12 December 2008
No students this morning! I waited for 20 min, but nobody turned up! ?
So I have time to write about my very nice day yesterday. But before that,
I will talk a bit more about my students. One class after another I realise
how they know absolutely nothing! So each time, I’m teaching lower level
things and now I’m back to the fundamentals: the difference between ‘to
have’ and ‘to be’, and how to conjugate these two verbs in
the present and past tenses! I can’t believe that I have to teach them
that while they have been studying English for 5-7 years!!! And even worse,
after one hour class about the matter, I still read things like “I have
15 years old” and “I am 5 brothers”. That made me feel like
crying!
I really wonder what they’ve learnt for so many years. They cannot make
a bloody full sentence. They just put one word after the other. I live Jhyanglang
100 km KTM ! And this could almost be considered as a good sentence as I often
read things like : “The to school you 10 am” (which was supposed
to be the answer to the question “When did you arrive at school this morning?”).
And when they speak, it’s the same, or worse. “Pen finished! Mrs
give!”
I’ve been teaching them how to use the articles (A/The for singular and
-/The for plural) too but I should rather say I’ve been trying to teach
them the articles as even that appeared to be an impossible task. When after
1.5 hours I read “A bananas are yellow”, I wanted to give up, sincerely
(especially that it works the same in Nepali!!!). But, instead of giving up,
I just tried to laugh while reading “nothing bananas are yellow”,
because I had told them that there should be nothing in the front of bananas
(meaning no article of course!)!!!.
Yesterday, as the weather had been really gorgious for a few days, I decided to climb again to the top of the hill in order to see the Langtang and Ganesh Himals. And this time, I succeeded, and it was indeed very nice to see one last time the giants of the Himalayas, above 7000m. As I was alone, I got lost many times, ended up in a path which had probably not been used for a few years, so it was a real adventure! And when I was about to give up to ever see these mountains, here they were, in front of me (although quite far away!). I was so happy! It was really good fun!
Not to risk to see the weather getting bad during the day like last time,
I had decided to go straight after my morning class, to be sure to get good
views. As there is a few days holiday at the moment, there is no school, so
I’ve taken this opportunity to divide my groups even more to make more
homogenous groups, and I’m thus teaching from 1.30 to 6.30. So I knew
I wouldn’t have time to go back home after my hike, before my afternoon
class. Therefore I ate a noodle soup and 2 eggs at 5.45am but then, the next
meal would only be in the evening at 7pm. So I had brought an apple, two oranges,
a cereal bar and a few biscuits ... and I stole two radishes in a field, up
the mountain! I would have been happy to pay for them, but there was nobody
? To be honest, I would have never thought by myself about taking vegies from
a field if Hari hadn’t done so in our previous walks together. When I
had protested that it was bad, he had answered that people in the village and
the nearby villages like him and they wouldn’t mind. And indeed, we once
met the owner of the field, so we told him about our petty theft: not only he
didn’t mind, but moreover, knowing that we liked radish, he offered us
4 huge radishes to bring home for dinner!!!
After this light lunch, I took a short nap in a grassy field and then went to
school ?.
At 4 o’clock, Bhah arrived in my class, to ask if I was not hungry! Of
course, I was a bit hungry, but what could I do? He didn’t bring any food,
and I had no time to go home. So I don’t really know why he came ... maybe
just to check that I was safely back from my hike alone!
When I arrived home after school, I had the nice surprise to see Gagan waiting for me to invite me again as his wife was baking bred and he had understood how much I was craving for bred! So sweet of him! So I ate bread with a potato curry, then bred with yoghurt and then bred with milk and a bit of sugar! Almost the same as usual but with bred instead of rice ... delicious! And so it was the third meal in a row without rice, what a change!!! ;-)
I will finish with a happy note, concerning the fact how people here (at least
the children!) are certainly much happier than the people in many suburbs of
big cities in France and England, even if they don’t have much. To give
you an idea, the keyholder at school, who is as well the cook, earns 5 euros
per month while he is the first one to arrive, the last one to leave, prepares
tea a few times a day and lunch for the teachers, and does many other jobs during
the day!!!
But they have love and communication. Indeed, parents and grand parents look
very tenderly after their children and families gather in the evening and talk.
No TV to spoil that, and I can tell you, children don’t need all the plastic
toys (they actually don’t have a single toy, except for some of them a
ball and a few marbles!) that our western consumer society provide to be happy
and bright!
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