Alice Symonds - English with Creative Writing BA(Hons) work placement in Nepal

Welcome to Nepal. Land of glorious bamboozlement, craggy old Everest and valiant Ghurkhas. I was there to teach English, a language I am still in the throws of growing accustomed to myself, down here in the deepest darkest depths of Cornwall.

BA(Hons) English with Creative Writing

I had just arrived in Nepal and, somehow, been allowed to cross the threshold into the country. Glancing up from peeking through my passport - and admiring the new stamp therein - I was just in time to be confronted with a Customs sign, informing me that I was allowed to have the following on my person upon entering Kathmandu:

“Cigarettes, 200 sticks; cigars, 50 sticks; alcoholic liquor, one bottle not exceeding 1.15 litre; one binocular; one movie camera films 12 rolls; one tape recorder with 15 tape reels or cassettes; one perambulator; one bicycle; one tricycle; one stick; and one set of fountain pens.”

Alongside this was another warning decreeing that if I failed to notice I had one too many fountain pens in my pocket, or a couple of sticks wedged in my bra - that if I didn’t comply with these fierce restrictions in any way - I would be thrown into Nepalese prison…to be fed on a diet of mung beans, and wear clothes made of Hessian around my crotch forever more. Or words to that effect. I stared, panic stricken, from sign to sign, desperately trying to recall what, precisely, I had thrown into the gaps in my bag during the last frenzied moments of unorganised luggage stuffing. All the while wondering what on earth a perambulator was? A sort of gun perhaps?

Welcome to Nepal. Land of glorious bamboozlement, craggy old Everest and valiant Ghurkhas. I was there to teach English, a language I am still in the throws of growing accustomed to myself, down here in the deepest darkest depths of Cornwall. It seemed, from my first encounter with that sign, that the Nepalese had far better command of its eccentricities than I could ever hope to possess. Nevertheless here I was, and to pass on what little I knew of my own lingua franca was my charge.

I was rescued by Tshering from the swarm of taxi drivers scrabbling over my luggage; dragging it off to respective corners of the car park and gleefully ignoring my arms that were still somewhat attached to most of it. We made our way toward the Excelsior Hotel. For anyone whom has never driven in a developing country, or Italy for that matter, I cannot begin to describe the terror that enswathes you when first experiencing the eccentricities of Nepalese traffic. One may travel by tricycle, tuk-tuk or taxi at any speed your engine might muster, with as many passengers on board and clinging to your wing mirrors as you fancy, in the most unpredictable direction possible - preferably what could at all times be described as ‘sideways’.

A cow is snoozing in the middle of the thoroughfare ahead, its muzzle shoved into the dust of the road, forcing great yellow clouds to rise up in the air then settle gently around the area with each rumbled snore. Tshering proudly informs me that, were we to run over the slumbering beast, we would be unlikely to ever see the light of day again - lest it be through thinly spaced bars. If it were a human obstruction on the other hand, you would be best advised to reverse back over him just to makes sure he were indeed dead. (You would then only have to make a single payment to the family, rather than support them for the duration of the mangled individual’s life.) Cows are sacred you see. Humans, apparently, not so.

We finally reached the Excelsior. My eyes were still agog from my first hare footed preamble through Kathmandu’s backstreets. I was happy to collapse atop what I supposed was my bed, hidden though it was beneath layers of yak carcass. I’d find some flea spray later on if needs be. Awaking a few hours afterward, I was only a little perturbed to discover there was still no contact from the agency that had ferried me to this place. Unbeknownst to me, I was of course now running on Nepali time. Nepalese time is rather similar to the Cornish 'drekly', and thus not at all reliant upon such a fastidious instrument as a clock. Eventually a few other ex-pats also turned up and delighted in recounting how they had just witnessed a couple of bombs go off South of the city in Bhaktapur. Though I wasn't to worry so, as there are ‘BOMBS’ and then there are “just, like, ‘bombs’, ya’ know?” I am still not sure where the distinction lies, and, what is more, am not entirely willing to find out. So I simply took their word for it and hoped that it was to the latter to which they referred.

That evening Carolina and I, being the two new arrivals, braved the ominous tales of the others and ventured out into the city. T.S. Elliot once said of Kipling’s depiction of India, that the best way to get to know a country is to smell it. Nepal is certainly no exception. In fact, to say that this country was pungent, whiffy or aromatic would be to do it an entire disservice. From the butchers’ malodorous market streets, where bits of miscellaneous creature dangle in the mid-day sun, taunting the chickens that cluck and scuffle in baskets below, to the syrupy whisper of cannabis trails bounding down from where men laying on their backs drink in the leaves of surrounding hillsides. It stinks.

I play with my camera as Carolina quibbled with the rickshaw driver. We are standing in front of a chipboard tabletop, balanced between two resting dogs, where men are playing poker. They flutter the ash from fat black cigars by their thighs. A grubby hand reaches round and encircles my elbow. You are told not to give the street children money as many sniff glue. However it also costs money to eat. I gave the girl a few rupees and my Polos, not knowing what else to do - or whether what I had done was desperately wrong, or merely insufficient.

The following day Carolina and I were collected to be dropped off at our respective placements. We travelled via Tony’s farm, where I’d the opportunity to cuddle a few semi-feral looking horses he had acquired from the Nepalese cavalry. We stopped off to visit the barracks as a little side trip on the way to Lalitpur. Kushunti is a collection of typically hickeldy pickeldy houses within Lalitpur itself and was where, for the very brief future, I was to call home. Our abode itself was very grand, particularly when viewed alongside the digs our host family kept on the lower level of the house. It made me strangely uncomfortable at times.

