walking tree

here and there

Greetings again from Pokhara! After baby Manish got pneumonia and was taken to hospital to stay for a weeks course of antibiotics and hot steam and something to clear his lungs I came up as soon as I could and have been here since Thursday to look after the children while Krishna and Bishnu in hospital looking after him.

Here he is helping himself to hot steam!

Only one small bed for them in the hosp and Krishna somehow managed to sleep on a stool and the floor for the week! Now everyone is back home and Manish is looking healthy again.

Thursday evening with the other babysitters - Krishna's friend Bikas and Binod from up the road after beers in the garden once all the children were put to bed.

Goodnight! Bimala and Dipa with naughty little Manashee

After the weekend I'll be going back down to Kathmandu to meet with Govinda and hopefully we will manage to arrange the meeting with the UN Laxman.

It's been a busy week since last writing to you - but good! Report is finished, lots of farms visited, all the poorest households interviewed and a fun trip down to a temple on the Kali Ghandaki river by motorbike!

I have to confess this actually belongs to my translator, Basanta. Here's the view down to the river and temple:
Jonti, there was an almost blind and deaf old mad sitting begging on the steps up to the temple and I gave him some of the money I wasn't able to get to the man with one leg. He was very grateful and blessed me and I was able to get Basanta to explain it was from you. On the way back down the steps he was munching away at some noodles.

On the way back we stopped for buffalo momos and another temple on a hill. Here's one of the holy men

and some more back in Tansen

The market stalls in Tansen were full of bright paint ready for the Holi festival, when everyone throws it at each other to celebrate the coming rains and harvest season.


We got mobbed on the way back to Khorbari by some pre-Holi paint party and had to pay a fee to fund their paint before they would let us pass!

Back in Khorbari things were a bit more serene - a group of children were doing a round on all the households asking if anyone wanted a tika...

Here are some of the enterprises I visited last week:

Ram with his bees

Lovely pig man, Mun, who manages to fund his 3 children through private school and has built his home through the profits on his pigs - very inspiring. He has offered to give training in the village

Rustic village on the hills where everyone was making there living from goats

One enterprising household was also making a good profit from bees in boxes under the eves!

Here's the view from up the hill, looking South towards India. Left to right here is Ram, the district coordinator of CCODER, Basanta my translator, Bog the district coodinator of something who likes to be involved in what we are doing and the "big man" of the village who earns nearly 1,000 pounds a year from his goats.

On the way back stopped at a riverside village in the valley - joined in with a community meeting, visited more farms and inspired by their veg farming in their out-of-season rice fields
Back in Khorbari it seems there are good opportunities for handicrafts - pots made from noodle packets

...bags and shawls. Here's a modeling shoot...

Thursday early morning (started 5:30am!) was a meeting with the district govt agricultural office in Tansen to discuss setting up a community bank owned cow farm in Khorbari. Very encouraging and seems it would be a great solution to the problems there - could provide well paid jobs for those without land, training for those wanting to get their own cow (and enough income for their husbands to return home from abroad) and a good investment for the community bank - which can use the profits to improve health, education, infrastructures etc in community and eventually create farms in pigs, chickens etc to provide further training and also a great source of compost for organic vegetables! (a new enterprise - most people use chemicals but a good and growing high end market for organic veg.)

Enough on agriculture. Here we are helping to build the final classroom of the school's extension. Nearly there!


Back to Pokhara. Yesterday we got all the kids new sandals to replace their decaying and dusty and dog eaten ones. They were so excited and constantly wash them to keep them just as bright and new and gather to inspect each others...

Last nights game of hangman. Susila makes a great teacher!

Off to the park this afternoon and will be making a dinner of spaghetti bolognese - another new experience (for them)!

The sun is shining and I am ready to say goodbye and hopefully be in touch again from Kathmndu.

Lots of love

Hope all is well with everyone, thinking of you!

Esther xxxx

survived the earthquake

Realised that the tiny tremblings I felt a few days ago and assumed were heavy lorries on the highway above the village - was the edge of the earthquake which ripped though up to Japan when I heard from Krishna that they had had it in Pokhara over 5 on the rictor (sp?) scale! Amazingly and thankfully no one hurt and no damage.

Poor Japan. It feels quite close to home with many people here with friends and family there. No one I have spoken to has managed to get in touch with anyone there with all the communication systems down...

More from Khorbari, Pokhara & Tansen

FRIDAY -

Hello everyone! How are you? Hope you are well! Thank you again for another nice little pile of emails - always enjoy hearing from you! Time for another update... lots more this time.....

I am back in a stuffy little internet cafe in Tanesn. I haven't missed computers!

I just came from a wedding in Khorbari...

The parents of the groom were busy running round putting tikas (red paint mixed with rice) on everyone's foreheads and cans of oil were being carried out from a shed to be transported with all the guests to a nearby village where the bride was from and where they would cook pigs and chickens and eat doughnuts made from rice and lentil flour...

Everyone piled into and ontop of a decorated bus ready and waiting on the "highway" and a procession of motorbikes followed behind. I hopped off half way to get a jeep up to Tansen.

