We woke up this morning and took a bus for about 1.5 hours to a village/school in Tanahun. It was smooth for a while, but the last little bit was pretty bumpy.
the truth, seen on the bus window
a white man arrives with a skateboard
Ben broke rocks with a sledge hammer and I corrected spelling and grammar mistakes in "research papers" about cows, chickens, and goats. The papers were written by the students, and were all pretty much in broken English and all kinda said the same thing
this is what pretty much all of the papers I corrected looked like 1/3
2/3
3/3
This one made me laugh:
"...different from other house. Goats house have high sleeping part and if goats shit there shits will fall down and people can use it for agriculture. Goats houses picture is drawn below."
They even labeled the shits, below the house. Classic.
the children at the school we visited were yelling letters, probably spelling something.
Not sure what they were spelling though...
I wish I took a picture of this girl's story. It was so cute.
For lunch we ate soy and rice. It was really interesting, not really that bad honestly. I actually really like eating with just my hands; utensils are overrated. Ben said all the guys he worked with when breaking rocks were surprised he was so good at it: it's because he does that at home haha. He hated that part, but he loved the skateboarding classes! The classes only had 3 or 4 kids at a time and were taught on the dirt floor. He basically just taught them how to stand on the skateboard and push themselves. A lot of them couldn't push themselves that well so it ended up being a kid standing on the board and Ben walking/pushing with them holding onto him. I watched the classes from a window, it was super cute. They'd usually laugh when they "got going", and sometimes a kid would get going on his own and hit a rock or something (resulting in them falling off the board), and the other kids would all laugh hahaha. He said he wished the classes were longer because as soon as someone would start getting the hang of it, the class would be over and a new batch of kids would replace them. Some kids stayed after school and we "played skateboard" with them. There was a lot of kids who wanted to ride it, so we'd come up with questions or challenges for them to do: what is my name?" Ben!!! "You said it first, you can ride it first!" or "what is an animal common to this area?" chickens! goats! leopards!
Skateboarding after school
Skating with Benny
I wish I had the videos I took of the kids losing their minds over Snapchat filters. Hahahaha, they love selfies. "Sir! Selfie, please!"
a "challenge" to decide who rides the skateboard, lol
Some of the student's houses. Most students live far away though and will just stay here throughout the week and go home on the weekend.
Same house, closer
A bunch of people played soccer before for dinner (soy and rice, again. Apparently they always eat that for lunch and dinner. Dal bhat for breakfast) and I watched on the side while some little kids braided my hair. One was about 7 and could speak a bit of English and the other was about 4 and he couldn't speak any English. I would ask them questions and sometimes address them to the 4 year old and the 7 year old would translate from English to Nepali. Very, very cute and impressive.
Soccer
soccer
Braiding my hair. They did a great job too!
Ben and I don’t really want to stay the night but the bus doesn’t come until the morning. Although the school is "fun", we don't want to pay Rs.1000 ($9.95) a day. It also feels a bit cult-like: all the students call me + all the other males sir (maybe it's "polite", but it just feels weird. They don't say madam or ma'am though?), they eat dal bhat and soy for every meal (literally made from the cheapest ingredients: lentils, rice, and soy), and they want us to pay them for work we're doing (I don't think you have to pay to get into cults, though)? Once when I couldn't remember the principal's name I referred to him as "Jim Jones", and between us it stuck
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