Two Week Check In

It's been two weeks now since I arrived in Nepal. The weather has been wonderful, 75 degrees F (or as they say here 24 degrees C) and sunny every day. The monsoon season ended just before I arrived so I'm getting to reap the benefits, including these views yesterday from the roof of Build Change's office of the west side of Kathmandu:

That white stripe in the back, those are the Himalayas

Work has been good so far. I haven't had a chance to go out in the field yet, the trip that we started last week got cancelled because a broken down truck blocked the road to the village we were going to. That happens around here. One of the challenges to rebuilding the homes and schools in these villages is how difficult it is to even get to them. During the monsoon rains the roads get blocked by mudslides a lot, and even during the dry season there are events like broken down trucks blocking the road. This even happens in Kathmandu, where on Wednesday a lot of roads were blocked because the president of India was in town for a state visit.

So I've been spending most of my time in the office, working on guidelines for constructing homes using stone masonry. Pretty much everybody on the Build Change staff is under the age of 30, and while most of them know a good amount of English typically Nepali is spoken around the office. Thus it has been a bit of a culture shock sitting in a room with a bunch of kids speaking Nepali when I'm the "old" (relatively speaking) guy who can only speak English and a few words of Spanish. Then again, the same thing was the case when I worked for Build Change in Haiti and Indonesia. There too the staff was mostly young people who spoke a foreign language. It's actually better here since in both Haiti and Indonesia there were only a few people who could speak English.

One of my big concerns coming here was whether or not I could figure out how to eat, since I cannot cook at all and it's intimidating for me to go to a restaurant alone (in the US as well as a foreign country). So I packed my suitcase with as many Clif bars, bags of oatmeal, breakfast bars, beef jerky, and bags of ramen noodles as I could fit into my suitcase (which exceeded the baggage weight limit as a result). However, I have managed so far without having to resort to a diet consisting solely of what I brought. I've only had 2 Clif bars, 2 breakfast bars, 1 bag of jerky, and 2 bags of ramen over these 2 weeks. I have been eating a lot of pasta dinners. That is the one thing I know how to make since it only requires being able to boil water, and all of the markets here sell lots of bags of pasta and even tomato sauce. I did try making rice for the first time in decades and failed miserably (too much rice & too much water makes a lot of mushy rice to throw in the trash), but I still have 6 weeks to figure that out. It does help that Build Change has a cook on staff to make lunches, that there are two good pizza places within walking distance for dinner, and there are 2 places nearby (plus 1 I haven't tried yet) that serve breakfast with lattes...

Today's latte, from Cafe Soma

There are some things back home that I miss. I did miss the Cubs winning the World Series, the sports stations here thought it was more important to show replays of old cricket matches instead. As I type this I'm missing an art reception, and tomorrow (your time) I'll be missing the LSU-Alabama football game. However, I still get to see English Premier League matches, plus the occasional NFL game and as mentioned in my last post episodes of The Sopranos. So it's not all bad. I'm not craving a hamburger or a chimichanga yet, but that'll still be my first meals when I get home.

I'm 2 weeks in, and I'm still here and still as healthy as I was when I left, though I haven't tried washing clothes yet. That's my next challenge...