Another day in the life of…
I’m afraid that you are going to have to insert your own funny, witty, erudite comment here. One that will enchant and capture the reader. One that will guarantee they continue to read on. One that will become discussed in literature classes throughout the rest of time for its brilliance and the way that it has managed to make Shakespeare look like a hack. You must do all that yourself because I have nothing. For the last few weeks life has slipped into a gentle routine and I have been waiting for something exciting or even mildly interesting to happen so I could fill another of these messages. But there has been nothing…so that’s what I’m going to write about.
It is now 9am on a Thursday morning and I have taken my first “day off” for a while. By “day off” I just mean that I won’t be going to the orphanage today. I let the kids know last night by saying that I had homework to do. They looked at me a little suspiciously and asked what I meant by homework exactly so I said that I had to write a story about them because there were lots of people who wanted to know what they were like. They could appreciate that because I have never seen a bunch of kids so keen to show off whenever someone new visits or to jump in front of a camera if there is a chance they can get their dirty little mugs in a photo. Now that everyone uses digital cameras there is that instant gratification of being able to see yourself on screen. These kids are major hams.
But enough of the kids for the moment.
Like I said, it’s 9am and I am sitting on the balcony of the restaurant in the hotel where I’m staying. I’m wearing my fleece because it’s a little chilly still but it will warm up as soon as the sun comes out. And where is the sun? Well, it’s up there somewhere but it’s hidden behind a fairly dense fog. The sky is a uniform grey and the sun is just a brighter smear over my left shoulder.
It’s been foggy here every morning for the last few weeks, which means that any views of the snow capped Annapurna’s are just memories and it gives Sauraha an even greater feeling of isolation when you look around the uniformly flat horizon and can see no further than a distant haze.
I’m having breakfast at the moment. I’m not usually one for breakfast but I figured since it was my day off I might as well do the tourist thing and have some while sitting on the balcony and typing away on my laptop like a complete tool. Breakfast is a large pot of Nepali tea (about 6 cups worth), a bowl of porridge (not quite how I remember it but hot and filling) and some Tibetan bread with a bowl of honey to dip it in. Tibetan bread is about the size of a dinner plate and fried in a frying pan until it’s a combination of crisp and chewy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. The local honey is almost worth the trip here alone. Nepali tea, which I am becoming addicted to, is brewed with the milk and sugar in it as well as a few cardamom seeds and cloves.
In front of me is a stretch of water that I’ve described before. It’s the river that marks the boundary of the National Park and is an imposing barrier that may just be wide enough to prevent me from landing a thrown stone on the far bank. Past the river the trees of the Park are coming into view as the sun manages to burn the fog away. Down on the riverside in front of me people are setting up their little restaurants and bars in preparation for the tourists returning from early morning elephant rides, walks and canoe trips. A canoe full of tourists has just floated past and I got a wave from the guide in the bow because I’ve been helping him with his PowerPoint slide presentation.
There are no elephants here at the moment but in about an hour they will be back to unload the tourists and then have their morning swim. Anyone willing to brave the cold water can go in with them and you can usually hear the screams for some distance, although whether it’s delight or hypothermic shock I’m not sure. But there’s no one here at the moment and it’s a perfect time to just gaze at the forest and the amazing birdlife that’s taking advantage of the quiet. On the river there is just one old man slowly poling his dugout canoe against the current.
But this is not a typical day for me.
Typically I am rudely woken by the alarm on my ipod at 7am.
Up at 7, morning ablutions and on the road by 7.20.
It is really foggy at 7.20. There is a dripping sound that you could almost take as rain but (and it took me a while to figure this out not having much experience with fog) it’s just the fog condensing on the leaves and branches of the trees and then dropping to the ground. The first time a few drops fell on my head I started looking up for sadistic birds or incontinent monkeys.
It is also cold at 7.20.
When I first got here it was quite warm but I realise that that was almost 2 months ago and now we are well and truly into winter. (Winter in December?! Crazy Nepalese!) I usually have my fleece zipped up to my chin and I am seriously thinking that I will have to dig out my gloves soon. It doesn’t snow down here (Snow at Christmas?! Crazy Nepalese!) but I’ve been informed that it will get colder yet.
