School visit's in Rukum

It was another 8 hour jeep ride to reach the first school we saw and the roads were just dirt tracks around the hillside:

Our route into the hills

A break to take photos

Te kitchen of our inn

In the doorway of our room

The road usually had a sheer drop on one side and there were no road signs or barriers at all.
We stayed in a friendly local inn wher eI got my first ever bed bug bites!
We visited two secondary and one primary school and it ws so good to be talking with students in the classroom again, even if their first language was Magar and so they did not always understand my Nepali. Our INGO, UMN is providing computer labs with 20 computers to 50 several needy rural schools in our working areas. This is in partnership with TAP and Microsoft. I was there to monitor the use of these facilities and to help the local teachers to use more child centred learning techniques. It was good to see how the whole community supported the govenment school and I also met with the school management committees to encourage the whole community to learn to use this resource. Poor children have no choice but ot use the government schools and we are part of a national drive to improve teaching and learning in them.
Talking to the students, it was clear that ,most of them had never even seen a real computer before the lab was installed, they had only seen pictures in books!
Despite the heart rending poverty It was clear that the students were really keen to learn and several of the teachers were teaching  in an interactive way. In the primary school they had addressed the water shortage and the extreme poverty of some of the pupils by providing a wash stand so they could clean themselves on arrival at school.

learning to use excel spreadsheets

Discussing the importance of computers in education

Using multilingual text books in nepali and mugar

wash stand for the primary school children

They also provided porridge at lunch time since  half of the children had to climb up a hillside for at least 30 minutes to get to the school from their village. Overall I was mpressed with the determination of these communities, with a high proportion of illieracy, to improve the education and therefore the life chances of their children.

Journey into the western hills

We have just returned from a field trip to Rukum, in the high hills of the mid west of Nepal. Roger and I travelled together but his focus was on climate change issues and mine on education.
We flew out of Kathmandu on a small  plane with only one propeller each side, which always un-nerves me but I did a lot of praying on take-off and landing and all was well. The best bit was that we had picked the side nearest the Himalayas and although it was raining on take-off, the sky cleared and we had some lovely views of the tops of the snow capped peaks with the clouds forming a carpet below them.


view of the Himalayas from the plane

 

 

 



Once we arrived in Nepalgung, a town right on the border with India in the flat terai region in the south,  we were met by a member of our field staff and shown to our Jeep.   We travelled for eight hours along roads that snaked around the hills with sheer drops on one side for most of the way. We forded small rivers and passed too many cleared landslides to count. The most alarming one was so recent that a digger was still clearing it and our driver drove as fast as he could since a tree was leaning at an alarming angle right above the road.

waiting for a landslide to be cleared

 We stopped for delicious dahl bhat with local meat and vegetables and then pressed on until we reached a big river. Here we left our jeep to walk over a swing bridge and up a hill to meet our second jeep. We were bringing multilingual educational text books  written in nepali and also in the local language, Mugar, to our partner schools in Rukum, Therefore these had to be carried by porters up by porters together with our own small cases. In the dry season the jeeps can ford this particular river but it was too high for our vehicle to cross.
The day we travelle dwas Teej, the annual womens festival when women and girls put n their best clothes, do their hair and the married women return to their mothers house. It was lovely to see them dancing in the villages as we passed.

Women gathered to dance and celebrate Teej

In one village we also saw this particularly well constructed festive swing.

Some of the men also enjoyed the Teej holiday

 Eventually we reached Rukum and gratefully settled into our guest house. The food was all cooked over a wood stove and the accommodation was clean but the best bit was the stunning views out over the hills and down the valley to the river.

arrival at Rukum