Sorry it's been a while since I've posted. For five or six days, there wasn't any internet. A phone tower was down or something.

Right now, it's raining. It's been raining for the last six or seven hours. I was supposed to give the seventh graders a test today but I couldn’t because of the rain. Usually, the students take tests outside, scattered under the trees. If the 25 of them took the test all cramped together in the classroom, they would just copy each other's papers. Outside is the only place where the classes take tests. But not when it rains. So, we did a "practice test" indoors and I told them the real test would be tomorrow.

I think most of the teachers just accept that almost all of the students at the school cheat and copy off their classmates in tests and homework, and don't really do much about it. So, I think the seventh and eighth graders were really surprised when I brought in some homework I had collected and, with as angry a tone as I could muster, pointed out all the homework that had been copied. These students are the absolute worst cheaters I have ever seen. They're not even good at it. It's so obvious which students have copied from another student because they copy everything EXACTLY as the other student had it. If one student makes a really silly mistake, four or five other students make the exact same silly mistake. For the first homework assignment I gave the eight graders, of which there are over 25, only three did the work and at least didn't make it obvious that they had copied someone else's. I've started a serious crackdown on homework. Take that middle-schoolers.

I'm spending a whole lot more time at the school because I'm not longer going up to the monastery in Chialsa in the afternoons to teach. In the group of six monks I was teaching, I kind of got the impression that three or four of them didn't really want to be there. And I didn't want them to feel like they had to come to classes they really didn't want to come to. Plus, I was beginning to realize that classes were going to start to get really difficult for me. The language barrier makes teaching English really really difficult, and I wasn't really sure what I was going to do after I covered all the really basic stuff. But I'm still going up there every once in a while just to say hey to Namdaal, the Tibetan teacher, and the other monks. So, now I'm at the school from 9:45 to 3:45 every day, either teaching class or sitting in the "staff room" grading homework or reading a book. But I think the principal is going to give me some more work to do in the next couple days, since all grades are getting ready to take end-of-term exams.

Now that I'm at the school the whole day, walking up with the kids in the morning and walking down with them in the afternoons, I'm getting to know a lot of the students and teachers a lot better. Sonam, one of the youngest teachers at the school, invited me over to his house for breakfast Friday morning before school. He has a kind of extra-curricular tutoring program that operates at his house in the mornings from 6-8 with about 30 students from the school, but after they left we had some really good dhalbaat and fish from the river, heads and fins and all.

The school runs Sunday to Friday (even though on Friday they only have three periods and then usually have volleyball tournaments and stuff) so on Saturdays I've started hiking to different places in the area. Last Saturday, I went to Chiwang Monastery, about three hours away from Nayabazzaar. It's atop a huge cliff on a mountainside, a 45 minute hike down to the nearest town, and it's ridiculously beautiful. By the time I got up there, clouds had already covered the mountain, but every once in a while the clouds would part and give just a peek at the view. Yesterday, I walked down by the river to Beni (which is just two houses and a school) and up a mountain on the other side of the river, not really knowing where I was going. After reaching a little town about 4 1/2 hours from Nayabazaar, I got some tea at a little restaurant and turned back. Next Saturday, Sonam told me he's going to take me up to a lookout about two hours up from Phaplu where you can see Everest on a clear day (which you don't really get in the monsoon season, but you never know).