One of the steep windy streets in Tansen. I'm sitting just a little further up this one right now.

Tansen highlife...

Last weekend I went back to Pokhara to meet baby Manish! He is very tiny and sweet and healthy and I was honoured to have him open one eye to look at me after traveling 5 hours to see him! His sister Manashee has coped well with suddenly getting half the attention she used to and it is amazing how quickly she has taken on the role of being big sister. She rocks him gently in his new cot and watches him sleep. He seemed very good and quiet but apparently keeps his crying (which sounds just like a little cat!) for the night...

Krishna had gone off trekking for a few days to catch up on sleep and came back the day I arrived with his clients and armfuls of rhododendron ("laliguras") flowers from the mountains and (incredibly strong!) apple brandy from an orchard in the Mustang Valley which borders Tibet.

Here is Bishnu warming her tiny baby by a fire we made in the garden

I love this one

The other children were excited to get a new little sibling - especially the older girls who spend every moment with him and barely put him down!

The boys were having endless fun with two little magnets...

After the usual games and dancing in the park we had a trip to a temple beside the lake

and I made a huge cauldron of macaroni cheese - a success!

We had fantastic clear skies and sunshine all weekend and incredible panoramic views of the Annapurnas. Here they are from the main street

I walked into a festival in Lakeside one day - beautiful costumes and dancing all down the street

Back in Khorbari since monday. It has been lots of meetings starting as early as 6am and finishing sometimes late at night, any day of the week! Sitting in on community meetings, running focus groups to gather more data, explaining to everyone what I am doing, endless training to the volunteers who have kindly offered to carry out the household surveys and recruiting a new translator. It's really helped having Bashanta now to translate (Dev disappeared off to Kathmandu), his English is good and he is very efficient - also good to talk to which I really appreciate as he is the only person I can speak with apart from Tilak at the school and friends on the phone!

We have finished all the surveys now and am looking forward to looking at all the data. We are finding that almost every household has at least one man away in the Indian Army or working in the Middle East - bringing in about 90% of the total household income!! Even though the women are working hard in the fields all day growing rice, corn and breeding pigs, goats, buffalo and hens, they get only a few hundred pounds a year from it at most - and there seems a lot of pressure for the men to work abroad. It is sad to see how some women are living all alone, waiting for the next year when their husband will return home for a few weeks.

Here are Sarswatti and Perma carrying out surveys in the village- great to have people who really know the area and culture doing it and nice to see them using their skills

MONDAY
--The power went off before I had a chance to finish so here I am again--

I have ust come from a meeting with the community and CCODER staff where I presented all the findings from our surveys - everyone was very receptive and keen to do anything they can to help improve things for themselves. A good start! We actually found that the avg income was almost the equivalent to 3,000 pounds a year which is good byNepali standards and although a third are living under the UN/World Bank poverty line of one dollar a day, most are doing well off it and everyone apart from two are managing to send their children to school. It seems that the biggest problem is that all the men are leaving and understandably the women are keen to do anything to get them back...!


As it seemed water is the main thing preventing people from doing well with their agriculture with everyone having to walk 1 1/2 hours to collect it in the summer, and lack of training. I will be making a proposal to the local and district level govt for funding for a proper water and irrigation system, and also try to find NGOs to support training in business skills and agriculture including identifying and treating the diseases that are killing off so many of the animals. Will also train everyone how to keep records of their consumption, investments and expenditure as trying to gather this mainly from their memories was a nightmare and its going to be important that we continue to gather it every year to measure how their businesses/agriculture are doing.

This week will be writing up a report to send back to Kathmandu and following up the poorest households to see what kind of training they need. May have to go back to Ktm to discuss with Govinda before making proposals and hope to combine it with a meeting with Laxman who runs the UN micro-enterprise programme - really love the opportunity to let people at the top know what is going on at the bottom and sharing some of the good ideas of the villagers who otherwise don't get heard... there is so much scope if we can do anything with the UN (who have said they are interested) as they will be supporting these enterprises all over Nepal...

I've been enjoying teaching at the school in my spare time - and like to make it as creative as possible, giving the children some idea of life outside Khorbari where it seems many have never left - I was teaching about water systems the other day and no one had ever seen a lake! Even with beautiful Pokhara not so far away... and some had never seen the Himalayas despite them being visible on clear days from the hill above the school...!



Here's a typical evening in Khorbari with neighbours - Goma and her baby, daughter Elina (also student at the community sch and has been in awe of me ever since seeing a pic of the python draped around my neck in Pokhara! and holds my hand all the way back from school after all the other little hands have dropped off) and mothers of other children at the school. They had all been drinking Raksi (like whiskey) out of pots like saucepans...


Dinner with Rupa "Ama" and Chander "Baba" last night. They were ecstatic to hear that their photo would be put on the internet...!

Hope to write to you again soon. About to visit the Mission Hosp here and looking forward to meeting some westerners and having easy conversations for the first time in weeks!

Lots of love

Esther xxxx