Ten days in Nepal

Hard to believe it was only ten days. Hard to believe that ten days can have such an impact on you and make everything look completely different for the rest of your life. John warned us, he warned us it would be the most challenging thing we would ever do or see and the most rewarding, he said that no one visits Nepal without being affected by it and have it change their lives forever, but, being the sceptic that I am, I thought, ‘’yeah, yeah we'll see’’.

I was living in Dubai and working as a full-time photographer. But I also volunteered with VID (Volunteer in the Dubai) and had worked my way up to Membership Manager.  The position for Global Events Manager came up and I so wanted it. VID was expanding out of the UAE and becoming more international with events offered to volunteers and needed someone to run the pre-show and accompany volunteers on the locations. I was not hesitant. This is something I have always dreamed of doing and I jumped at the chance, even though I was working full time I knew I could do this. Around the same time, John Mathews, founder of Children of the Mountain (COTM) was planning another trip out to Nepal to oversee the enormous task he’s undertaken of rebuilding schools up in the mountains of the Himalaya’s in Tangerang. He was my first stop. I'd met him before, he's a photographer, and I loved his story. He went out to Nepal many years ago to take photos and was struck by how the boys were in a school during the day, and the girls were out in the fields with their mothers working. The schools were no more than brick shelters but at least they didn't need to do the back-breaking jobs in the fields. John has a daughter, so it was close to his heart that all children are entitled to an education. He started fundraising and after two years, using local builders, he had a small school for girls built way up the Himalayas in the first little "district". I asked him if I could bring a group of volunteers out to help for our first International event and to cut a very long story short, I ended up in the Himalaya’s with 30 handpicked volunteers from VID. 

After a few weeks of stressing and planning, we eventually met at Dubai International Airport early on the morning of Thursday the 12^th of April. Lola came to wave us off and after a few airport hitches, (Suzanne forgetting her passport and Abdul’s luggage being offloaded as he had to abandon his trip due to a family emergency), we were all seated and on our way to Kathmandu. The first night we arrived was the Nepalese new year, the year is 2069, but after we ate something we all went back to the hotel to sleep as exhaustion had set in, so no New Year celebrations for us. That night we stayed at  The Tibet Guest House, and I would guesstimate that it’s around a minus 2-star hotel :).  The beds were like bricks, there was sporadic electricity, filthy, smelly and gross and our toilet looked like something out of Train Spotting! Warm water was available, but I chose not to use the ‘’shower’’ on the first night as I was suspicious that I might come out filthier than when I went in. Little did I know that 5 days later, having returned from the mountain, I would be eternally grateful for the luxurious accommodation of The Tibet Guest House!

The buses arrived bright and early the next morning. Typical Nepalese buses that looked so quaint and cute but not so much after 10 hours on the Himalayan narrow and very dangerous mountain roads! The 10-hour bus ride was hot, sticky and uncomfortable and a few opted to take slight relief by sitting on the roof or hanging out the front door. The ‘’roads’’ on the mountains were nothing more than single track dust roads with a 1,000-foot drop a few inches from the outside tyres. A few tears of fear were wept on the bus, a few offers of ‘’can I get out and walk please?’’ and a lot of very frightening turns and bumps. I was told that Ice Road Truckers filmed a few episodes on these very roads of the Himalayas for their extreme trucking programme. As we passed through mountain villages the local people looked and pointed and smiled at the strange-looking crew on our bus, and put their hands together in prayer and said the word Namaste. We quickly learned that waving and whooping was not the Nepalese way, and everyone adopted the Namaste greeting for the rest of the trip. 

Exhausted, dirty, hungry and deflated we arrived at a pitch-black field near a river that had been given up to around twenty small tents. In actual fact,  the location turned out to be idyllic, but due to the darkness, we would need to wait till morning to see it. I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say that this was a low point of the trip. In the black of the night with only a torch for light, I tried to see where we would be sleeping for the next few nights and seeing the lack of washing or toilet facilities after that trip didn’t raise my spirits much. Sorry, there were toilets, there were dug out holes in the soft earth with a cover over them to be used by our thirty and the crew. I managed to use this one time on the first night and forever after, the smell was too atrocious to contemplate spending any time in there ever again. At 6am we were awoken after a restless night in our sleeping bags and greeted by a view of rolling mountains, a flowing, babbling river and scenery not unlike Scotland, except it was warm and sunny. In high spirits, we took the bus to our first school and was totally surprised to be greeted by the whole village, a welcoming party complete with music from the Panche Baaja, a set of 5 musical instruments that are played at auspicious occasions. There followed speeches, welcoming garlands, and blessings to each of us by placing a red powder on our foreheads. Some children performed traditional dances and I found it all a bit overwhelming as I’m sure everyone else did. We were being treated like Angelina and Brad here! We only came to paint schools and teach!.  In fact, there were another 2 welcoming days just like these in the next few days as we moved to other villages to the other schools. 

