A few people have asked for a more detailed account of life day to day while we are in training – I promised that I would not turn this blog into a public daily journal, but just this once I will oblige…

We wake at about 5:30am, not because we want to or because we have to, but rather because we have no choice 🙂 The dogs, the birds, the blaring Hindi music…life begins with the sun. After a restless hour of trying to sleep through the chatter we resign ourselves to the fact that awake we must be.

Our small room does have a small bathroom with shower (one kind of showers over and around the toilet so the whole bathroom gets rinsed) so Rex and I take turns having a quick shower. We have the luxury of hot water but it doesn’t last long and with 13 volunteers, the race is always to get the hot shower first. Breakfast is at 8am in the big dining hall – usually semi-toasted toast, toasted over am open gas flame, perhaps a hard boiled egg or some rice pudding, and always some curried chick peas, beans, or potato. And as much chiyaa (tea) as you could want – with milk and spices or black and piping hot.

At 9am we start class in groups of 3-4. We have been in the same groups for a number of weeks so have gotten to know our teachers well. After learning about 20 new vocabulary, 6-10 new verbs, and a new sentence structure we break at 10:45 for chiyaa chuTTi (tea break). This is the time to bask in the sun and warm up…perhaps even remove one of the fleece layers that we added immediately after waking.

More class until 12:30 and then lunch. Lunch is baat (rice), daal (lentils), tarkarri kauli and alu (curried potato and cauliflower), saag (usually radish or mustard greens), achaar (a pickle of some sort) and papads (papadums in Canada). After lunch is almost always a chance to sit in the sun for 1/2 hour and let our minds rest. PLUS…I think we all believe that somehow we can store body heat and release it at night when we are freezing!

Final block of class in the afternoon which is often more of the same, but sometimes a lesson in Nepali script (so we can read signs and perhaps even write a few words) or a culture class on do’s and don’ts, how to use a pit toilet or bathe in public (yes, we do get lessons on that), understanding temple symbols, understanding the caste system, how to eat with your hands etc… All very interesting indeed. And sometimes, if we are very lucky, we have a game or activity. For example, this week we had a Nepali pictionary class and last week we had to go out into the village and chat with people in Nepali.

Usually we end around 3pm and there is a race to the internet cafe for everyone to check email. If we are lucky it is working and we all get a comp. If we are unlucky there is no power or poor connectivity, then we stroll around the town. We buy oranges from the local street vendors or poke into small shops and dig through a strange assortment of things (anyone for olive oil or shaving cream? Plastic flip flops or a metal canister?)

By 6pm it is always dark so we rush home and sit either in the dark or with the gas fumes tingling our senses from the on-site generator…I think I actually prefer the dark. Or candlelight too…that is nice. At 7 we eat..usually the same thing as lunch too…but by dinner we are hungry again so anything tastes good.

After dinner Maybe an hour of BBC news if the power and cable are working, and usually an hour of homework…revising sentence structures, learning new verbs and vocab, or pravcticing our conjugations. Bedtime is usually around 9pm…early early early.

And that’s a day in the life…for now. Next week we leave to stay with a village family for a week…the daily schedule will surely be different.