Guided Tour

I thought I would post a few photos of the school in which I am working and living right now.

Here's the main compound, or the hostel, where we are sleeping. Each room has a couple of beds and the centre bit is a recreation room where the kids come to sing in the mornings. Here you can see Danny and Archie sitting outside reading in the sun; this is a popular pastime here so Archie and I went out and bought some colourful traditional stools to perch on!

This is the bathroom with, to my delight, a western toilet! The shower is supposed to be heated but it hasn't worked for a week. Showers in the morning are cold but those in the evening are lukewarm. No problem! But the shower unit was taken away today, presumably to try and make it work?



At this school, we have running water, electricity and internet. However we never seem to have all 3 together, and frequently we have only 1! There is a mind-bendingly confusing plumbing system which requires frequent sojourns onto the roof to switch valves over etc. Also the water pump only works when the power is on, which is approximately half the day - auxiliary power is available from 6pm to 10pm and 4am to 6am, so we have another lightbulb in each room connected to this system. The internet, which varies from 1 to 100 kb/s, works most of the time (even when the power is out).

Here is one of the newly-built walls which we will need to paint:

The construction site that we're living in, on the left is the area in which we will soon be digging and building the foundations for the new, permanent canteen building. Also here is the very well-finished school just on the other side of the canteen building where the kids spend most of their time:

 

The construction side seems mostly finished, though behind the hostel you can see a few walls we are going to need to build and paint.

 

So this is where I'm going to be living and working! So far, I am very pleased with my decision to stay in the hostel rather than a host family. We get 3 hot meals a day and there is good company here in the form of Danny, Nicky and Archie, along with many others who come and go. Danny runs 3 times a week so Archie and I are now joining him, we do between 4.5 and 6k on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

We also see quite a lot of the Nepali staff and their family; in particular Adi, Arun and Samena (who are the 3 children of Hem, the assistant manager) who have been great company and shown us round their house where some of the other volunteers live. Yesterday was a public holiday so no food was available at the Hostel so we were made very welcome in their home for the 3 meals and a little bit of relaxing in front of their TV. I'll get some photos at some point.