New Orphanage

September 18 2007

It has been almost a week since we started working in the new orphanage and we are not here for too long (only one week more) so it is a bit of a flying visit. This orphanage is a pretty amazing place the director Dinesh has gone to great lengths to provide a clean, safe environment to grow up in. We have spent a lot of time with the kids trying to improve their english as the orphanage was only started in January they have not been at school for very long. Most of them had not been to a school prior to joining the orphanage. To be honest though the people that have really captured our hearts at this place are the "didis".

Didi literally means older sister in Nepali but it is a respectful way of referring to a lady and that is what we all call the ladies who work at the orphanage. There are four of them in total and when we arrived they asked us if we would mind trying to teach them English. Of course we agreed and the next day we started what we thought would be a one hour lesson.... that turned into more like a three hour lesson because they kept making us tea and asking us for more and then they spent the entire afternoon practicing with eachother.

In Nepal women are generally not encouraged to learn skills and better themselves and these didis really showed a lot of courage to even ask us in the first place to help them. They are so cute everytime they gave an answer they broke down in shrieks of laughter because they felt so embarrassed. Anyway we are doing our best to give them a crash course as I think it can really help people get jobs over here if they can speak english well (yes you may well question my ability to teach English coming from Blackpool!!! but there you have it!).

So that is it really for this week a bit boring but after last weeks epic adventure I am quite happy for a bit of boredom. We have a day off today and Jon has gone mountain biking -I dont think I have seen him that excited since we arrived and I am drinking wine.

Caroline x