Sagarmatha House: The Little Things
Sunday, June 10th, 2007Wow. We’ve been in Nepal for over six weeks now. Damn that’s gone fast. Faster than a monkey stealing your banana (and I’ve seen that happen here. Whoa, those monkeys don’t mess around folks!)
Bec and I have settled into a nice routine now. The initial impact of immersing yourself in a culture vastly different from your own has passed, and we’re feeling right at home with the kids at the orphanage. They make me smile every day. Huge grins that spread right across my face. And I find it’s the little things that make me smile the most.
I smile when Prakash asks Bec if he can use the eraser during homework time. Prakash (that’s him on the left in the photo, Pawan is the boy on the right) is one of the youngest boys at Sagarmatha house, perhaps five or six years old, and he’s, well, he’s a little slow. A few sheep short in the top paddock, if you know what I mean (or, as Kamal, the house manager put it one day as Prakash was the last kid to get his shoes on, “Prakash is, hmmmm, mental”). Bec has been teaching him and the other young kids to ask for things in English, rather than just point and utter a single word. So during the couple of hours after school, when the kids sit down to do their homework, we hear a chorus of “Bec miss, can I have the eraser please?” and “Dave sir, can I have the sharpener please?” Except the words don’t come out quite as fast as you probably read them then. Prakash is the slowest. The words slide out of his mouth heavy and slow, and he nods his head dramatically with each word. It’s as though his eyes, well, his whole damn head, are following a bouncing ball, and each word comes out as the ball hits the ground;
“Can……..I………hab………de………elaser……….pwease?” And he’s so sincere and he tries so hard and it makes me smile every time.
Dave