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[Editor’s note: Oren Karp is a recent graduate of Brown University and a Fulbright Scholar teaching English in Kathmandu, Nepal. He posts an account of his life in Nepal every few weeks.]
At 9:55 am the bell rings (or, I should say, someone bangs on the metal plate) to get everyone ready for assembly at 10:00. My school, Shree Bishwo Rastriya Secondary School, is a simple two-story U-shaped building less than a five-minute walk from my house in Kirtipur. Despite the short commute, I am somehow always late. When I walk in from the street, I enter through a gate to the small brick-paved yard where our assembly and recess take place. Directly in the middle of the first floor is the teacher’s room, which is where I aim, dodging and greeting students and teachers on my way, keeping in mind the piles of dirt and gravel on the way. After completing my daily obstacle course, I duck inside, where a chorus of “Namaskar!” and “Good morning!” assure me I’m not too late.
I’m already sweating as the portable speaker and microphone are wheeled outside and each grade begins to line up by height. Morning assembly generally consists of some brief group calisthenics, some questions in English and Nepali (“What day is today?” “Today is Wednesday!”), and a rendition of the national anthem. The exact order of events depends on the day. Teachers and students trickle in late, the latter usually getting forcibly placed by a fellow classmate into their proper spot in the altitudinal hierarchy. When it’s all done, the classes march off one file at a time to their classrooms, where they sit and presumably wreak havoc and copy homework answers until their first teacher of the day shows up. I go back into the teachers room and wait for Sita Ma’am, my primary co-teacher, to arrive, which usually takes about 5 minutes. There is certainly no rush to get things started. I don’t know where she goes during assembly that makes her late every day, but I don’t bother asking.
I start off co-teaching grade 2 English, my youngest class. They are adorable, well-behaved, and very excited to see me every day. As for academic performance, well, I think my Nepali vocabulary eclipses their English capabilities, but at least they are enthusiastic. We would all be pretty lost if my co-teacher wasn’t there. Class 2 is about twelve or fifteen kids, a pretty average size for my school, which has a little over one hundred students from kindergarten to seventh grade. We teach together for 45 minutes, following the textbook all too closely, and my responsibilities usually include writing on the board and leading some sort of speaking exercise. I also serve as a pronunciation or grammar guide, for my co-teacher as much as my students: it’s not uncommon for her to look at me and double-check her own answers, and I appreciate that humility. The group repetition and rote memorization, however, I think I could do without.
After that I move to grade 6, my oldest grade, and I teach a class with them alone, the only class I teach alone, which is by far my biggest challenge. There is no textbook, so I am responsible for lesson planning with no real curriculum to follow and, for better or for worse, not a whole lot of oversight either. For now we’ve been playing a lot of games and doing grammar review, and once we’re done I have no idea where we’ll head. I have a pretty good idea of where their language level is generally, but sometimes I still make mistakes. Last week, I gave them the first page of a kids’ book that I photocopied, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t understand a word in the whole 45 minutes. Luckily, the class is old enough to understand a lot of what I say to them in English, and though we run into obstacles here or there, they are usually pretty eager to work through misunderstandings. They push my boundaries, talking and sometimes fighting, but they are a sweet group, funny and kind and enthusiastic, and they’re already starting to show their personalities. I think they’re excited to have me in their class, and I’m really excited to get to know them more throughout the year.
My school is still being built, which has made it a difficult place to teach at times. The yard is a mess, with debris and often random objects like tires just strewn about, while men come and go doing various different jobs. So far, we’ve gotten new steps at the entrance, new floors, and we’re halfway through a new paint job. Sometimes, the work is harmless, and workers are just wandering around my yard moving heavy things from one place to another, but other times it can cause real disruptions. One day there were two guys downstairs using a jackhammer to break up concrete for over an hour while I tried to do a speaking exercise with my class. Another day they were cutting ceramic tiles with an electric saw in the yard. Extra sound only exacerbates existing issues, since some of the kids already speak very quietly, and I have enough trouble understanding Nepali at a normal volume. On top of everything, the students’ bathrooms on the ground floor have been under renovation the entire school year so far, which means there are only the two staff bathrooms to be shared by the entire school population. I peed once at school, and since then I have taken every precaution to avoid having to do that again.
