Ah, Nepal. I have been here a week and in true Nepali style, nothing has gone as originally planned. I arrived smoothly and was collected from the airport by my dear friend Rick (from Australia), and his fiancé Marjorie (French but also living in Australia). However Prakash, my Nepali brother and director of CASD-Nepal, had been called away to work for his day job and his dear wife Sanju was at her home village visiting family. So it was without Nepali company that I was greeted and spent my first two days in Kathmandu helping Marjorie source materials for our library projects. She is a teacher in Melbourne and is here for a month helping the teachers set up the library and we walked into many local shops to buy notebooks, dictionaries, shelves, etc.

Ghusel schools are in exam period right now so that part of my trip will be next week when regular classes start again. In the meantime the three of us decided to check in on our big water project in the village of Kairani in central/western Nepal. A bus from Kathmandu to Pokhara (the third biggest city in Nepal and the jumping off point to Kairani) usually takes 5-6 hours. We planned to get in early afternoon to enjoy the famous New Year street festival. We left at 7:30 am and did not arrive until 9 pm. The journey took us 13 hours.

First I want to mention that Nepal is in the middle of a blockade by India. The why is more complicated than I want to explain, but it basically boils down to India not liking Nepal’s new Constitution, and they sealed the borders because they can. This blockade started in August and has been going for almost 4 months now. That was only 3 months after the earthquakes and now there is almost no access to building supplies, medicine, gas, food, everything. Nepal is landlocked and bordered by the Himalayas to the north and by India on the other 3 sides. It is infuriating that the international community has done nothing about this. We don’t know how long it will go on. And on a simple level is means everything is a little more expensive and a little more difficult. Once we loaded on the bus we drove to the edge of the city and waited 45 minutes to get our fuel ration. They only allow buses to get gas when they’re full of passengers, and only 15 gallons at a time. The pump was protected by armed military and razor wire. Serious business.

After that the next 4 hours of the trip went as normal along the “Death Highway,” one of the most dangerous stretches of road in the world. And then the traffic just stopped. A line farther than we could see of buses completely stopped on the two-lane highway. We sat there for 1.5 hours with no news as to why. We assumed it was an accident (we were on the Death Highway after all) but had no real way of knowing so there we all patient sat. Eventually the bus started moving at about 5 meters at a time as vehicles sporadically came through heading the other direction, and then suddenly traffic opened up. We all cheered. We got about 1.5 km along before we were stopped again, this time by a military truck. I have no idea where all the buses in front of us went because we were the front of this new line where we all sat for 4 more hours. I am not exaggerating. We all got out and wandered around in turns, plying the police for news, throwing small tantrums, plotting with fellow foreigners to throw a party there in the street. Eventually we learned that at 10 am there had been a double fatality accident including a traffic cop, a bus and a motorbike. Tragedy. However there are no words to describe how ludacris it was for a highway to be closed, the only road between Kathmandu and Pokhara in fact, to be closed for 9 hours on account of one accident. We did not eat, did not get water, did not pee, for 7 hours. There were elderly and children on the bus. Traffic stopped for miles. We struggled to think of how this situation could be worse. The bus could have been filled with Mosquitos. It could be a lightning storm. And did I mention both my companions had the runs?

And then suddenly at dinner time the police decided they would let us go. It seemed completely arbitrary. It was dinnertime and they wanted to go home, it was as simple as that. They held us because they could. And that is what we call Nepali Time.

For the next 2 hours everyone on the bus were best friends, taking selfies and cheering to the too-loud Indian music and flashing lights, as you can only feel when you have been through something difficult and come thought the other end of it. At 9 pm we arrived to Pokhara and the festival was in full swing. Dozens of stages of bands, dancers, comedians. Food and drink stalls everywhere and throngs of Nepalis. They are some of the most genuine people, and here we were surrounded by unhindered joyfulness. We had the most wonderful time after dropping our bags at our hotel, going with the crowd, drinking French champagne out of the bottle, and watching the most hilarious firework show (which started at 11:57, Nepali Time) before falling asleep on too-soft mattresses.