From the hotel where I’m staying I walk a few meters down the road to the hotel where I should be staying and retrieve my somewhat trusty bike from the rack. I have to carefully check the tyres in case they have given up and deflated in the night before I walk the bike out to the road. If the tyres have deflated then I walk the bike up to the shop where it was hired from, dig out the antique pump and get some unwanted aerobic exercise. It can take a while given that only about 30% of the air makes it into the tyre.
From there it’s on to a little shop that sells groceries. The woman is friendly and gives a discount for volunteers because her husband works in the restaurant of the hotel I should be staying at and I see him every night when I eat there. I always stop to buy a packet of biscuits for the kids, a routine that Liz started and now I don’t have the heart to stop. The biscuits go into my backpack with my laptop and I climb onto the bike and hope that this will not be the morning when my thigh or calf muscles decide to snap from either the cold or as a protest against the most exercise they’ve done in many years.
As I’ve said before, Sauraha is not the biggest place in the world. I go past the major intersection in town, the one with the big concrete rhino on the traffic island, within the first 20 seconds on the bike. Past the dozen or so shops all selling the same combination of groceries and tourist souvenirs within the next minute. The shop owners on the left are putting up awnings to shade their wares from the rising sun and at about midday there will be a flurry of activity as those awnings come down and ones are erected on the opposite side of the street to combat the setting sun.
I duck around a large Tata truck parked on the side of the road with a painting of a cruise ship on its side just below the prominent word “Titanic”. I wonder if he’s seen the movie or knows what actually happened. I don’t think it’s a name that would inspire much confidence in me just before I climbed in the cab for a journey on these roads.
Within a couple of minutes more riding I’m passing the elephant parking area. There are normally about ten or so elephants waiting here before they pick up their load of tourists. I used to think the sight was pretty cool and would slow down for a bit of a look but now I just ride past, eyes down in search of large “messages” the elephants scatter on the road. Take it from me that you do not want to hit an elephant message on a bicycle. You are quite likely to come to a complete and sudden stop in the middle and end up perched there while the locals laugh at you.
Of course there is also the danger of running into an elephant itself. This may sound funny and really hard to do but elephants are surprisingly quiet and with my glasses fogged up from the fog it’s easy to be on one before you know it. It’s also a narrow road quite often forcing me to squeeze between the oncoming traffic on one side and an elephant plodding along on the other side. Being close enough to the elephant to rub my hand along its side I realise that it wouldn’t take much of a nudge from it to really cause a problem. Luckily elephants with mean senses of humour seem to be rare.
I’m yet to actually hit an elephant but I have run over a duck. I’ve already described the road rules here so you can imagine what it’s like when you throw livestock into the mix. Within a few minutes of starting I’m out of town and into the next village. Now I have to start being wary of buses, cars, tractors, bicycles, motorbikes, elephants, camels, horses, buffalo, dogs, chickens, ducks, goats, children, old people and idiots who pull out of driveways and side roads and then look to see if they may have caused an accident. Given the lack of brakes on my bike I’m surprised I haven’t run into or been run into more often. I’ve only run over the one duck, hit one girl on a bicycle and ended up in one ditch getting out of the way of someone in a jeep.
The next village is kind of how you would imagine a Nepali village to look. You can probably imagine the livestock running around and in the early morning as I ride through there are already plenty of people up and about. Woman carry impossible loads on their heads as the men stand around and watch. Children are running around barefooted and wearing the exact same clothes that I have come to recognise them in week after week. There are small fires burning in front yards and children are poking at cobs of corn roasting in the embers. Chickens and dogs are rooting among the piles of rubbish that are a permanent fixture on the side of the road. Sometimes there is a fire and someone raking rubbish into it and I’m careful to hold my breath as I ride through the smoke, not sure what toxic substances are being released.
Just behind the houses are fields. When I first arrived they were high with barley and in my time here I’ve watched it being cut and dried and taken away and now most of the fields are a brilliant yellow as mustard plants take root. It almost has a look of a painting of the French countryside as the yellow is muted by the fog and stretches into the distance.