Of all the people I met in Nepal, the child that I have the fondest memories of is the toddler I lived with, Baboo. His name remains a mystery (Baboo simply being a generic term for baby boy in Nepali and no-one, not even his father, seemed to know what he might have actually been christened.) I would often wake up to find he had squirmed into my sleeping bag under the mosquito net, clutching an adorable yet undoubtedly flea-ridden puppy, and chattering away in Nepali. It never seemed to occur, or particularly matter, to Baboo that I could not understand a word he was saying. Though his sister, who also spoke a little English, confessed it was often nothing but mumbo-jumbo to her as well.

Sajahana, the young lady in question, attended the school in which I was to teach. On my first day she escorted me there along with Julia, an Austrian woman who was in the same volunteering programme as I. We made our way through the jumble-stone alleyways, between the hotchpotch houses, past the hundreds of grumbling street dogs and trip-skipping through the barrage of honking, ill-directed traffic of the Kathmandu ring road. Our journey took us to the tall blue gates of Arniko. I remember standing there pondering how, exactly, the children kept their trousers so white whilst scudding about in the dust of the playground. I also marveled at the teachers who floated around in stilettos and saris, looking immaculate despite having made similar journeys to myself in getting to work. This had been a journey for which I had, quite contrastingly, required hiking boots and a technical t-shirt combination. My dress had me shuffling about in certain displeasure with my scrofulous appearance - especially next to the charming mirrored goddesses swanning about before me amongst children in neatly pressed uniforms.

I was introduced to the headmaster, who was always addressed as ‘Dwarika Sir’, and his deputy Shankar. They regarded me kindly enough to put me at some form of ease while they scribbled out a lesson plan. I hadn’t the heart to tell them I didn’t have the foggiest idea what Roman numerals meant. This alone made finding the right classrooms an interesting task. I regarded the books I had been provided with in even deeper suspicion than the Roman numerals. They appeared to have been obtained from the same dodgy Indian printing press that had produced the Nepalese customs sign. I quickly discarded them in favour of a collection of English novels abandoned by passing backpackers in one of Kathmandu‘s many second hand shops.

The students themselves were, on the other hand, wondrous; if adorably mischievous with it. Class Two in particular were only ever partly controllable after an especially energetic round of ‘Simon Says’ and ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes’. I unfortunately cannot remember the Nepali version. Despite insisting that England was an annex of India, and lay somewhere nestled amongst the outlying peaks of the Himalayas, and flatly refusing that Austria even existed (believing that it was just Julia’s rather lazy enunciation of ‘Australia’), they were in fact quite open to instruction. (The non-existence of Austria was later explained by the appearance of a globe with which they were taught geography. Austria, and a small portion of the western hemisphere had disappeared underneath the point at which Germany had been folded over and glued into place. Hitler would have been most approving.)

Despite the fact that, on the most part, the children were willing to learn; I still found those first few lessons filled with haunting moments. Moments in which I heard the most loathsome tutors of my yesteryear emerging in my own voice. I became the terrifying lance-corporal that had taught me to ride, and found myself innocently quoting the frustrated exclamations of my long-suffering GCSE English teacher in the same sharp-tongued Irish accent. It was bloody awful and my students were understandably mystified at times. Jeni, who soon became an inadvertent favourite of mine, gave me a list of Nepali phrases to learn. It seemed a fair deal. If I wanted them to learn more of my language, then it was only right that I ought to at least make an effort toward familiarising myself with theirs. Things went far better after that. It seemed that once they found they had something they could teach me - once it became a two-way thing - teachers were somehow made more palatable.

A lot of the children at Arniko had come from excruciatingly poor backgrounds. The many horrendous endurances they had undoubtedly faced lay beyond my imagination at least. Julia had the task of teaching Dan, a boy of about six or seven, whose learning difficulties extended beyond anything the limited time and resources of Arniko’s teachers could hope to provide. It was a sad admittance on leaving that many such children, despite having been given access to a school by praiseworthy charities such as ‘Happy House’, would perhaps continue to face as bleak a future that could be conceived.

Others, like Jeni, succeeded in teaching me far more than I could ever have hoped to impart to them. By which I do not mean my few sentences of poorly articulated Nepali. Nor do I mean the many stirring discussions we had on a range of subjects from the caste system, to the merits of onion bhajis, to whether or not Angelina Jolie did in fact look curiously Nepalese (I remain convinced that she does.) I am, furthermore, still an atrocious teacher. This comes as no special surprise to me as I am also an atrocious student…and now also partly confused about where Austria may or may not be positioned. I have in fact returned more bewildered than when I left. Exploring the backwaters of the Kathmandu valley has left me unsure of things I once thought unquestionable truth, and of how I supposed life just ‘was’. I am more befuddled than ever, yet perhaps that’s not such a bad thing after all? To travel to far flung climes and assume that you’re enlightened just for having done so, for being able to tick off this country or that one off an extensive list is daft. However, if the people you met along the way made you think twice, or a hundred times, about what it is you believe - whether it be the status of greasy Asian snacks in your palette’s hierarchy or more profound considerations - then I could sincerely say such a trip was a trip worth making.