Wednesday 24 April 2013
Dogs and homework
Wednesday 24th April
Today was a national holiday to celebrate a politician so all the children were off school and the orphanage seemed very crowded and busy. Barbara continued with her lessons on parasites, bacteria and viruses. Truly, this was all brand new information to the older girls and the cook and the didi ( house mother). I took the mid age range boys and girls in turns. They are allowed to play together but boys can't go into girls' dormitories and vice versa and there are no communal rooms other than the dining room which is so dark you can't see what you are doing. We learned number songs like "One, two, buckle my shoe" and listing games like "I went to market and bought some ..." While I am typing this, I am having problems with adding letters etc and am now starting to panic as I let the older boys play with my iPad this morning and am wondering whether they have jiggered it for me. They get very excited and are all jabbing at it at once.
Did I mention the dog? One of the girls has brought a puppy home. He looks about 12 weeks old and is very friendly. It's strange to see how the children react to it. They all watch it and seem to like it but no one picks it up and some are perhaps a little afraid of it as they run away if it approaches. There are lots of stray dogs in the street and apart from the colour they all look pretty much the same. There are no pugs, spaniels, labradors etc. The only difference is that some have upright, curly tails, a la Frank, and some have straight horizontal tails. They lie sleeping on their sides everywhere but they do wag their tails if you speak to them. Back to the puppy at the orphanage. They have named him Tyson and he is black and white but now has an orange tail and neck where one of the boys painted him!
This afternoon, we had another lesson in Nepali and learned some useful phrases which I could have done with yesterday on the taxi ride, eg tapai bujhdina. Occed kahaa chha? I don't understand. Where is the orphanage? However I'm sure it will come in handy another time, especially I don't understand.
I had a long chat with a lady who comes in several times a week. She runs a beauty parlour round the corner from the orphanage and was put in touch with it through a volunteer last year who went in for a massage. Now she and her husband are regular visitors. She told me that she checks the children's general health because when she started visiting they were dirty and had lice. On the first day we arrived, we saw her poking a cotton bud down a boy's ear to burst a boil. He was in agony. There were no painkillers or antibiotics for him. Those in the clinic were out of date. Her husband comes in between 6am and 8am to help the older ones with their home work. One of the older girls asked me to help her today. She had to write about the Wright Brothers in English. There is no Internet in the orphanage so I googled it when I got back . But I am really ashamed that apart from knowing they were the first to fly, I really didn't know much about them.
My photos today are of the street in front of the orphanage.
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