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Nepali sunset memories by Chris Ord

“Bola!” Susma shouts with a cheeky giggle and a twinkle of the eye. In Nepalese, it means ‘madman’. And I guess the five-year old daughter of the school principal has a point. I mean, you have to be mad to spend four months sleeping on a wooden bench, washing under a bore pump, eating daal bhat with your fingers (right hand, of course), abluting in a malarial mozzie-infested drop-hole and dodging stray rhinos all while teaching the not-so-finer points of the Queen’s to a scruffy gaggle of wide-eyed village children. Don’t you?

For some, volunteer teaching in a third world country like Nepal is something of a do-gooder mission. For others, it’s a convenient challenge or a cheap way to step off the backpacking treadmill – free food and board, right? It may be a dash of both but for the intrepid it offers a frontier of discovery where, rather than dipping a toe in, one bathes at length in a different culture, washing in its intricacies, and, as an experience, there’s nothing like it on sale in the latest Thomas Cook brochure.

Seasoned travellers would be thick-skinned to culture shock and alighting from a plane in rubbish-strewn Kathmandu, touts on the shout, is nothing more than a familiar airport challenge to the jetlagged senses. Annoying, but expected.

Ten bone-jarring hours later, a brightly decorated but appallingly maintained bus offloads me in a village marking the entrance to Nepal’s equivalent of no-man’s land. Having taken on this assignment sans research, I’m surprised to learn that instead of spending the next four months high in the Himalayas sharing a mountain hut with a Buddhist family, I’m being offloaded on the northern reaches of the Gangetic plain; flat, hot, humid and Hindu.

The village centre is a scattered jigsaw of poverty and cast-away elements of Westernisation. Bare-footed children play in the dirt, chickens run amock, goats are tethered to poles outside ramshackle trackside eateries, waiting for the next fateful order to seal a dinner plate destiny. At least you know it’s fresh; I just hope the rabid flies aren’t the only condiments on offer.

Eyes blink back at me from inside the lean-tos and cackled laughter rings out. It’s alarmingly unsettling. Principal Bhim assures in broken English: “Happy, see you. Come. Do good!”

The barrier of language plays tricks on your mind and even after developing bonds with some villagers, I find myself deconstructing what is said, analysing body language, a mistake given that cultural differences pervade and change the meaning of all human communicative devices when compared to Western understanding. Communication is slow, troublesome, and fraught with misunderstanding as a result.

Of course, while I tutor them in English, they teach me Nepali, an ancient language of Sanscrit origin. Beautiful, poetic and subtle in nature, it is sometimes efficient, other times lacking in raw detail.

In class I find that corporal punishment is still an accepted part of education in rural Nepal and it’s no surprise to find pupils withdrawn, afraid to learn for fear of a belting. The joy of teaching hits me as I try to teach the basics of English to a struggling grade six boy. After weeks of tearing (verb) my (pronoun) hair (common noun) out (adverb), I witness a light of understanding flicker on in his eyes. Carried on the wave of a clapping classroom, he associates learning with higher self-esteem possibly for the first time and it gets me higher than any homegrown Himalayan.

Away from dirt-floored classrooms, I’m the student, with a never-ending stream of experience flicking on my own light of cultural understanding. There’s the action-packed Hindu weddings; colourful, vibrant celebrations where the betrothed get to know each other for the first time over the many religious rituals that bind them in awkward arranged matrimony, if not love.

The still-prevalent caste system is another eye-opener. To convince a southern Nepali of the Brahman (highest) caste that your surname doesn’t automatically make you a lowly toilet cleaner is impossible. To them, it’s written in Sanscrit stone. Ghandi didn’t quite make the inroads here as in nearby India.

Still, even for this backwater the writing of the Western world is billboarded on the wall. I realise that what in the not-too-distant past was a cultural frontier is slowly being homogenised. As I leave my fellow villagers in their thatched-roof mud hut, sadly hypnotised by the only television set for twenty miles, I question my being here. The buzz of travel sticks like a clammy, sweat-drenched shirt, but it’s accompanied by the shadow of a confused conscience.

Outside my sparsely-furnished abode, banana palm leaves ride the warm evening breeze, oscillating across the heavy sun as it sinks to tomorrow. Through my hut door, down across the way, I watch womanly shadows work the dusk-laden fields of rice. The laughter of men playing cards under the papaya tree is gentle but strangely grating. It’s a changing world that continues to melt as I prepare a lesson of ‘Hangman’ for tomorrow’s Class Three.

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