Volunteering

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Look who's on the internet again! I feel like I shouldn't be on this often since I'm in Nepal, but there's not much else to do. We have a break from work from 10-3 during the hot part of the day. The family is either in the fields or sleeping or watching tv so we can't even really interact with them so basically the options are sleep, read, or walk in to Rampur. There's a nice cafe here that we've gone to a couple times and twice I've actually gotten to read a newspaper! So here I am at the internet again. Hotmail is failing though so I can see the emails but can't open them on one of my addresses and then the other one I can open them on. Weird...
So volunteering...yesterday I was in the orphanage. In the mornings we teach the kids and then in the afternoons we play with them and help in the kitchen. I had the oldest group for the morning. It's actually kind of hard to teach them because they're learning about random stuff. The lesson was about municipalities. It was in english which is already hard for them and then the text uses big words in english when there are much simpler ways that it could have been said. So the kids have a hard time understanding. It's much more fun in the afternoons when we just get to play with them.
Then today we planted trees in the morning at a local school. The oldest students (16-17) helped us. It was fun to get to talk to them while we worked. Then on the way back our tuk-tuk broke and so we got back late for dhaal bhaat.
We've definitely started getting mosquito bites! We have nets for at night, but the bad part is when we're weeding. We serve them a buffet every time all of us go out into the field!
The other day Dori (the girl I'm staying with from California) and I were asking our host sister about arranged marriages. Her 3 older sisters were married at 18. She's 17 now and she thinks it's going to be the same for her. She really wants to go to university and become a teacher and then teach english, but if she gets married she can't. She'll have to go live at her husband's house and do all the duties that come along with that. She thinks that her parents will arrange a marriage for her at 18 since they did for her sisters even though her sisters wanted to study as well. So all her dreams would go down the drain. I can't even imagine that kind of a situation! It always seems like stuff like that doesn't really happen anymore. It really puts our own lives into perspective for us!
The food's the same every day but it tastes good! Nice and spicy! We feel like we eat tons at every meal but then we're always hungry again by the next meal. I guess rice and vegetables don't stay with you very long.
I feel like I'm repeating myself sometimes so I might be. I don't always remember what I've written about and what I've just thought about. Oh well.

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Comments

[kirsten]

arranged marriages
goodness! that's just really insane. i can't even imagine being in that situation. i mean what do you say to someone when they tell you that? just wow.