I am writing from my parent's home in Maryland my second and final report about my final six weeks in Nepal and my thoughts upon returning to the United States. I arrived home on November 1. As for the time in Nepal, the months of September and October were filled to the brim with activities.
The weeks in September breathlessly led up to a very big to-do at LMV school: the One-Act plays. The children are divided into teams and a couple of lucky teachers are put in charge of choosing a play for and directing each team. I really struggled with choosing a play for my team. Overachiever that I am, I decided to write my own play; I do not recommend this avenue to others, because there is more than enough to plan without writing your own play. After weeks of struggling and throwing horrible script after horrible script away in my computer's virtual trash can, Courtney helped me come up with the idea to do a play about Rosa Parks and the bus boycott. This story, after all, had dramatic scenes, a struggle between good and evil and the potential to involve many students. After reading how Andy had included all group members in his play, I thought this was a great idea and strived to do so myself. I still have no idea how he did it. I had about 30 kids in my play and trust me, between staging huge protest and bus scenes and just getting everyone to each practice, it was a pretty bumpy ride. Another teacher helped me, and somehow we pulled it off. I was actually more than pleased with the results. The kids had A LOT of fun with it and everyone in the audience seemed to enjoy it and complemented me on how it was interesting, different, and clear. After performing the bus scene and the get out of jail scene to ad nauseam, I don't think a single of those thirty kids will forget this piece of American history. In a country where, according to my students, the caste system is alive and well, our play explored some relevant themes.
After the One-Act plays, the school took a break for the Dashain holiday, which is one of the biggest Hindu festivals of the year. The Dashain holiday is the meat-eating holiday - when goats and chickens everywhere meet their day of reckoning. It is the time for extended families to celebrate together, exchanging money and tikka. (Tikka is a sticky paste of rice, water and red or yellow dye which family members put on each other's foreheads in religious ceremonies). Almost everyone in Nepal celebrates Dashain; stores are closed and even the buses and taxis don't run.
After the Dashain holiday ended, I taught the perfect tenses to the seventh and eighth grade students. Each day I spent a while thinking of examples such as: "When Pradeep returned from the war, Rashmi, his high school love, had already married a librarian named Ramu." We would make a timeline identifying the order of events expressed in this sentence and others; from there we would deduce how to use the past perfect tense, or future perfect, or whichever tense we were learning. You get the idea. I felt a rush each time I stepped into the classroom as I confronted the challenge of holding attention in a roomful of thirteen year olds for forty minutes. The combination of my excitement about the material and the kids' willingness to work with me made for a great time. Sometimes, the kids responded so well to the grammar classes that I felt like I was walking on air as I left the classroom!
I had an additional unique and rewarding opportunity with a small group of eighth grade students. Courtney had assigned different religions to small groups in each class eight for the students to research. I volunteered to take one student from each Jewish group to a temple. Jews are basically unheard of in Nepal, but there is one temple for Jews in Kathmandu; it mostly caters to Israeli travelers. When I took five students to this synagogue one Friday afternoon, many people there happily answered the students' questions and took it upon themselves to explain more about the history and beliefs of the Jewish people. In addition, the rabbi allowed us to open a Torah, which is our holy book from which we read every Sabbath. The Torah is not merely a book; it is a scroll on which a special scribe writes in an ornate style and it is decorated with a crown to symbolize its status; the traditionally religious believe it contains the word of God. We read from it every Saturday and in this way it is the pivot around which Jewish ritual revolves. This particular Sabbath marked the holiday of Simchat Torah, which is when we finish reading the Torah and begin it again for the year. Everyone at the temple with whom we spoke invited the students to the festivities on Saturday morning. To my surprise, after staying at the temple for hours on Friday afternoon, all the students wanted to return and stay the whole day on Saturday, their only day off during the week. One of the students who came with us, one who is not normally a very good student in English, began to do a great deal of research on his own about Judaism. None of the students had heard of Judaism before this project. Upon a toast around the table on Saturday, every child ventured beyond his/her shyness to address the young group of Israelis scattered around six long tables. All of my students thanked the group for including them, and many went beyond this to say what they had learned; this included how we say a prayer over red wine and braided bread before a meal and then share these items as a group. As a practitioner, the Sabbath prayers over bread and wine have been the most constant ritual in my life to set apart the work-week from the day of rest. If asked, I don't know if I would have recounted these little rituals as a defining feature of Judaism. If these kids had learned from me about such rituals or read about them in a book, they would surely have forgotten them shortly thereafter. However, seeing these rituals in action has imprinted them in these five students' memories in a way no written or spoken words could do. If, as I have experienced, peeks into new worlds set off sparks of curiosity which lead one to pursue knowledge, which in turn fuel more sparks and more learning, then who's to say how this glimpse of a world outside their own could lead these students to pursue answers to other questions throughout their lives?
As for my lovely fifth grade Extra-English class, I read a chapter of the reader with them about marine animals. To supplement this, I found information on the Internet and at an English library in Lalitpur about these sea creatures. Then I divided them into groups, gave information about a different animal to every group, and asked the kids to answer questions that we had formulated together as a class. Most of the kids really enjoyed this because they were able to work with their friends and because they were all curious about sharks, dolphins, penguins and whales. I consider the activity a success, as it stimulated reading and speaking in English. The only problem with this assignment was that I also asked the students to present some of their information to the class. I let this get a little unruly sometimes, and I spent a great deal of time pondering how to manage question and answer sessions among fifth graders. In retrospect, the messiness of the activity was only natural for 10-year olds unaccustomed to giving presentations; I believe that the benefits for the children of sharing their work with their classmates outweighed the costs of intermittent confusion and boredom.
The last day of school before the Tihar holiday, October 24, was also the day we learned the U.S. had issued a travel warning for Nepal and that we therefore needed to leave the country. The next few days were spent trying to put everything in order and say goodbye to people.
One can never fully wrap up all the loose ends in a rich and varied experience, but ending suddenly leaves even more untidiness than an expected conclusion. I arrived home shaken, my head full of lights blinking with everything I left undone, confusion as to what to do next, and all-around exhaustion.
I have spent the past six weeks trying to refocus my vision and decide on the best way to proceed. I miss the children most. Working with them was a constant challenge that filled my heart and imbued me with a sense of purpose. I now know I want teaching to be a part of my life.
In Nepal there were so many things I could not control that developing an unshakable calm and humor was the only way for me to cope. Those qualities, perhaps more than any others, are what I strive to recapture when things drive me crazy here. I find that it is all too easy to slide back into the routines of a fast-paced life and its accompanying annoyances at insignificant things such as a few lost minutes in time. I battle with myself on a daily basis to maintain my hard-won sense of perspective.
Nepal lingers in other ways, too; for example, in my inexplicable addiction to condensed milk and my wonder and delight upon every hot shower. Still, it is perhaps disturbing how quickly the mind adjusts from shock at 10-story buildings, superhighways and huge shopping malls to numbed expectation. The material distance between Nepal and the United States is inconceivably great, yet I easily accustom myself to this gap.
What I keep returning to is the following: While I believe I gained much more from my experience with the students than I gave to them, I also have faith that over the years I will gain enough experience so I can give back to other people in other ways.
