The Day of Snacks.

It was decided by our team leaders that Sunday would be our rest day. Personally, it seemed like we’d done enough sitting around already. But it did give me the chance to have a go at hand-washing my clothes for the first time.

I began the day by chatting to Perkas about Jack Daniels, and other alcohol, after he’d noticed a t-shirt I was wearing. It seems like the men in Nepal were either teetotal or bordering alcoholics. I’m not sure I saw any of the women drink at all. Maybe it was a cultural thing. Anyway, after breakfast, I spotted Amita and Loulou down by the communal village water tap doing their washing, and saw it as a great opportunity to learn how. Amita took me through the process and in return I started calling her Mum. If I remember correctly, you had to scrub everything with soap, then rinse each item of clothing several times. The whole thing took me over an hour and I definitely missed washing machines by the end of it.

To stave off boredom, we went for another shower. Twice in two days, oh the luxury! Then met up with Luke, who’d gone with the team leaders to get our digging tools from another group. He told us to meet up at 4 at Jess’ host home for Papaya that a local had given them.

Before we could even get excited at the prospect at this, (you would too if you had lived on lentils and rice for a week) Sudhaka called to us to let us know that they’d been cooking roti and to come and get it while it was still warm. (Roti was the name for any kind of bread in Nepali. As we soon found out, it could mean anything from donuts to flatbread.) This particular roti was a kind of weird sugary dough, which tasted amazing after having nothing sweet for a week.

The papaya turned out to be unripe and a massive dissapointment but at least we had some good chats. There was the usual toilet conversation that seemed to always come up, but also a rumour had been heard that Turlough and Bidhya had done the deed. This was pretty quickly dismissed, as going by previous conversations, Turlough was the kind of guy to shout stuff like that from the rooftops.

On my return to my host home, I was greeted by yet more roti. This time it came in the form of an unsugared ring donut, with a cup of tea on the side. With all the snacks throughout the day, it was a good thing I had finally learned the word for enough/full (poogyo) as I definitely needed it come dinner time.

Intro to Digging

Today was the day. After a week of fucking about, it was finally time to start doing some real work. I would come to regret this sentiment almost immediately.

At 11.30 we were led by a group of villagers to the mountain spring, where we would begin digging the pipeline. Armed with just pickaxes and spades, the trench needed to be 60cm deep and 30cm wide. To add to the difficulty, the first section was through dense jungle undergrowth, which had to be cleared by the villagers of plants and tree roots. On top of this, we quickly found the earth to be full of rocks. These varied from football sized, to boulders the size of a 10 year old.

By quitting time at 16.00 we, and by we I mean mostly the villagers, had dug a 50m stretch of the trench. As someone who usually hated any form of physical exercise, I actually found the work incredibly satisfying, especially smashing up smaller rocks with a pickaxe. But fuck was it exhausting!

The highlight of the day was watching five villagers dig up one of the child sized boulders and lever it out of the way, using nothing but crowbars and brute strength. We quickly learned that although they were small, the rural Nepalese people were tough as nails and a lot stronger than they looked. No wonder the royal family have Gurkha soldiers guarding them.

We had a group meeting with the villagers to end the day and it really felt like we had bonded. Even if were useless at the work by comparison. They pledged to send six workers a day to help us out. A bit of a downgrade from the twenty who had been there today, but a great help nonetheless. It was going to be slow going.

Meg

Going forward we would be spending four hours each morning, from 7.00 until 11.00, digging the pipeline with the help of the villagers. Whilst I would normally have hated the early morning starts, it made a lot of sense when working outdoors, with the sun being at it’s hottest at midday and the early afternoon.

With how well things went yesterday, I got a head of myself and went way too hard on the second day. Absolutely knackering myself by lunch time. In addition, I had picked up a sinus infection from all the dust in the air, which meant my nose was constantly leaking brown snot. But in spite of this, the morning was actually really enjoyable. Turlough had brought a bluetooth speaker back in Kathmandu and I got a chance to play a bit of classic rock like AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. I’m not sure the Nepali’s had ever heard anything like it, but I got some compliments on my taste in music from Rianne and Jess.

The other big reason why it was a good morning, was the arrival of a new dog. Since the disapperance of Ago five days ago, we had thought there wouldn’t be anymore in the village, what with the tigers and all. She was a black and white border collie looking mutt and was very quickly named Meg, after Matt Baker’s dog on Blue Peter. Being very much a puppy, she was a great distraction from the hard work, although she spent most of her time sunbathing at the side of the trench.

After what felt like best waterfall shower yet, the group met up at the team leaders house for more roti. This time it was more like bland pancakes, but was was greatly improved by dipping it in chocolate spread and peanut butter. While we were eating, Rosie and I discovered that not only did we both go to Loughborough University, but that she also grew up in the same town just two years ahead of me. Small world!

The rest of the afternoon was spent doing baseline surveys. These were produced by Raleigh in order for us to gain important information about the village, that would help us in allocating our resources. Mostly where we would need to build the toilets and taps. Jess and I found a missprint of ‘To observe’ as ‘Toobserve’ and for some reason, probably exhaustion from the digging, found it absolutely hilarious.

I was paired with Mum (Amita) to go round and get the surveys done, and all was going well until a 71 year old woman began crying. Apparently, they’d been talking about family and it had brought back memories of her son who had died in a car crash. I of course was completely oblivious to this, as the whole conversation was in Nepali, so sat there haplessly as Amita comforted her. Being the twat that I am, I spent the rest of our rounds teasing Amita about it and asking her if she was going to make the next house’s occupants cry as well.