Kids and Chaos in Kathmandu

"Ke bhayo?" means "What happened?"in Nepalese.  For the month of December, while volunteering at an Nepalese orphanage and school, I was using "Ke bhayo" a lot.

A crying kid.  "Ke bhayo?".   Another bloody knee.   "Ke bhayo?".  A kid with stomach pains and a fever.  "Ke bhayo?".

I've volunteered with kids before so I figured working with kids from Nepal would be a worthwhile experience.   It was also an opportunity to shed the tourist comforts and see what Nepal is really like.

I stayed with a host family for the time that I was volunteering.   When I first arrived at their home the family was in the middle of their cousin's wedding celebration.   It was an overwhelming blur of introductions over wedding music, screaming, dancing  and shouting.  For 4 hours I couldn't even figure out who my host family was (everybody in Nepal calls friends and relatives brothers and sisters even if they're not related).  When things finally settled down I found out that I had three little sisters and one little brother (Parlavi, Nikki, Nojul and Krish).

Living with a Nepalese family is really a warmhearted experience.   When they take you into their home they genuinely treat you like family.  Until this day I have no idea what my mother's name was.  I just called her amah (mother in Nepali) just like everybody else in the family.  And the littles ones simply called me dai (which means brother).

Over the month, my family would feed me, give me a room to live in and ask endlessly about how much things cost in Canada.  I saw my host family mostly in the mornings and evenings but the bulk of the day was spent at the orphanage.

As one of the poorest nations in the world, orphanages are not a government priority.  The majority of the orphanages are run as cash cows for orphanage owners who get a monthly allowance for each kid that they house.   It's not surprisingly when you see overcrowded orphanages with very little money going to the kids.

Luckily, my orphanage was fairly well managed.  We only had 14 kids (as opposed to 25 to 40 kids at other orphanages).   More importantly, most of our kids were generally healthy.  We had no scabbies (skin parasites), lice or any other serious problems (one kid went into seizures at another orphanage).  

The days in the orphanage fell into a pretty good routine where I'd be a babysitter, big brother and medic anytime in the day.  I'd get to the orphanage at 730 as the kid were getting out of bed.  We'd do a morning health check and treat cuts, scraps, athletes foot and the occasional worts.  The kids would then eat dhal bhat prepared by the orphanage didi (sister).  We'd help them get ready for school, pack their bags, supervise the teeth brushing and then walk them to school.   While they were gone to school I would head off and teach at another school until 3 pm.  Then I'd return to the orphanage and do another health check and play with the kids until evening dal bhat.  At about 6:30 I'd head home.

Often times, the toughest part of the day was teaching English.   I taught at a school that took kids that couldn't afford to go the most basic government schools. It was a combination of the lack of support from local teachers (not like they were around anyways), the sparse facilites (our blackboards were plywood painted with black paint that  could hardly hold any chalk) and the poor level of English (my grade 5 kids didn't know what a verb was) that made it difficult. 

Going back to the orphanage afterschool was a relief because it was just playtime then. You soon learn that kids here are just like kids anywhere else in the world.  They want attention, they get rowdy, they love to play football, wrestle, play hacky sack or crawl on your lap and fart.   Probably the strangest thing I've seen them do was the ear piercings.   They would self pierce their own ears and then put a little tiny wooden stick to keep the hole (none of them had earrings).   Not surprisingly, their ears would get infected and we'd have treat them while the stick was still in their ears.

When the kids are crying and bleeding and fighting and you're trying to get over a really bad case of food poisoning and the orphanage lights go out because of the rolling blackouts, you naturally ask yourself "What the hell am I doing here?".  But the answer is easy when you realize the alternative you had 5 months ago in an office job.  I don't regret a moment of it.

One of my kids wrote me this poem on my last day:

Roses are red,
Tea is hot,
Life is short,
Forget me not.

The boys of GPPM orphanage will definitely be remembered as an incredible part of this trip.

Mitho sumjana,

Lenny

PS.  A big thank you goes to KF who was here in Nepal as a volunteer a few years back and gave me this idea.   Your donation is definitely being put to good use.