Through this village I hit the major piece of gravel road I have to negotiate. Gravel road may not be a completely accurate description though as it seems that someone has attempted to recreate the Himalayan mountain range in one quarter scale. There are rocks that you have to look up to see the top of and holes where you can see people rappelling their way towards the bottom. In parts there is a fine dust that will suck at your wheels and bring your bike to a sudden stop before slowly drawing it down into the quicksandy depths. The dust! The dust is so fine that it seems to coat and cake you so insidiously that you you’re not even aware of the extra 2 or 3 kilos of weight. Add that dust to the moisture from the fog and my glasses are constantly covered in a sheen of pure Nepali mud.
Okay, so I’m exaggerating slightly. But only slightly.
Just as a side note…for the first couple of weeks I kept seeing people with 2 or 3 dozen dead chickens tied upside down all over their bikes as they peddled them determinedly somewhere. Or at least I thought they were dead, until one day one chicken raised its head and looked at me with imploring eyes. If you’ve ever looked a chicken in the eye you’ll know just how impressive it was that this one managed that.
At the end of the gravel road there is a sealed road and a bridge over a river with a small roadblock. A couple of guys are permanently camped there and they stop every car or bus and elicit a toll. Apparently it’s not uncommon for small villages to set up toll collection points to supplement their incomes. Gasping tourists on bicycles aren’t stopped so I make it safely across and into the village of Chitrisari. This is the home of the orphanage.
Orphanage is actually a bit of a misnomer and not even part of the official name. I read online recently that some vast proportion of kids in orphanages around the world aren’t technically orphans. Something like 80% or 90% have one or more parents. Maybe that’s why Madonna is always getting into trouble. The official name of the place I go is the “Disregarded and Helpless Children Welfare Centre – Chitwan, Nepal. Est. 2058”. By the way, that established date is correct because according to the Nepali calendar this is the year 2066. The kids in the centre come from all over the country and are there because things were so bad at home. I’m not going to go into individual stories, you can probably guess at the sorts of things I could tell you. Let’s just say that they are much better off now.
At the end of the bridge is a T-intersection and I weave my bike through the people and animals into a right hand turn, past the bike repair shop with so many old tyres tossed onto the roof that a fire would send up a plume of black smoke dense enough to kill migrating birds. I pass the “Hotel California” restaurant where I’ve never seen anyone eating. I pass the barber where I got my 43c haircut, much to the fascination of the kids and a large number of passing locals. Both the kids and the barber were determined to colour my hair black to get rid of the grey and couldn’t understand why I would be happy to keep it. I pass the handful of little shops selling the usual things. A couple of hundred metres along the road and I pull into the centre and am mobbed with kids.
The centre is a building with basically 5 rooms. There is a bedroom for the boys and one for the girls, 5 to a room in bunk beds. There is a room for the woman who lives there and looks after the kids. There is a room for the kids to play and do their homework etc that is where all their toys and books are stored. There is also a kitchen although this room is separate from the main building because they cook mainly over an open fire. It’s also where they eat.
The first thing I do when I get there is hand over the packet of biscuits to whoever gets to me first. They are reverently taken into the kitchen and carefully divided into 11 piles. In the meantime I head into the play room, usually with one or two kids hanging off me, and get my laptop out of my pack. TV may not have been invented as a babysitter but it makes a really good one. We sit and watch about 45 minutes of a movie, interrupted once by the arrival of the biscuits on a stainless steel plate of which I always get first pick. I tried once to say that I didn’t want any but the looks of dismay were too much to take.
At 9 o’clock breakfast is ready, the movie is stopped and the kids go off for their Dhal Bat. Liz called this “quiet time”, a name that’s stuck and it is the only time of the day when they are quiet. They sit on the floor of the kitchen and tuck into their food with a relish that’s hard to understand given that it’s the same dish for every meal, every day.