The next few days I can truthfully say were the most challenging but rewarding days of my entire life and I think I can speak for everyone. Seeing poverty and filth like you cannot believe we stepped back 300 years in time. The school houses that were not rebuilt yet were nothing more than derelict brick shacks, with over 50 children packed into a room with around 6 bench desks. Dogs can come in to defecate in the room and the teachers carry on, in fact, the children take a toilet break wherever they feel the need also. There was no blackboard……….. nothing. When John gets his hands on it it will be unrecognisable. Rebuilt, restored, school supplies, uniforms and teachers trained up! 

I can still see the faces of some of those kids clearly in my head, I can still see their expressions. I wasn’t there to change their lives, but I think we did bring some hope to them. Someone was doing something. Someone cared.

I saw our people work hard, the boys repainted and cleaned and scrubbed the ‘’new’’ school and I saw two of my woman, clean the school toilets. The school toilets looked like they hadn’t been cleaned years and certainly smelt like it. These two women covered their faces and went in and scrubbed, truly inspirational and I for one certainly could not have done that! I was retching at the door watching them! The young new teachers were taught how to teach, shown how to use the equipment and basically given more confidence. The kids played games with us, we showed them how to paint, some of them had never even seen simple watercolour paints and showing them how to make a picture was something I will never forget, the look on their faces when something was created on the page. One day, as we waited for the bus home, Victoria and I found some hanging branches, the soft kind like in the Tarzan movies.  We used it like a skipping rope, one at each end and showed the children how to skip. We watched this, grubby, filthy little boy try to jump as the rope came around and we counted out loud and eventually, he got to 28! He looked so pleased with himself. 

The VID gang were truly inspirational. In fact, everyone was, all the team, as that’s what we became, a team of 30.. I have never been challenged so strongly and I’m sure I speak for everyone. Even if you’ve been camping before I’m sure there was at least water to wash or toilets, and when we came back every night in the dark we were filthy!!! By the fourth day the men set up a bamboo cover near the river and the women went down to wash. The water was brown and didn’t look too appealing especially when your feet sank into deep soft slimy mud when you waded out, but still, we washed, and still, we all laughed and felt so good after and joked about how a clean-up in a dirty river was so wonderful. 

The bus ride home to Kathmandu took 12 hours instead 10 this time, go figure! The last day we had all to ourselves to site see and John arranged a tour guide. We visited the crematorium in Pashupatinath!!!!! The Nepalese, are all mainly cremated and they are all mainly cremated in this holy ground in the river. This has to have been the most disturbing thing I have ever witnessed and hope never to witness again. I sat down opposite the cremation site and watched. For me, a westerner where death has virtually disappeared from public life, the openness and accessibility of this cremation site had a tremendous impact. Along the banks of the river on the opposite side were concrete platforms, around 20 I would guess, although I didn’t count. Each platform had a pile of wood, some burning in preparation, some not started yet and some with bodies. Families with young children were watching with me while a corpse, wrapped in a yellow cloth, was carried to one of the platforms. A few relatives were bidding their last farewells to the corpse, some flowers were tossed, after which it was lifted and carried on the pile of wooden blocks that had been constructed just before. This was surprisingly little ceremony surrounding the event, and when smoke started billowing out of the pile of wood, straw and human remains blew everywhere and I just knew I was breathing in the remains of at least one of the burning bodies. I thought as I sat on the banks of the Bagmati, that this was surely the most surreal situation I would ever encounter. Tourists are allowed to stand and watch and take photos, which seemed strange at best, but the river Bagmati was a sludgy, disease-infested swamp and this is their holy water?!!! It was no more than a cesspit to dispose of the cremated bodies after they had been publicly burned. Cows stood in the water and monkeys jumped around the rocks eating………… god knows what! Young naked boys were in the river. They were searching for any money that may have been left on the bodies. They had their heads under the water and ducked, I felt physically sick. Earlier, at the beginning of the river, before we had even seen the crematorium, some of us had joked about how much money we would need to swim across the river and most said not even a million would tempt us and that even if we did it we wouldn’t survive the infestation of bacteria you would pick up. I watched in sadness as a family prepared their loved one in yellow silks and garlands of orange flowers and watched in horror as the body was placed on the burning wood and the head could be seen to begin to leave the body. A black crispy round ball dandled from the edge of the fire………………….time to leave. 

Our last evening was spent eating drinking and being merry (well cheese sandwiches and the worse wine ever tasted merry). I want to say that it was the most incredible experience of my entire life and I had become an old sceptic and thought I had seen it all. Having travelled a lot, lived in Rome, the Middle East, seen all our continents and spend most of my life experiencing new things, I truly believed I couldn’t ever be awestruck by a country and its people again…………..I was very, very wrong. I took my daughter with me again the next year. I really wanted her to see all this for herself and witness these amazing people who have nothing and are truly the happiest  and kindest people I have ever met.

For information on travelling to Nepal on one of Johns trips, he's always happy for the company, even if you're not up for volunteering, visit children of the mountain website or Facebook page. I promise you it will be the most humbling experience of your life and will totally make you feel everything very differently.