my host family on Friday, continue language lessons for 3 more weeks, and will start observing at Elim Kids Academy next week to see where I’ll fit in. It’s an exciting time with a LOT of new things… new family, new language, new city, new habits, new way of living, new way of thinking, new jobs… so prayers are appreciated as it’s a bit overwhelming sometimes! Thank you so very much for all your support!

Take care!

Kelsey

PS: I have a link on the left side of my blog to view photos! Just click on it and  you will be taken to my Picasa photo album for Nepal!