Adjusting to Nepali classroom norms has also been somewhat slow. There is a lot more deference to the teacher here than in the classrooms I’m used to, which can make me a bit uncomfortable sometimes. Students are supposed to ask permission to do everything, from using the bathroom to sharpening their pencil to drinking water to coming back into the room after using the bathroom. As the teacher, I usually have to tell kids what to do a lot more directly and exactly than I’m used to, since my students seem to be very focused on following directions. My co-teachers, when teaching a lesson, will sometimes just go through questions from the textbook one by one, simply giving the answers if the students don’t know. Homework is often to write the answers from class in your notebook, copying the words whether or not they’re understood. And, unfortunately, there is a certain amount of physical discipline in the classrooms. It’s not hard and it’s not often, but teachers are not afraid to hit students, and even light contact is enough to make me very uneasy. I’m still wrestling with how much of my own culture I’m imposing here, but striking kids crosses a line I’m sure of, and I know the next time it happens I’ll have to say something.
The students and teachers at my school alike have been very welcoming to me. I may still be in my shiny-new-toy phase, but I love arriving to school and meeting with smiles and hellos. Some students have started offering me handshakes or fist bumps throughout the day, and even classes I don’t teach have asked me to come into their room between periods just to say hello. One of the biggest difficulties for me has been names. The first thing I requested from management was a list of all the students’ names in each class I teach, and now I’m learning: Saugat, Suhan, Saurav; Bhabesh, Bhabin; Nabin, Nanu, Nima. Another thing I’ve noticed is that many of the students are not the age that we would associate with their grade in the US. This is due to either being held back (failing even just one subject means students have to repeat the entire year), transferring from a different school, or just starting school later. Classes will have a range of kids sometimes spanning wide age gaps: grade 2, for example, has students from 7 to 11 years old. But mainly, my focus is on learning to balance the special treatment that I get as a white foreigner with students disrespecting me because they know I can’t translate everything that’s happening.
Other teachers have also seemed glad to have me, though I can’t understand a lot of what they’re saying so I can’t be certain. But one woman in particular, the Nepali teacher, seems to have really taken a fondness to me, saying that she will teach me Nepali and I can teach her English. She sits next to me in the teachers’ room at lunch and makes sure to direct one or two questions my way every day, telling me about her daughter in Australia or asking if I’m married. The other teachers, mostly middle-aged women, seem impressed by the fact that I’m a young man with a job alone. There is a bit of an ongoing debate over who my true Nepali ama [aunt] is: when I was confronted about it, I managed, “I have many Nepali amas,” in Nepali and gave my most charming smile. It did the trick for the time being. As for the men, there are only four others working at the school, two teachers and two administrators. Of those four, three of them are named Dinesh Maharjan. Exact same first and last name. To avoid confusion, they call them Head Sir Dinesh, Big Dinesh Sir, and Small Dinesh Sir. Sometimes just Big Sir and Small Sir, and as a corollary, some teachers have taken to calling me Tall sir.
After my solo class with grade 6, the rest of my day passes quickly, the stress of teaching alone out of the way. I co-teach the third period with Mina Ma’am, sixth grade again, and then I have two periods off before lunch. I generally use that time to sit in the teachers’ room, lesson plan, and drink some water, since it’s hot out by then. After the last two periods, fifth and then fourth grade with Sita Ma’am, I’m done. We have a thirty minute planning period, which people use more for socialization than anything else, and at 4:00 I head home, where I continue to procrastinate my lesson planning as much as possible. The days feel much longer than they actually are, because the school day happens to be situated in such a way that I have a little bit of free time in the morning, a little bit at night, and not quite enough time to have any really big adventures.
And, to be honest, I’m a little scared that it might stay that way. The one-or-two-day-weekend saga has continued, with many schools at first refusing to follow the government-mandated Sunday holiday, then individual municipalities making the call. Kirtipur decided to heed the two-day weekend, but only for the month of Jesth, which was last month. So we got two Sundays off and now we’re back to just a one-day weekend on Saturday, which is a real double whammy of more class and less time off. One day of break means having to choose between fun, relaxation, and chores or other work. It defeats any possibility of a casual overnight trip outside the Kathmandu valley. Effectively, it defeats any possibility of really exploring anywhere beyond the bounds of a day trip, and even then at the cost of my laundry and lesson planning, which will have to happen during the week.
