Nayabazaar, Solukhumbu

On Thursday morning, I finally made it out of Kathmandu in a little propeller plane headed northeast towards Phaplu. I had never ridden in a propeller plane before, so it was pretty sweet. We flew up to 10,000 ft and didn't come back down. The landscape rose up to meet us. After 45 minutes in the air, the plane headed straight towards a mountain, did a 180 and landed on a really short strip on a mountainside. The guy next to me gave a thumbs up and I gathered that landings weren't usually that smooth. I was told later that a plane crashes on this strip every three years or so, which I was glad I hadn't know beforehand.

Tej had given me some basic directions of where to go once I got there but luckily I met Natalie, the other VSN volunteer working in the area, on the way and she took me to the house I'll be staying at while I'm here (which turns out is where Tej's mom, sister, two nieces and nephew-in-law (?) live). She then took me around to the different places she's been working at. She gives English lessons to a monk that lives about an hours hike away, but also helps out at a nearby monastery and teaches English to 2nd, 3rd and 7th graders the local "Mt. Everest" school.

On Friday, which is the final day of a six-day school week, classes at the school had been cancelled for a girl's volleyball tournament (Volleyball is huge here. Everywhere I go I see people dirt courts and people playing. Even the monks play.) but I got to meet some people around the school and see a little more of the area.

On Saturday, we hiked up past the monastery Natalie works at (stopping briefly because of the rain and eating bananas and green mango we'd bought at the market that morning) and walked around a Tibetan "refugee camp" (people have been living there for over fifty years so I'm not sure what to call it). Everyone spoke Tibetan which made communication really difficult, not that my Nepali is exactly stellar, but we managed to inquire about a "Tibetan cave" we'd heard about. We never actually found "the cave" even though we hiked another couple hours up into the mountains, but it was still a pretty amazing hike. The clouds had disappeared after the rain earlier and we could see for miles, even glimpsing the Himalayas at one point, but now the clouds swept over us making everything really creepy and mysterious. We managed to find our way back to Nayabazaar, where we're staying, just before nightfall and were served huge heaping plates of daalbhat, which I eat two meals a day (basically rice, veggies, lentils, sometimes meat all mixed together).

Today I went to the school and watched Natalie (try to) teach a class of 2nd graders. Since teachers here beat kids with sticks whenever they act up, and the kids know Natalie doesn't, they go completely crazy. They were screaming, throwing stuff, spitting, wiping their snotty noses all over the place. It was painful to watch. All the English classes at the school consist of repetition and memorization of lessons from a textbook, so there's really no focus on comprehension. Most of the teachers themselves have pretty horrible English and sometimes they just have the class read aloud in unison from the book instead of actually giving a lesson. So, after hearing about how hard it was to teach English and sitting in on the 2nd grade classroom from hell, I wasn't that excited about teaching English. But, luckily, I found a way out: Math! I talked to the main math teacher (I was going to talk to the principal but he's away with typhoid at the moment) and he said he would love for me to help out. Right now he has a class every single period so he was pretty excited to dump a couple on me. So, starting tomorrow, I will be teaching 7th and 8th grade math. We'll see how that goes.

I've taken a bunch of really epic photos, and for some reason the internet is pretty fast today, but my camera has just died. Sorry.