It has been a long week – we are gearing up for a program analysis workshop happening Monday to Wednesday next week and since we are all new here in the Education Program office, I am pitching in to help where I can – we are sort of fumbling through it all together which is pretty comedic really.   And yet in all the rush, I am celebrating the feeling of being productive and useful again – I forgot how good it feels to be useful.

• Silence.  Kathmandu is a city full of noise.  There is rarely that deep and unending silence that one can sometimes find deep in the forest or even the kind of silence that one finds at the ocean – the waves and seagulls become a sort of white noise.  BUT, in the misty early morning as families wake and give “puja” to the gods there is a stillness that almost resembles silence.  I sleep through the best silence most days since it appears fleetingly between 5am – 6am.  But if one is lucky enough to catch it, it would be easy to understand why people in Nepal wake so early – the gods are present in the silence.
• Transgender choirs. So last week I was grateful for diversity and this week I am grateful that I was able to be present at the first performance of Nepal’s first transgender choir (perhaps the first in much of the world too?).  It was a great show and I discovered that one of the offices for the Blue Diamond Society is actually in a small building in my back yard…a truly small world!  Needless to say, this week I was inspired by all the voices I heard in the choir.
• Gas. No, not the human kind, but the cooking kind.  We are now the proud “owners” of two large red gas cylinders which dutifully cook our food on the two-gas burner stove and heat our water for showers.  They are cumbersome, heavy, ugly, and dirty things but we love them for the freedom they provide – we can finally cook our own dinners!
• The Department of Education in Nepal. This week I attended my first meeting in the Department, along with about 20 other Nepali individuals from various INGOs, NGOs, and the government.  It was just the most amazing thing to see – the politics, the subtle power dynamics, the personalities, the cultural rituals.  The important government officials came and went throughout the meeting – particularly when things got sticky and they were being called to task on some of the programming choices – enrolling students who are not retained in the school system instead of working on student-teacher ratios or providing free textbooks to students – they simply stood up, walked into a side office, and shut the door.  There was much banging of fists, agenda pushing, and advocating for various causes, all happening throughout the official meeting – cell phones ringing, people coming in and out, Nepali insults flying (at least I think that is what happened, as it was all in Nepali – I think I caught most of it!).  Fantastic fun and a great introduction to the nature of government meetings – I have to say I throroughly enjoyed it and look forward to the next showing.