It is thundering (which means the end of my connection) and I can't think of a creative title under this pressure...

Hi! We’ve been without power for almost two days, so we haven’t been able to get on the internet. It’s been killing the kids! I have also found it challenging to cook dinner and wash dishes in the almost dark.  I think that I have the dishes all clean and find out the next morning (in the light) that I wasn't even close...
Here’s what we’ve been up to…

The solar water heater in the campground is up and running – hooray!! That means hot showers. There are a few things that still need to get done to complete it, but it is working. If you don’t care about engineering details, then skip the rest of this paragraph … One thing that needs to get installed is a pressure relief device on the tank. As the water heats up in the tubes, it can get really hot, evaporate, and create a high pressure in the tank. If the pressure gets too high, then the tank will burst, which is bad… So it is important to relieve the pressure if it gets too high. The solar heaters that we looked at in Singapore all came equipped with a pressure relief valve. The ones that we bought in Nepal don’t have that. The people in Nangi were not going to put any relief devices on the tank - they were just going to put an open pipe on the top of the tank so that the water vapor could escape. The problem is that their feed tank is about 10 ft about the solar water heater tank, so I tried to explain to them that if they left the valve open between the feed tank and the solar heater tank, then the water would just drain out of the open pipe until the feed tank was empty. I said that we really needed to put a pressure relief valve on the tank. When we called the store that we bought it from, the guy told us that they did not recommend that - if it failed and the tank burst, we would be responsible. He said we had to just put on a really tall open pipe . So then I explained that in the winter the water would freeze in that pipe and then it wouldn't provide a means of pressure relief anymore. The guy from the store just said “Oh, well that’s how we do it.” I am definitely working against the "this is how we always do it" mentality. So we have agreed on a pressure relief valve on one port and a rupture/burst disc on the other port (set at a higher pressure than the valve) as a backup. The sales shop was OK with that. So now when I can get on the internet, I am trying to find burst discs and pressure relief valves that will work.

A few days ago we hiked to a village called Salizaar to see how the women there make blankets and other things out of nettle. Nettle is a stinging plant (I touched one by accident, and it really does sting a lot!) – it is amazing that they can make something nice out of the plant. They do it all by hand in their village. The hike was tough – up and over a ridge to get there, and then back up and over the ridge to get home. We were tired!! Our guide on the trip was this older man named Moti. He was a Ghorka in the British army, and he had been stationed in Singapore. He is so nice – one of our favorite people in Nangi. He doesn’t seem fierce enough to have been a Ghorka.

On our hike, Jessica got bit by a leech. It had already fallen off by the time she realized it had been there. The spots where they bite bleed like crazy. Then when we got home, I had one on my foot. It didn’t hurt, and at first it didn’t bother me. According to Jeff Corwin , you should not remove a leech. I was prepared to follow this advice, but then the kids kept giving me a running commentary on what it was doing. After awhile I couldn’t stand it anymore – it was creeping me out. So we touched it with a hot ember from the fire and that made it leave go. I’m not listening to Jeff Corwin anymore!  Those things are gross.

Here are some new phrases that we have learned…

How are you? “Ta pie lie ka stosa?”

I am fine. “Ma lie sun sigh tsu”

How old are you? “Ta pie koti barsa hunu bio?”

How old are your kids? “Ta pie ko batsa koti barsa bio?”

I need to find out how to say “I am 29, again”…

The headmaster of the school has taken to quizzing me with Nepalese questions every morning, so I am really trying to learn it.

One of our favorite pastimes is going down to Moti’s house to pick plums. They are awesome! He has tons of them, so we can pick as many as we want. Moti is also in charge of the nursery (the plant kind of nursery) here in Nangi. They grow all kinds of plants, but especially trees, that they sell to people to raise money for the school.

The kids have befriended another nice man named Jagat. He does wood carving. He makes all of the signs that are posted around the village and on the local trails. He is making signs for Brad, Ty, and Kami with their names on them – they are thrilled and visit him multiple times a day to check on the progress. He may be regretting making those signs .

Last night, a female teacher named Hemkumari made us a Nepalese dinner. She made a type of French fries that the kids loved, and she also made rice pudding that I loved, but no one else really did. It was so nice of her to come up and cook for us. She brought her niece, Tamuna, with her. Kami and Tamuna played together all night and part of today. It was cute how well they got along.

