Jo (Nepal)

It was fantastic to spend a month teaching at a school in the village of Bhotang in November 2018, with Jan, a fellow volunteer. It was a challenging but rewarding and heartwarming experience, in which I met such generosity from everyone I encountered.

Bhotang is a remote but beautiful village, surrounded by mountains, about 6 hours’ drive on bumpy roads from Kathmandu. We stayed with Meera, the sister of the school’s Chairman.  We were very lucky to have Meera looking after us as she was a great cook.  Lots of dal, rice and vegetables and rotis for breakfast which was my favourite – eaten with a bit of marmite that I took with me as a home comfort!

It was a bit of a culture shock at first.  Very cold at night and in the mornings with no heating or hot water.  We did have a western loo though and a big bucket of hot water every two days for a wash.  But the days were mostly warm and sunny with beautiful blue skies.

We had a 20 minute walk to get to school with amazing views of the snow-capped mountains and rice fields.  And everyone was so friendly.  You could never walk far without someone saying ‘namaste’.  So nice to have that walk every day and we never got tired of the view and passing cows, buffaloes, goats and chickens along the way.

The teaching was fun and the children were lovely.  Although Class 6 with over 70 children in was a bit of a challenge!  Classes 9 and 10 were the older children whose English was better and with just over 20 in a class.  It was quite hard getting them to talk to start with – they seemed very shy but so rewarding when you could see them getting more confident and wanting to talk to us more.  There were three teachers at the school from the Teach Nepal programme who were spending two years at the school.  RKD, Pratik and Ramesh were great and looked after us very well.  They lead a lot of initiatives within the school and brought bags of enthusiasm and new teaching ideas with them and it definitely helped us having them there.

We generally taught four classes a day, so not too much but enough with having to prepare lessons as well.  And it was nice to have spare time to just hang around at school and talk to any of the kids that wanted to come and practice their English.

At the weekends we were able to explore the area and did a couple of good hikes around Bhotang and to Yangri, the next village at the bottom of the valley where we bumped into one of the girls from class 8 who introduced us to her family, showed us their new house and gave us a tour of the village.

Jan left a week before me so and I was a bit daunted to be left on my own at first.  We had been a good team!  We had taught class 10 to sing ‘Imagine’ which they loved and they sang it to the school at assembly on Jan’s last day.  A great send off along with the many scarves they gave her.  I needn’t have worried as the children were very kind to me and I was never on my own for long.  In the evenings some very small children from the family across the road came over a few times and would knock on my door and sit with me doing their homework or some drawing.  And Meera took me to her friend’s house at the weekend for more delicious food.

My last day was a bit overwhelming with just as many scarves and hand made cards, posters and notes from the children.  It was a wonderful end to an amazing experience.