Rice, Lentils and Long Division in Nepal

Picture yourself returning from Everest Base Camp with more recycled underwear than you'd ever admit to your mother and a solid dose of bronchitis. The perfect starting point for spending a month in a Nepalese orphanage, right?

The month was May and I'd tracked down an orphanage in the Kathmandu Valley who would be happy to take me on as a volunteer where I would live, eat and play cricket for a month with 80+ children as the only foreigner. All lessons were taught in English in recognition of the bright future that proficiency in the language of the tourists can afford, and so began a month of explaining long division with finger puppets and learning how to pronounce 'let's go' in Nepalese without it sounding like an invitation to procreate.

Challenges? Of course there were many. I had to question whether it was ethical to point out inaccuracies in their quaint textbooks (and in case you're wondering, a number of Nepalese orphans still believe that their fingernails contain poison). I was also confronted with the grim reality that many of these children were not in fact orphans, but had been abandoned by their families for more lucrative employment opportunities in the Middle East.

The children themselves were so earnest that when they saw you walking past their school window, the only thing they could think to yell out of the window was 'Hello' and 'How are you?' in perfect English. Let me assure you, these would not be the phrases of choice for Australian school students.

The day was punctuated twice by the staple of Nepalese diet - dal bhat, which translates quite neatly to rice and lentils. All at once spicy and bland, it is served on a metal plate and scraped up by hand. Yes, it is possible to eat soupy rice by hand. It just takes practice and a change of clothes.

I promise I'll avoid cliches of how I learnt more from the orphans than they did from me but let's just say that giving back on the dusty road can change the way you live . . and play cricket.