As I sat on one of the four hard single beds for our morning meeting, a small dirty baby crawled around the floor tossing what looked like Bombay mix about the floor. Today I was beginning the delivery of the first project I had contributed to the design of in a developing country and I was very excited to find out if it would work. The adventure had begun the previous day with a 13 hour journey on a local bus from Nepalgunj to Khallanga in the district of Salyan. Our mission to audit government service provision, accessibility and inclusion for people with disabilities.
We sat in this bedroom as if it was the most normal place to hold a meeting, there were us three ladies from Nepalgunj and about five other people from local organisations, who had come to help us to deliver our mission. At one point a man joined us with his arm tucked into his pocket, I came to the conclusion he was hiding his disability. The baby crawling around joined his mother and she popped out her breast and started feeding her baby, I tried not to look, but just couldn’t help it.
As I sat in that room I could smell various odours, I was holding my sulphurous explosions in. After an ongoing stomach problem I had self diagnosed that I had giarsis, a nasty intestinal parasite, I will spare you the details, so I prescribed myself some antibiotics and had since experienced frequent vile odour emitted from my behind.
After a dose of dhall baat for lunch at 11:00, even though I wasn’t hungry, we set off to visit the government thullo manches (bosses), armed with audit forms to ask without even an appointment and proceeded with our unannounced enquiries, which were surprisingly well received. I noticed that all the offices are still working on a hand written basis, computers do not dominate the work place, everything is handwritten and placed in cardboard files. The reason for my noticing such detail is based purely on the need to entertain my mind from boredom as I couldn’t understand anything that was said, as my nepali is ok but by no means can I understand a conversation between a group of nepalis, not yet anyway.
With our five visits completed and samosas in our bellies, the three of us headed off to have a look round khallanga. The tiny town is nestled in the hillside and benefits from far cooler temperatures than Nepalgunj, I was even able sleep with a duvet, what a treat. The houses are traditional homes built with straw, mud and wood, with slate roofs neatly packed. The contrast of the houses against the darkened sky as a storm approached was immense. That night I went to bed without a shower or brushing my teeth as I could not face another dip in the smelly bathroom which housed a simple nepali style toilet, a tap, bucket and jug for showering and bum washing.
The next morning we had all just woken up about 6:00am, when a male colleague from a local organisation came into our room pulled up a plastic chair and started talking to us about the days programme, is this guy for real. I asked my colleague to tell him to go whilst we got showered and changed. Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable for a man to come into a bedroom with three women in at 6:00 am, but in his defence he had brought me a nokia phone charger. The day was fresh and bright after the storm, I showered and was just about to change from my cotton mexi when I noticed a boy peering through the window, I shut the window deciding not to embarrass the boy for his misdeed.
About 5.5 hours later I found myself sitting in a meeting room waiting for enough people to turn up to start . These situations are difficult for me, as I understand very little when the conversation gets going and really my contribution to the programme was more in the design that the delivery, though apparently just appearing as a foreigner gives status to the programme, but really it was my co-workers who did all the work at this stage. This feels very strange to me as I am using to taking the lead in these situations and enjoy being an extrovert, buts in some ways it’s kind of nice to have less responsibility. At just gone 12:00, one hour later than scheduled, we started and the room was full to bursting, we had to bring in extra chairs and benches just to accommodate everyone.
Four hours of absolute boredom later and the programme ended and I can happily say it was huge success, I found out later. Although I have to say I was about to keel over with boredom and general uncomfortable feelings, the success of the programme and happiness of the Co-ordinator was enough to pull my spirits back up. And from that point forward I vowed to myself to start actively learning nepali again and have since been studying 1-2 hours per day and can already feel an improvement. Only another seven more districts to go and I hope to be fluent!
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