Our cooking skills are getting better. Jessica has become a pro at making bread. It’s great, and we can either eat it as-is or turn it into French Toast. Brad is trying to perfect the art of making cookies without butter. He’s doing a pretty good job of that. We are now waiting for batch number two to finish cooking.

I have not looked in a mirror for 2 weeks now – maybe that is for the best! There are no mirrors up here in our house, so I have no idea how crazy my hair looks.

Bruce left a week ago to go to work in Mumbai. He was supposed to come back to Nangi today to spend the last few days with us, but we just got an email saying that he has to go to London for an emergency meeting. What a bummer!  Oh, well - we will catch up with him in Pokhara or Kathmandu (hopefully).

I will post pictures when I have a more reliable internet connection.  It is all I can do to get a post done before the power goes out again, and I lose the connection...

Reading Kindles to pass the time.

From before: Getting the old tank down.

THREE WORDS: WE ARE CLEAN!!! :D

The night's sky.

Taken by: Jessica Schult (aka the blurry thing on the right)

We'd really appreciate if the power stayed on long enough for us to do something.

It rained for three days in a row and we didn't have internet for any of that time which has meant that we haven't been able to blog. So here's an overview of the past few days:

Thursday afternoon, my mom and I went with the 10th grade boys up to the Sacred Forest, which no one is allowed to take anything out of, and we showed them how to take pictures. They seemed to be much more creative than the girls (who took hundreds of pictures of us but very few of the surroundings). The Sacred Forest had some really neat temples but it was a long walk to get up there!

Saturday morning, at 5:45 am we were woken up by a girl. What did she want at 5:45 am you might wonder? Well, she wanted a volleyball. That’s right; we were woken up at 5:45am just so they could play volleyball. If this doesn’t scream culture difference to you then I don’t know what would.

Other than that, life here in Nangi has been going really well. The kids didn't have school on Saturday so some of the boys went down to the fish pond to catch fish to sell. The money that is raised from selling the fish goes directly to the school. It was neat to watch them catch the fish with nets and their bare hands and then throw them into baskets at the side of the pond. After watching the fish catching spectacle we went down to Amuti’s house (also known as grandfather of the nursery) and we picked tons of plums. The plums that are grown here are SO good! Bradley even likes them.

I (Jess) have learned to make bread and we've found a way to bake it using embers from the fires that we've been building ourselves. We made French toast this morning using some of the bread. Other than that nothing super eventful has been going on lately. They are almost done installing the water heater at the camp ground. The heater is up on the roof, all ready to use but the piping is not quite finished. Also, there was a minor setback due to the hail protection cover but that problem was soon fixed. That means HOT SHOWERS SOON! We desperately need the grubbiness of 7 days washed off us and you should see Tyler's feet. We'll put some pictures up soon.

About an hour ago we were showing the 10th grade students all of the pictures that they'd taken on the computer and it was great to see how interested they all were. We had close to 15 students in our tiny little house before Krishna, the math and computer teacher, offered to set up the projector in his classroom. I'd say that the photography has been a success. (:

Living in a house without a relevant door

Hi!  We have been in the beautiful village of Nangi for three days now.  We spent half a day in Kathmandu, but we were all so tired from the end of the school year that we napped through most of it.  We then spent about a day and a half in Pokhara.  We loved it there.  The kids found their second favorite pizza place in the world there, and we had a chance to do some shopping for some gear for Jessica's Australia trip.  They have lots of stores with great outdoor gear.

Our trip to Nangi from Pokhara was a full day event.  We drove for 3 hours from Pokhara to Beni.  While we were in Beni, we made lots of stops to buy tiles and other building supplies for the project.  The kids were getting so anxious to get going to the village.  We then took the jeep part of the way to the village - some of the road was a little frightening, but Jessica was a very calming influence on me when I started to freak out :-).  We walked the last part of the way.  It is a beautiful walk and we were surrounded by BEAUTIFULLLL mountains the entire time, and we could see the beautiful village across the beautiful valley from where we were (my obnoxious teenager added that part - she thinks that I say that the mountains are "so beautiful" too often).  When we first arrived, there was a huge welcoming committee.  Women gave us flower necklaces, and they made a big meal for us.  LOTS of people from the village stopped in to say hello.  In addition to our family, Mahabir (the man who started this whole volunteer program) and two men from Thailand had also just arrived.  Those men have a computer software venture, in which they design software for remote areas of the world for communication with larger city hospitals about medical issues. The food that they made was really good - chicken, potatoes, cabbage, spices, rice.  Even the kids liked it (somewhat) and ate a lot (whew!).

