Extra school for exams

Final exams are coming up in less than a month. To make sure that all kids are prepared, students that are ranked 11th or lower in their class must go to extra school from 4PM to 6PM. The top ten students do not have to stay. This has made things very quiet around the orphanage in the afternoon, and it didn't take me long to figure out who the smart ones were. In three weeks when the exams are over, the extra schooling will come to an end and the kids will get a one month break.

Making a (very small) Difference

Every morning before school I help Garnisham, one of the older kids, do his math homework. He needs someone to help him one-on-one for two reasons. Firstly, he needs someone to explain every question to him. Secondly, he cannot sit down and concentrate for long enough to do a math problem unless someone is constantly encouraging him. After a couple of weeks of helping him for an hour every morning, he now has more trust in what I tell him than whatever is written down in his math book.

I have been trying to teach him about math concepts instead of sheer memorization, and it has been very challenging based on his schooling. Yesterday we were working with graphs, specifically rotating points and shapes 90 degrees about the origin. In his book it said that if you rotate (x, y) 90 degrees clockwise, the point becomes (y, -x). He had no idea what the formula meant, confused the negative signs, and could never keep straight the formulas for clockwise and counterclockwise.

The problem was that he did not understand what rotation was. So I physically rotated his math book 90 degrees clockwise and started to explain the concept of rotation. I drew a graph with some shapes on it and physically rotated the piece of paper 90, 180, and 360 degrees clockwise and counterclockwise. We began solving problems by rotating the graphs instead of using the formulas. After a half an hour, he finally understood what rotation was. In the end, I was even able to show him how the formulas were derived.

We'll see what he remembers tomorrow, but today it seemed like he finally understood the homework he was doing.

Sarankot Sunrise

Sarankot is a tiny village 2,500 feet above Pokhara in a perfect spot to view the Annapurna Mountains. The village is a popular spot to go for sunrise, so I woke up early one morning to bike to the top to watch the show. At 4:50AM I hit the road, and by the light of the full moon I was able to follow the road. The moonlight reflected off of the snow in the Annapurna Mountains, and I could see a couple 8,000 meter peaks barely visible halfway into the sky.

By 6:00AM I had reached the end of the paved road. The last twenty minutes were mountain biking to the top, and I found out that the moonlight was not as bright as I originally thought. By 6:20AM I made it to the top before dawn and sat to watch the mountains appear before my eyes.

When you are at the top of Sarankot, you can see 23,500 vertical feet of mountains all at once. For the next 45 minutes, I watched the mountains light up by the sun in sheer amazement. First the sun lit up the tops of only the tallest peaks, and slowly it unveiled the beauty and magnitude of the mountain range. After 100 pictures, I decided to ride down to begin my day at the orphanage. What a morning!

Plans for my Final Month

My volunteering is coming to an end and I will be traveling for the next month. Below are my plans for those that like to keep track.

Until March 7th: Mountain bike around the Annapurna Mountains with my dad. It is usually a 16-20 day hut to hut hike, but we will hopefully make it an 9 day hut to hut mountain bike. Max altitude is around 17,700 feet.
March 7th-9th: Volunteer at the orphanage for 3 more days
March 10th-12th: Kayak to Chitwan-- 3 day intro to kayaking clinic where we learn how to run rivers with class 3 rapids on the last day!
March 12th-14th: Two days in Chitwan National Park-- a tropical jungle with tigers, rhinos, elephants, crocodiles, over 400 types of birds
March 15th-21st: Final week in Kathmandu. Biking to the Tibetan border (4 day ride) and visiting some of the sites that I missed the first time
March 22nd-April 1st: Flying back to Chicago and going to the British Virgin Islands for a week before going back to school-- sailing around a 35 foot catamaran for a week with 12 of my friends

Girl Aged 12 Marries the Sun

Jesse and Jane, two volunteers that I met in Kathmandu, are working in an orphanage in Old Pokhara A couple of days ago, I met up with them and they showed me around their part of town. To give you a feel for where we were, I did not see one white person the entire day with the exception of my friends. We went to the local markets where they sold food, clothes, kitchenware, electronics, and almost everything imaginable on tables lining the side of the streets. We ate Nepali fast food, where for 30 cents some street vendor filled my plate with God knows what and it filled me up. And we watched a Newari wedding where a twelve year old girl was marrying the sun.