Once breakfast is finished its dishwashing time. This is done at a hand pump on a concrete pad between the kitchen and the main building. There are no utensils to clean since they eat with their hands, just pots and pans and plates. Dirt is the scourer and it is then washed off under a stream of water provided by one kid heaving up and down on the pump handle. It may sound primitive, like something out of Little House on the Prairie, but they are lucky enough to have their own pump. No need to carry water from a communal one.
Now comes the somewhat organised chaos of 10 kids all trying to get dressed for school. I am constantly saying “get changed for school” to ones that seem to be dallying and having mock Jackie Chan fights with ones that are already ready. Somehow it all comes together and everyone is in the correct shoes, ties done up, proper colour ribbons in hair for the girls and hair slicked down with cooking oil for the boys. By now it’s 9.30 or 9.45 and a couple of the smaller ones grab my hand for the walk up to the school. My bike is usually long gone, purloined by an older one who has already ridden it and parked it outside the school. There is probably some cool factor in turning up on a bike, the same as there is in having a giant of a foreigner walk up to the gate with you and swap a high five in view of all the other kids.
The kids go to a private school. It gives them a much better education than they would get at the government school next door. The majority of the classes are in English.
Once I’ve made sure they are all safely in school I climb onto my bike and ride all the way back to Sauraha over that road again. Now I have the rest of the day to kill, which is surprisingly easy to do. By the time I’ve downloaded my emails, had some lunch and read for a while it’s time to tackle that road again and be back at the centre for when the kids return.
I’m usually sitting on the verandah of the centre as they come trickling in. Looking worn out from a day at school I have to go the “tough love” route and make sure that they do their homework. To this end I’ve downloaded a couple of games onto my ipod and as they finish they get to play. There is also football or badminton in the front yard and the sweat is flowing freely, from me at least, when the sun starts to hit the horizon and it’s time to get back before it’s so dark I can’t see the ducks and elephants. Riding into the setting sun can be a bit brutal and if I don’t keep my mouth closed I find that I’ve swallowed enough bugs not to need to eat anything else till the next day.
From there it’s dinner at the hotel I should be staying at, a shower, a little TV courtesy of one of the shows I have saved on my laptop for just such an event, and a good night’s sleep.
Fridays are little different. I don’t bother going first thing in the morning because it is only a half day for them. School finishes at 1pm and I am there waiting for them then, laptop fully charged. Saturdays are even more different because it is the one day of the week that there is no school so I sleep in a little and get there at about 9am, once again with the laptop fully charged.
I’m glad I brought the laptop. I’m even gladder that I had a few movies that are kid friendly. I have about 8 that we keep seeing over and over again. I guess it’s one of the joys of being a kid that you can do that. One of the other things about being a kid is that you can only sit still for a limited amount of time. We will start a movie and after about 45 minutes to an hour it’s time for a break and some running around outside. This is where I pick up most of my bruises, sprains and pulled muscles. The fact that I can lift up one of them in each arm, with one around my neck and one hanging off my waist as I spin around in a circle is a source of constant amusement to them. That I get so dizzy I have to collapse on the ground, giving a couple of them an opportunity to tie my shoelaces together, is even more amusing.
Then it’s back to see a bit more of the movie.
Like I said, I’m lucky I had a few kid friendly movies which is even harder to do here than at home. Local cinema will still not show a kiss onscreen. A couple of the movies have a kiss or two in them, incredibly chaste by western standards but enough to make the girls turn away or cover their eyes. Even characters in cartoons that may touch animated lips are enough. But that’s the girls…the boys are a different story.
The first time I showed up with the laptop and demonstrated that we could watch movies the boys took me aside and asked for “kissing movies”. I already knew the way it was with Nepali cinema so I was pretty confident I could show them some things that would blow their little minds but instead I found a scene with one of the aforementioned chaste kisses. The girls embarrassedly looked away but the boys just turned to me and said, “That’s not a kissing movie! We’ve been to sex.com, we know what a kissing movie is and that’s not it!” They are not getting to see one of those. We are sticking to the Disney cartoons and Harry Potter.
Well, given that I started out to write about nothing I seem to have written rather a lot. This may be an opportune time to draw this one to a close before you get too bored and before my laptop battery packs it in. Back to the routine tomorrow.