Birthdays to Bed-ridden

We have two Nepali birthdays this week! How exciting =)

I'll start at the beginning of the week with Sanzu's on Tuesday, and move on to Kuldeep's today.

Sanzu's host home is in Surya Pal, so it meant another trek up the mountain, plus then some. Meetum and I started walking around 9am because we wanted to avoid the heat as much as possible, because recently it is sure getting HOT.

Now I don't know whether I've got fitter over the last couple of weeks, or if I'm becoming more tolerant of having to walk up mountains, but this time it felt a lot easier walking up. Winning...!

Once we got to Sami, Meetum decided to wait for the others that started off a little after us, whereas I really wanted to get out of the heat, so decided to press on on my own.

This would've been wise if I actually knew where I was going. I must have walked back and forth three times, much to the hilarity of the local women, and within this time I was chased by a buffalo. Yes you read that correctly. I was only alerted to this fact by a woman shouting, me turning round out of curiosity and seeing a buffalo charging after me. It was honestly as if it straight out of a comedy movie. You can picture the movie scenario... bull chases after man. Man gets hit by bull. Man flies into air and lands in a heap of something. However this was real life and I had three options;

1) Keep walking and be killed.
2) Run off the cliff and be killed.
3) Run and be killed by sheer embarrassment. Yes those same ladies who find everything hilarious were round the corner and saw this whole debacle.

One of them finally took pity and led me to Lily and Sanzu's host home. It was a lovely afternoon and we even had a birthday cake! It tasted somewhat funky but a birthday cake in the middle of Nepal?!? Massively satisfied that day. 

I got a bit too much sun, but that is not the reason for the bed-ridden part of the blog post title.

Yesterday I was cleaning my ears when I noticed blood from my left ear. I tried putting some drops in and then proceeded to get muffled hearing (sorry to any doctors reading this that think I'm an idiot. I know ok?). That's when it was time to visit the doctor. Turns out I have an ear infection and I'll admit that I was a big baby and cried. I think it was 1) the shock that I had an infection because I just thought it was blocked and 2) being in a foreign country ill isn't ideal. They gave me antibiotics (which I'm not taking as they seem to give them for EVERY ailment here), some ear drops and painkillers. Hopefully I'll be on the mend in a few days! What does make me laugh is that (touch wood) this is my first illness in Nepal and it isn't even remotely linked to an upset stomach. Funny that...

So today I'm missing the second birthday of the week which is Kuldeep. Everyone has gone to Rambazar (the furthest town away) to celebrate with him and I'm stuck at home resting. Boo!

Anyway, that's pretty much all that's happened so far this week. Our Waste Management Workshop has moved to Monday and the Community Health Programme is next Saturday. I'm going to get some more shut eye, because as they say, "Sleep is the best medicine". I say chocolate but I'm in bed right now and the shop is up the road so it'll have to wait.

Alice x

PS: Tip: don't use cotton buds. Just don't. They were created by the devil.

Litter Picking Day in Duipiple

Our very first CAD (Community Action Day) and... it was mostly a success.

Our event was supposed to start at 8am, but people were already clearing way before this. Maybe in a bid for their part of the village to look clean? Who knows... but it kind of defeated the idea of separating all the rubbish and recycling what we could. They just ended up burning their piles of rubbish.

When we headed out, we had 60 gloves (kindly donated by the Health Post) and all 60 of those gloves disappeared. We even had the children getting involved, who then demolished the tea and biscuits provided afterwards. The police, shopowners, women's group members, health workers... they all came out to get involved!

The plan was to separate the cardboard/paper and plastic into the rice bags to dispose of them properly. That didn't really go to plan...

We encouraged people to get on board to clear the rubbish, but the disposing of it was the main issue. Like the rest of the community had done previously, it ended with burning all the rubbish, both plastic and paper, in a pile at the end of the village. That's not what we wanted at all, but this is the norm across the region.

We've decided that this should be our next step with combating the waste management problem in this area. We are going to come up with a strategic plan to ensure that the waste is disposed of correctly within the community, products are reused wherever possible, and that there's no unnecessary burning of plastic to ensure no further damage to the climate.

All in all though, our first CAD showed us how onboard the community gets with programmes and how keen they are to implement change. It's just going to be our job now to educate the community on how to make those changes and sustain them.

I'm pleased with today as it's given us something to learn from, and hopefully our workshop on Tuesday will inform people a lot more on a good environment for the community.

Alice x

The lady in red is the leader of the Women's group.