Thursday, December 31, 2009

Village Stay: Part 2 in Pictures

My host family.

The community area. Mountains in the background.

A closer view of the mountains.
The village "main" street, which had a tea shop we would spend time at in the afternoon between things.
My family's barn and animals.

View from inside my family's mud house. Very simply, but very well built. The mud houses kept quite warm in the evenings, but were quite dark. Especially during loadshedding time when we only had candles for a few hours each evening. The house was three stories: bottom story open for housing the animals at certain times, second floor consisted of three small bed/living rooms, and the top floor was the kitchen area with nothing much more than an altar, a wood-burning fire, and a few kitchen items.

Picture from inside my bedroom (usually the daughter's room).
View from outside my window one early morning.
The village hosted a welcome ceremony for us. Here there are women dancing at the ceremony.
And more dancing......
And here's the men dancing.....

Woman here in Nepal wear red quite often.
Here's the woman-in-charge: definitely one of the movers and shakers and organizers within the village.
At the end of our stay we did a community service day for the village. We lucked out, in a way, that there was a national strike that day. Everyone came. Hard to tell if they would have come otherwise, but it ended up being very successful. Our group did teacher training (above), a broom making workshop from local materials that I think might have been considered the most useful workshop of all, and a day long game day for the children who were glad to have something to amuse them - song and dance competition included.
My "bahini" - little sister jumproping.

These two got dressed up for the dance competition.

A villager.
The handmade cutting tools were beautiful - and strong.

Oh - and more dancing. This was taken the night before I left when my sisters had fully warmed up to me and were comfortable, I think. They were so excited after the singing and dance competition that they spent a good two hours afterwards performing for me. They were fabulous!



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