Swoyambu: Lacking the essentials
During my first week in Nepal, the most important lesson I learnt was this: attempting to register a peaceful night’s slumber whilst simultaneously clencing one’s butt-cheeks to prevent diarrhoea-related anal leakage is even more difficult than it sounds!
I learnt this lesson whilst sleeping in a house that had a squat toilet and no running water.
Thank fuck the kids are cute!
Nepal’s Child Welfare Board recently invoked a law that prevents volunteers from staying in the orphanages at which they are assisting. What this meant for me and Bec was that rather than stay in a house with 40 kids, we slept in the “volunteer house”.
This volunteer house was a two storey, concrete building of which we took up only the bottom floor. By we, I refer to Bec and myself, and two Irish girls, Kelly and Keira. Kelly had been volunteering with Umbrella (the organisation that runs all the orphanages) for two months, whilst Keira had arrived just a week or so before us. On the second floor resided a Nepali family. They used our front door, and the two residences were separated by a locked cage door half way up the stair case.
Our room in this house was a simple square box, with walls painted pink, and furniture that consisted of two flimsy mattresses on the floor and a couple of blankets. The house was located right next door to Conor’s Dhaulagiri orphanage, and so each morning we were awaken around 6am by the laughter of kids playing right outside. So much more agreeable than the buzz of an alarm clock.
Our mornings and afternoons were spent hanging out with the kids, walking them to and from school, and helping them with their homework. At night we crashed early, exhausted from running around after the little’uns.
And whilst looking after the kids was great, it became little more than a distraction from the fact that our house had no running water. For five days. No shower. No toilet. For five days.
Actually, I tell a little bit of a lie there. We could use the toilet. The reason for this was that out the front of the house was a well. That’s right, a well. With a bucket attached to some rope that you could lower down to procure that precious water.
Thus, my mornings went something like this: wake up to the sound of kids laughing. Smile. Then recoil with stomach cramps, and clench butt-cheeks to prevent soiling myself. Throw some clothes on and run to the toilet. Stop halfway down the hall when I remember there is no running water. Run outside to the well. Now this is where things would go pear-shaped. (Yeah, that’s right, only now do things start to look really bad). The bucket is not there. This is because the Nepali family upstairs were seemingly unhappy with us using “their water” and so were hoarding the bucket upstairs.
By now my feet are slightly apart, but my knees are together (although their hidden behind my hands) and my legs bent a little, as though I’m dong some sort of retarded curtsey.
Cursing the bucket-hoarding bastards upstairs, I would run in desperation next door to Dhaulagiri (well, running probably isn’t the right word, more like “galloped like a two-legged buck-kneed camel), bound through the house like the road runner waving good morning to the kids, and finally plonk myself down on the toilet and try my darndest not to let out an audible sigh of relief.
A power vomit finally cured me of my ails, about five days after getting here, and since then life has been much more pleasurable.
It was a day or two after this that Bec and I were walking back to the house one night in darkness. The power was out. It does that here sometimes, just goes out for a few hours in the early evening. But after being here a week, Bec and I had become pretty blase about the whole thing.
“Do you realise,” Bec proferred as we strolled home, “that we have no running water, and no electricity, and we hardly care at all?”
“Yeah. Cool huh. Goes to show how cool these kids are. Hanging out with them just makes everything else not seem to matter.” I replied, stepping into our darkened house. “Do you have the key for the room?”
“Uh, I thought you had it?”
“Nup, you had it.”
“Oh yeah, shit, I must have left it in the room when I chased out that giant spider.”
“Giant spider?”
“Yeah, there was a giant sp…… How the hell are we gonna get in?”
We gimmied the door with a credit card. We kicked the damn door. We tried to pry open the steel bars that blocked the wnidow. And then, defeated, we sat on the front porch, in the dark, and watched the flashing lights of fire flies.
Bec just about cried. Having no water, she could deal with that. Having no electricity, yeah, that was ok. But being locked out of the room, with no conceivable way of getting in – that knocked us on our arses.
After an hour or so we managed to track down another key, and life was restored.
A few days later all the volunteers moved to a new house just down the hill a bit, where we wouldn’t have to share with a Nepali family, and where Bec and I would actually get a bed to sleep on and some drawers in which we could throw our clothes.
Oh, but the new house, yeah – no running water for the first two days.
Like I said before, thank fuck these kids are cute!
Tags: Kathmandu, Nepal, Travel
Dave
May 16th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Hi guys,
glad to hear that you are both well, the writing is as descriptive as ever, just enjoy reading the stories, keep up the good work
Cian
May 16th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
i didn’t post this for the united kingdom, i posted it from dublin……
May 19th, 2007 at 6:07 am
Hi ya Cian,
Great to know you’re still reading buddy. And don’t worry about the UK thing, the last comment I put up had me in the United States. Looking out the window right now to the sleepy town of Pokhara in Nepal – man, this is a long way from Uncle Sam!
Dave