Repeat.

The days had started to follow a familiar pattern. Wake up, dig , lunch, chill, afternoon activities, chill, dinner, sleep, repeat. There’s not much to be said about today, that wasn’t already said yesterday. We dug with a few more aches and pains, and Meg seemed like she was here to stay.

The only highlights were Meg’s playful puppy antics and Amita making another woman cry during baseline surveys. Thankfully, this time it was in happiness. She was so grateful that Raleigh were in Archale and helping the community. We definitely couldn’t turn down tea after we heard that.

While we were doing our surveys, a small group of our team had trekked to the local school to see if we could run sessions there. On their returned, we learned that next to the school was a shop where they’d been able to buy bread, eggs and cake! I’m sure this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you’ve been living on lentils and rice for 10 days it felt like Christmas! I had dreams that night of the peanut butter sandwich I was going to have for breakfast.

How not to Evacuate

My breakfast peanut butter sandwich was everything I had hoped it would be and more! Although, I’m not sure it helped with the morning dig. I feel like I can stop reporting on the morning at this point, as if you’re reading all of these, you know the deal.

After lunch I met up with Jess to go for a shower. Whilst we waited for the others, we had a little moment sunbathing together, her lying on my stomach. We chatted for a bit, then just lay in silence, enjoying the feeling of the warm sun on our faces and the distant noises of the village going on around us. Eventually, Meg came and nuzzled us so we gave up waiting and made the short hike to the waterfall. With a holiday romance off the table, making a really good friend in Jess was a pretty good consolation prize. We easily spent three quarters of our time together laughing.

The afternoon was spent doing our CASEVAC (casualty evacuation in english) test, which we’d been trained before coming to Archale. This involved Rosie and Rianne pretending to have injuries that needed us to call in to Kathmandu and organise a car or helicopter to evacuate them. Of course, in classic NC5 fashion everything went wrong.

When Rianne ‘had a fall’, Loulou volunteered to be on the phone, but when asked who was helping her, forgot Jess’ name and had a laughing fit. From there, things only got worse/funnier. Rianne was stretchered away when she had potential head injury and shouldnt’ have been moved, Rosie had her ‘injury’ before Rianne’s scenario was finished, and the phone was passed between the the two ‘injury’ sites, even though they were meant to be 10 minutes walk apart.

Despite all the confusion and laughing, we somehow passed the test. The rest of the day was largely uneventful until I went back to my host home for dinner to find Raj cooking. It turned out, he had a bit of a passion for the culinary arts and had decided to use the recently acquired eggs to make a curry for the whole family. It wasn’t anything special, but I was definitely grateful for a respite from the same meal twice a day. It was nice seeing Raj, who was so quiet around the other volunteers, come alive chatting about cooking with the family.