Since we had such a grueling day and my friends were still sick we decided to take an easy day next instead of heading straight to the work site. January 1, 2016 was lovely. We treated ourselves to breakfast at the fanciest place in town (still only $6), rented a boat to paddle across the lake, hiked up to the World Peace Pagoda, and watched the sunset with french fries and pizza for dinner. The skies were clear and we had a magnificent view of Fishtail and the Annapurnas.

The next day we headed out, a journey that had another dose of Nepali Time patience. We loaded onto a morning bus from the local bus station, rode 2 hours, and then had to transfer to another local bus for another 45 minutes to the end of the paved road, and then waited 4 hours for the jeep (it left an hour late) that would take us another 2 hours to the end of the dirt road, and then a 15 minute motorbike ride to one village for tea and respects to Prakash’s family, then another 15 minutes motorbike ride to Kairani. We left at 7 am and arrived at 4:30 pm. We sustained ourselves on samosa and rolls from a roadside stand and granola from my pack. The jeep was the most foul vehicle I have ever ridden in and reminded me of a prison transport vehicle. There were two benches in the back which were loaded with about 2 people too many with our packs and sacks of rice and car batteries, and the door latch was so tight it took a good 10 seconds to wrench it open from the outside. We were made to sit in the backseat of the cab. None of the doors operates from the inside, the windows were fused either fully open or halfway, rusty sharp edges everywhere, and the stink of old fish. At one point the driver pulled over to buy a chicken which was chopped into 3 pieces and put on the dashboard. An old man tried to spit out the window and missed. The road is so rough that I felt about an inch shorter and had a throbbing at the base of my neck where I imagined my spine compressing with every bounce. But I digress. It is all worth it to get there, and the landscape is some of the most beautiful I have seen.

This is a place off the grid, where tigers and jackals still roam the jungle and the evening entertainment consists of the one village drum and dancing. We stayed with Mansing, the head of the village, huge for a Nepali and handsome, an ex-National volleyball player, and a fantastic guy. After a typical dinner of daal bhat (rice and lentils), feeling on display as about 15 people sat and watched us eat with our spoons and not our hands, we set up our sleeping bags on the second story balcony and went right to sleep.

The following morning was leisurely as we waited for the family to do their normal routine. The women started the daal bhat and then went to the field to work at about 5:00 am. Then the grandaughter got ready for school and she and her mother went to the village an hours walk away for school and teacher training. Then Mansing served us daal bhat and finally at 12:30, after the villagers had returned from working their fields all morning, we all assembled and went to work on the water project.

The similarities to my old projects in Honduras warmed my heart and I’m pretty sure I smiled for 2 hours straight. They have completed a ferrocement water tank and a clever water intake structure and are working on digging a few kilometers of pipe trenches. This project was started by CASD-Nepal 2 years ago and much of the money was raised by Katie, my friend and CASD-USA teammate last year. I had visited this village in May for a very tense meeting to convince them the funds would not be diverted because of the earthquake, and to implore them to allow us to assist their fellow countrymen in need when we delayed the start of construction. It was all smiles this time and I was impressed.

While the men were finishing the valve box at the tank the women were busy digging trenches. Remember this is after working in their fields for 5 hours that morning. I wanted to help and swung a pick axe for a bit as they laughed at me. Then one of the older women took it from me as Mansing explained that Nepali women are very strong and I’m a foreigner so I shouldn’t be embarrassed by how weak I was, all in good humor. And truly, I watched women who appeared to be 60 years old wrench out large rocks and move loads of soil, chatting and laughing and hardly working up a sweat.

Before we left Kairani to spend the night in the village closer to the end of the road the drum came out and half the village appeared at Mansing’s house to convince first Rick, then Marjorie and finally myself to dance for them, to many many laughs. Even the toughest faces cracked a smile. We took a lot of pictures and had red tika smudged on our foreheads and flowers tucked behind our ears. The joyful goodbyes are one of my favorite things about Nepal-the loving sendoffs that they give even to us, who didn’t do too much but show up, although the showing up part is no easy task.