The new year has arrived and it is now officially the year 2069. I am not sure why Nepal is ahead of the rest of the year in this regard, my Nepali friends I ask don't seem to know why, but wonder at the rest of the world being behind. Despite the difference in years, Nepal is an amazing mix of ancient and old! As experienced from this recent trip and my experience staying with a Nepali family in their traditional Nepali style farmhouse sleeping over the livestock in the loft , sharing my simple wood plank floored room with hundreds of potatoes spread around the floor in storage. That was easy enough to do, the harder part of village life is walking up and down steep pathways, and watching your dinner go from walking around the yard to next being beheaded and ending up in the pot, but talk about fresh food.
It took a nearly all day jeep ride to go from Kathmandu to the village of Phulkharta, this was the end of a long week for me traveling to Nepal, finding my bearings, changing currency to rupees and then finding enough bookstores that had the right type of books for our library. Our library project was started earlier this year in January, a dream we have had for awhile to bring a library to the village where we built a school, finding a serious lack of books for pleasure reading, and just a serious lack of books in general. As with our school, our trusty friend in Nepal Bhupendra guided us through all the stages of building and acquiring material for the library, and added his input into our original design of a simple one room building. We raised enough funds to increase it to two rooms, thanks to the Dwork family who helped fund our school here, and other donations, one larger than the other for community meetings,workshops and maybe even someday computers.
In fact one of my first meetings in Nepal was with a young enterprising Australian named Mark who started an org called Logged On, and is now putting computers into remote village areas, although unlike ours, his villages have electricity. We talked of how to bring a power source such as solar to Phulkharta so they too may get logged on with the world someday.
The next three days of my stay in Nepal was a mix of meetings with other people running orgs similar to ours, finding out how we can combine resources and information, and shopping for books. With my trusty side-kick Kelsang, we walked many of the tight and crowded streets of Kathmandu hunting for books in Nepali and English. Because it is so expensive to ship books over here, it was decided before I left to do the book buying here, and it was worth the effort, because for as little as one dollar ( by the time I convert the money to Rubees) I was able to buy a child's reading book, and sometimes after purchasing several, the owner would begin to pitch in books gathering dust on their tiny shop shelves, especially when I told them what we were doing. The money went far, and after three days time I had boxes piled in our friend Bhupendras office, awaiting our trip to the village.
Rain was coming daily now in Kathmandu, and that spells big trouble for travel on dirt roads that wind up and down the Himalayan foothills. Bhupendra said we wouldn't make it without a jeep, and that meant renting one so we could take our books and keep them inside the jeep, protected from rain. It was very reasonable to hire a driver with a good Nissan jeep for the two day trip, he would also have to stay in the village with us, and then be responsible for breakdowns and jeep care himself ( this is always an occurrence on these rugged and insanely difficult jeep trails). Fortunate for us, Bhupendra found a cheerful Nepali with a great attitude who calmed my fears at each mud hole, and was able to negotiate hair-pin turns in slimy mud, with our jeep fish tailing madly and all of us hanging on for dear life trying to not look over the edge of the mountain.
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