The villages – part 2
Our days of rest at Yangri included lots of play with the local kids. Some, we learned, go to school way back up at Gangkharka, others at the ‘local’ school 45 minutes walk away, others across the river and up the hill and hour to the ‘good’ school at Botang, and still others in Kathmandu. Schooling in Nepal is not easy!
At the river in Yangri
Bibi and friends
A couple days later, it was uphill again, to Bolgaon, with it’s spectacular mountain views and lively village center. Our host, Pimsen Lama, is the father of the Gangkharka school’s yak keeper. His young Indian bartender nephew, Raman, was also there, and we enjoyed hours of fun talk discussing the modern versus traditional perspectives of the generations!
One of Ranu's many relatives in Yangri
Friendly Shamani women of Simpani
On again, through Simpani, to Baruwa. Here there’s a brand new ‘road’ cut into the mountainside (not yet vehicle-ready), and we hear that it’s scheduled to reach Bolgaon next year. Our staff race back and forth, running the horses, thrilled for the chance to test their riding skills. Electricity is here, too. The result? The evenings, which had been a time of silence and rest in the previous villages, is filled here with television, radio, and loud music from nearly every house. Welcome back to ‘civilization’! The town also boasts a government health post, and Ina enjoyed the chance to work for a day with the staff there, making plans for our own medical work in the other villages.
Maya's grandmother in Baruwa
A visit to the local school completed our stay in pretty Baruwa, before our final decent to Tipani and Melamchi Bazaar, and the long jeep ride back to Kathmendu, interrupted by one bad traffic jam behind a bus that had slid partway off the road in the mud, and the astonishingly bad late-evening traffic jams of Kathmendu.
Writing this four days later, the whole trek seems far off now, somehow magical. The city and village lives are so hard to reconcile with each other! Like oil and water.