In the Newari culture, a girl has three weddings in her life. When she is twelve she marries the sun, when she is fifteen she marries a flower, and then eventually she marries a man. For the first wedding, the young girl is locked in a dark room for two weeks and is not allowed to come out. She can only eat and go to the bathroom at certain times. She can only interact with women. Every night women come to dance with her in the room, and Jane had been dancing with the women for the past couple of days. The three of us went to her coming out ceremony. The day that she came out of the room, they held a full day ceremony on the balcony of their house (this was a wealthy Nepali family). All the women dressed in red robes, and the men wore nice clothes. They had a rug with a whole bunch of food laid out, and around the rug sat the bride, her mother, and some old man who was the religious leader. For hours, he would ring a bell in his hand and mumble indistingishable prayers. Then everyone would get up and feast in another room. They back to praying, then eating-- I think you get the idea. We stayed for one round of praying and eating and were treated with unbelievable hospitality. They even fed us meat!

The next night the family hosted a party for over 400 people. Sounds like a bar-mitzvah to me! Unfortunately I wasn't invited.

Nepali Soccer Game

We took the older kids to a soccer game in downtown Pokhara. The Nepali national team was playing the best kids team (age 19 and younger), and the stadium was packed. The soccer field has just as much grass as dirt, and the stadium was large concrete steps on one side of the field. We showed up 45 minutes before the game to get good seats and watched the crowd fill in.

There is no concept of a capacity limit in Nepal. Whether it is public buses, motorcycles, or soccer stadiums, a maximum limit does not exist. People upon people came onto the concrete steps to sit down leaving no rows or aisles. If we wanted to move during the game, we would have had to step on people's thighs to get out. Once no one else could physically fit onto the steps, people started to sit on the ground around the field. By the time the game started, there were as many people sitting around the field as there were on the concrete.

Most of the fans wanted to see the young kids beat the professional team. The fans were roudy, yelling, and laughing at each others comments. I have never seen a closer soccer game in my life. After 90 minutes of play, the score was still 0-0. Once no one scored in double overtime, the game went to a shoot out. Five players from each team took a shot. The first four players on each team all made their shots. Unfortunately, the fifth player on the young kids team missed the shot, and the game went to the professional team. The younger team had several opportunities to win during the game including a shot that bounced off of the goal post, but in the end they could not score a goal.

The orphanage kids wanted the professional team to win, so we cheered opposite each other the whole entire game. They loved rubbing their victory in my face after my team lost. After the game, we walked a half an hour back to the orphanage, again hand in hand. I sang "The ants go marching one by one" the whole way home, and they loved it.

Why are these kids orphans?

Before I came to Nepal several people asked me why there were so many orphans. I always assumed that in third world countries the mortality rate was much higher than in western countries, so parents died earlier due to disease, health problems, and crime. I could not have been more wrong.

Out of 76 children, there is one kid who had both parents killed in a landslide, and one kid who had both parents killed in a car accident. These were the kinds of stories I was expecting, and they are few and far between. The majority of the orphans at Namaste have parents that are still alive. Half of the kids had fathers that abandoned the family because they a) wanted to marry someone else, b) had an alcohol abuse problem and could barely care for themselves, or c) did not want to be responsible for supporting kids and simply left the rest of the family to fend for themselves. The same half had mothers that a) were too poor to care for them so they sent their kids out to beg on the streets, b) got married to another man, were not allowed to take their kids into their second marriage, and abandoned them, or c) filled out applications to send their kid to an orphanage because they could not provide enough for their child to survive. The lucky ones have loving mothers that are just too poor to raise a child.

Below are two of the sadder and more depressing stories. I would never have guessed these kids came from a background like this until Namaste lent me a book that described each orphan and his/her story. They seem like the kind of kids that I used to spend my summers with at camp-- just a lot less spoiled.

W, X, Y, and Z (from oldest to youngest) came to Namaste after they had been living on the streets for three months. Their father remarried and left the family when the mother was pregnant with Z. When Z was two, their mother abandoned the family and married another man. The four kids fought for themselves on the streets for three months before they came to Namaste. W began working at a hotel to try to support herself and her siblings. She was only nine years old. She could not make enough to buy food for herself and her three siblings, so she would distribute the food equally among her three younger siblings and leave nothing for herself. To satiate her hunger, she would routinely eat bricks. Eventually the Pokhara police caught them one night as they were searching for a place to sleep. The police referred them to a socialization center who referred them to Namaste. After W came to Namaste, she needed counseling as she continued to eat bricks and was visibly affected by the abandonment of her parents.

S has the most traumatic background of all the children here at Namaste. When she was seven years old, her mother, who was extremely poor and unable to properly care for her, sent S to work as a house servant. The owner of the house, along with his two adult sons, repeatedly raped S for the three years she was there as a servant. This owner did not give her enough to eat and reluctantly let her go to school while refusing to pay for books or supplies. One night, a teacher discovered that S spent the night at school instead of going home. The teacher asked her about her home life, and once she heard about the violent rape and abuse, the police were notified and the men were put in jail. S was referred to Namaste immediately after.