The five-day work weeks have already been moving slowly. I don’t really have hobbies or social circles outside my family yet, so when work is over I don’t know what to do with myself. Sure, I love to tout a simple lifestyle, yet nothing but reading and exercising and walking around my neighborhood left me feeling pretty disconnected after a few days, and turning to technology didn’t help. Letters and kind words from friends, both here in Nepal and back at home, have been helping me through, but nonetheless I’m having a bit of trouble coming to terms with my new reality. I’m working a full-time job now, more than a full-time job now that it’s moving to six days a week, and I have no idea what my vacation time will look like since I still don’t have an academic calendar. (Sometimes I think about how much my standards have changed since I arrived here. Can you imagine if your school didn’t know when vacations would be two weeks into teaching? But that’s how it is.)
The most difficult part is not being able to look forward and know that things will get better. I know this is the beginning, this is supposed to be the hard part, and I have been continuing to tell myself that, but this is harder than any of my previous experiences living abroad. Last week dragged, and it made me nervous for what an even longer week with less time off will feel like. I am naturally an optimistic person, and I have been trying my best not to let my mind focus on the negative feelings, but isolation has cut off my normal modes of distracting myself and left me with too much time to think about it. Last weekend was great, two days full of fun, relaxation, and chores, but I’m not sure if it balanced out how sad I’ve been feeling. And if it already feels unbalanced now, with a two-day weekend, then I don’t know that I can convince myself it will get better when I have more work and less time off. For the first time here, I feel really apprehensive about what the future will bring.
So I have been holding on to the good things, and hoping they will get me through. I’ve discovered a Saturday farmers’ market, one of my favorite things to do back at home, and I plan on becoming a regular there. The wheatgrass shot wasn’t my thing, but there’s a lady who makes little bowls of rice noodles like she’s possessed with some kind of black magic.
Some friends and I rallied for a real night out in the tourist neighborhood on a Friday night, and went to a club which felt like it couldn’t have possibly been in Kathmandu. The night pretty quickly derailed, and I don’t know if I could say it was fun, exactly, but it’s certainly something I can laugh about now.
On Saturday morning, my little brother Aarash came to ask if I wanted to ride cycles (“bike” means motorbike here) with him, and I said yes. He proceeded to offer me the cycle his 10-year-old brother rides, and seeing no alternative, I got on. We spent an hour riding back and forth down the alley by my house, the exact same 200 feet of cobblestones over and over again. I accidentally rode my bike into a one-foot-deep pothole in front of my house, and he laughed.
I’ve started to make friends with all the old people who sit out on the stoops of my neighborhood all day. Okay, when I say “make friends,” what I really mean is that I greet them on my way to and from work, but they recognize me and they smile now. It’s mostly a bunch of Newari grandmothers. We’re building rapport.
Standing on the balcony outside our bathroom on Monday, I suddenly heard a squawking noise and saw quails falling all around me. One splashed down in a metal bowl full of water next to me. Two of them fell four flapping stories down to our shared backyard. There were more loose up on the roof itself. It was pandemonium for about fifteen minutes as my brothers and cousins chased them around in the rain while my grandma yelled. All the quails were brought back home safely in the end.
It’s (finally!) mango season, and I was given a bag of mangoes as a thank you for some (non-illicit) gifts that I brought back to Nepal with me from the US. Every day last week, when I was at my lowest, I thought about how, after school, I’d be able to sit in my room, alone, sweaty, and eat a mango. And I would, every day, looking out at my tree, slowly savoring the sweet yellow fruit.
Maybe, after experiencing so much gratitude writing my last update, I’m a little scared of being ungrateful now. Maybe I’m scared of not being thankful for such an unbelievable opportunity, and I don’t want to spend my time here wishing I was somewhere else. But I’m torn, because in so many ways this experience has not been what I expected it to be. There is no way to tell what will come (I can’t stress this enough: I have no academic calendar), but right now I have a lot of work and not a lot of time to myself, and I’m not in a place that is really bringing me peace. So, as the rains come, I’m hoping they bring something new with them, and I’m trying to remember what I have (because, truly, I have so much). And, as always, I’m trying to make some new friends!
This essay was original published by Oren Karp on his Nepali Dispatch blog and is posted here with permission from Oren Karp.
The picture of his 2nd grade students was provided by Oren Karp.