The school was a modest building and only exists at all because of the kind donations of a French business. Sometimes the French people send them letters, which the teachers carefully file away because they're always written in French and no one can speak that language at all. Looking at the photos - which I'll put up in a few days, so you can look at them too - the apparent poverty is very striking. It didn't seem like that at the time. The children sit on wooden benches in small, drafty rooms and all face the black board. The building is made of mud and stone and was once painted white, but I don't think it's been redecorated in a while.
The exams were coming up in a few weeks so I had to teach from the English text books. Exams are very strange over here. They include questions that require you to remember the stories and questions from the text book rather than just that you can understand English. The problem was that everything in the text book is in English and I only speak English but the children speak no English at all. If I didn't have to follow the text book this wouldn't really be a problem, but as it was it made things a little odd. In the end, lessons became collaborative lesson between myself and either Peter or Ash. Ash, the English teacher, can't speak very much English and lacks a real understanding of grammer, but can understand written English and can translate into Gurung. Peter speaks English and Nepali very well, but not all the children understood Nepali so sometimes there'd be a whole chain of translating before everyone got the idea. I spent so much time speaking slowly and clearly that I ended up sounding like a Radio Four newsreader...
Much more fun than the regular school lessons were the unoffical lessons. Teaching people English words at the same time that I learnt Gurung words was the best, although I soon learnt that many of the villagers don't speak Nepali well. They taught me a number of words that I later found out were so strangely pronounced that most Nepali people won't recogise them. I also did lessons after school for the teachers, which were great fun. Now I'd expected to teach English, I hadn't expected to be teaching IT as well. About a twenty minute walk up a hill outside the village, there is a building that is supposed to be the villahe high school. Unfortunately, they don't have the teachers or the money to open it. However, it does have some solar panels and they have recently acquired a PC. So while the village doesn't have electricity, there was a need to learn some computer skills. It was very odd but enjoyable experience.
Music-making is an important part of village life. This mostly seems to consist of singing Nepali pop songs and clapping along, perhaps bullying someone into dancing. Want to be a rock star for a while? Bring a (acoustic) guitar to a village. Peter can play pretty well and could improvise an accompaniment if I gave him a tune, which led to some pretty interesting recitals. See, most of the music I listen to is rather to heavy to be appropriate (funny as that would be), which pretty much left those 80s rock classics. So yes, I have introduced Guns N Roses, Bon Jovi and Iron Maiden to a remote Nepalese village. They were utterly delighted. Oh yes, and traditional Nepalese dancing would not be out of place in any UK goth club, except the villagers actually had some sense of rhythm. All in all, it was a lot of fun. My only mistake was agreeing to teach everyone a simple english song. A lot of Nepali folk music is based on a simple, repeated tune and often improvised lyrics. For some reason this brough to mind She'll Be Coming Round The Mountains When She Comes, probably because I'd come round the mountains in the very recent past. It was a mistake because everyone loved it so much that we had to sing it for several hours each night. If She never Comes Round The Mountains every again, I'll be quite happy.
