There’s no rest for the wicked, and at 7am the next morning we were up at the NEWAH house for a Hygiene and Sanitation workshop. My legs were killing me and I was having a serious Maccas craving. Since then I’ve been dying for a burger…
After the workshop we held meetings with the Mathillo Semrang and Tallo Semrange WSUC, CHSV, caretakers and sanitation masons. I’m really excited about my project; getting community information really brought home to me how important this feedback is- things that external people wouldn’t pick up on (for example, in the dry season they let their cows graze around their water source…). I also found out that between the 3 communities of my project, only about 15% of people wash their hands at critical times (after the toilet, before cooking, before eating, after changing a nappy- no wonder they don’t want me eating with my left hand!). These things still surprise me because in Western culture we learn those things right from being potty trained. Also, I thought that the presence of NEWAH would have drastically increased the proportion of people washing their hands, but apparently not. So, many more Sanitation and Hygiene workshops to come!
The afternoon was fairly laid back, with a nap over lunch time. I realised how much I had settled into the rural culture when I caught myself watching a spider build its entire web. It was fascinating. I couldn’t believe I’d never watched a spider do it before- except now I’ll feel incredibly guilty when cleaning webs out of corners; knowing how much work goes into them! Anyway, not to sound like a raving hippie, but if you ever do happen to catch a glance of a spider building its web, I recommend taking a few minutes to just sit and watch it- mesmerising!
Kopila and I had afternoon tea with a few of the NEWAH and local staff, who were busy building a demonstration toilet for the village at the house next to us. Like most occasions where there’s food, this involved me being force fed and until I thought I might throw up; this time on an overdose of chocolate biscuits and guava. Later on in the afternoon our house sister cooked us black kidney beans (or whatever they’re called), which I told her were delicious (because they were the closest thing I’d had to nachos in months), but she took that as me wanting more, and it turns out that my desire to be polite managed to overcome my desire to vomit. Score one for me, except there’s no way I was losing weight from all the exercise with the amount of food being shoved down my throat!
Anyway, back to the afternoon toilet building. The local guys were building a toilet to show villagers, and also the NEWAH staff were capacity building the local sanitation masons so that more could be installed. Like the dork I am, I found the whole process really interesting (as you can imagine from the title of my blog). The toilet ‘room’ had already been constructed and the pan was in place (though not set in concrete yet), and the tank had been dug already. At this stage the staff were working on making a lid for the tank. They were using steels rods for reinforcement (watching them cut those whilst they were wearing thongs was a bit hair-raising!!), but couldn’t get a hold of wire at the markets, so were tying them together with bits of plastic. I love the way they could just adapt straight away to the situation. Once they’d finished I remembered that I had 82 metres of twine in my bag (and a Swiss Army Knife, I figured I could ‘Bear-Grylls’ myself out of any situation with those two items) but hey, they were too quick at recycling local materials for me to suggest it.
That evening I sat down with the NEWAH and local staff to ask them the same questions I’d asked in the community meetings- it was interesting to get some conflicting answers, and generally this occurred because the villagers thought there was too little water in the dry season, but the NEWAH staff had measured flows and that shouldn’t be the case, or the villagers didn’t think there was a problem with contamination, but the NEWAH staff knew there was. So, as well as seeing the importance of community consultation, this day also hit home as to the importance of technical and social knowledge as well, particularly from professionals who have spent significant time in the field. I also answered a lot of questions about Australia that evening, and got pretty bummed out that most of the people I met would never get the chance to travel outside of Nepal, let alone that far away. But hey, if there are any Aussie boys out there looking for a Nepali wife, I know a few looking for Aussie Visas :P
That night I had a heap of crazy dreams- I think I must have been homesick, because so many people featured… The first was fairly normal; I was in Perth for Christmas and it involved all of my and Luke’s families. The second I was in Pokhora with Alec, Amy, and Amanda (to be expected), but at some point Hannah, Alanna and Emily also showed up. In the third I was geocaching with Emily and Amy W (it was a Currie Hall themed cache), which is a bit crazy because I didn’t even know what geocaching was until a couple of weeks ago. And in the last one I must have been at EWB Conference, because there were EWBers from around the country there- I specifically remember talking to Lizzie Brown, Mark McNee, and Kim Axworthy. Anyway, the interesting part of that dream was that Kim told me that Matt had gotten a job in Antarctica, so they were moving there…
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