The next day we got started on the project.  The kids were disappointed that they didn't get to do more, but the work consisted of removing the old solar water heater that was on the roof of the shower room.  Definitely a little too dangerous.  We also had fun just playing around in the village.  The kids are enjoying all of the open space.

Yesterday, a lot got done on the project.  Again, a lot of the work is difficult for the kids to do, so they were a little frustrated.  I found it interesting just to watch how the villagers got things done.  One thing that they did was put a large plastic tank (1000L)  up onto a 5 m stone tower using a "ladder" made of two poles with some wood cross pieces nailed to it.  One guy started up on the tower and then had to move to a tree to make way for the tank.  Another guy had to get up in a tree and precariously hold on while he hooked up the inlet tubing.  We have pictures that I'll post in a day or two when I get them downloaded.  We also were in awe of how they can just fashion a tool out of what is around them.  If they need to plug up a tube while they work on it, they just cut a tree branch that is about the right size using a sickle (which they all carry), trim it down and then plug up the tube with it. They can make anything with one of those sickles.  They also tiled one wall in the shower room.  This village is definitely in need of a level - they seem to confuse the concept of things being on a straight line with things being level...  In the US or Singapore, we connect piping using fittings.  Here, the piping is plastic, and they connect it by heating up a metal plate, melting both ends of the piping, and then sticking the melted ends together.  A little easier than what we do...

Jessica and I brought up about 15 donated cameras with the idea that we would teach some kids in Nangi how to take pictures and then let them take pictures of whatever they wanted.  We thought it would be neat to see what was important and interesting to them.  Yesterday was day one of that project.  We met with about 13 10th grade girls and showed them how to work the camera that they were using.  Then we walked with them to a little stream that Krishna, one of the teachers, sent us to.  It was a long walk!  Instead to taking pictures of interesting Nepali things, they only seemed to want to take pictures of Jessica and me :-).  We have a million of those now - not exactly what we envisioned!  We are uploading their pictures to our computer, and then we are going to teach them a little bit about composition, etc.  Then we'll head back out again to take more pictures.  I am hoping that at the end, we can send their cameras home with them overnight and tell them to take pictures of what is really important to them - those should be interesting.  Although the pictures that we got initially were not exactly what we had been envisioning, we had a GREAT time with the girls.  They taught us a lot of Nepali phrases and questions.  They are tough task-masters -- they made us repeat them over and over and then they quizzed us constantly.  They also gave Jessica and I Nepali names, and now they only call us by those names.  Jessica is now known as Charna, and I am called Barsa.  Here are some Nepalese things that we have learned...
"What is your name?"  is  "Ta pie co nam keh ho?"  (I don't know how they really spell it - I'm writing it the way it sounds)
"My name is Charna" is  "Merdo nam Charna ho"
"Hello" is  "Na ma stay"  (spelled Namaste)
"I am from Singapore" is  "Ma Singapore dikhi aiko huh"  (that last huh is very grunty sounding)
The girls also made us remember all of their names and quizzed us on that.  They fed us plums that grow all over here.  We watched one of the girls catch a frog in the stream, and we all squealed when he got away and hopped toward us - squealing is apparently a reaction that spans all cultures.

We have gotten the hang of cooking meals over a single propane burner.  Lots of carbs - pancakes, pasta, biscuits, etc.  One thing that we are finding interesting is that there seems to be no time of the day before which it is inappropriate for people to come into our house.  This morning we had multiple visitors before 7 am.  People are in and out of here constantly.  They just come in whenever they want - and are always curious about what we are doing and what everything is that we have out on the tables in the house.  When the students are on their lunch break, they love to walk around the house and look in the windows at us.  The kids say they feel like they are in a zoo (funny, with my kids I have always felt like I lived in a zoo!).  I am trying to explain that we are such a novelty to the villagers and that they are just curious about us but it is still slightly strange.

P.S. Want to guess our favorite adjective? It has been used by Barsa to describe just about EVERYTHING. :-P