Lokta Gift Bag Information

The gift bags that we are helping make and sell are made in the remote village of Nangi, Nepal, which is located west of the Annapurna Mountains. The bags are made of lokta paper, which is very strong, yet very soft. Lokta is a plant that grows throughout the area. The paper is made from the bark of the plant, and it is harvested in such a way that the plant is able to regenerate. So these bags are eco-friendly, and they are so durable that they can be used over and over.

Our family goes to Nangi every year to do volunteer projects with the Himanchal Education Foundation. The goal of this foundation is to support Himanchal High School in Nangi, a school that is a prototype for community-based educational development in rural areas. Many students who attend this school come from villages that are many hours away. These students live at the school during the week and then walk home on the weekends.

During our first trip to Nangi, we saw the village women making beautiful paper, but they did not have a good means of selling the paper. I (Jessica) am a student, and I love art. With the input of others, I decided that gift bags made from their paper would be beautiful. So I learned how to make bags of various sizes, and the following year I taught the women how to make the bags. The women in the village do the entire paper-making process themselves - everything from harvesting the lokta to making the bags. 

This project provides the women from Nangi with additional income, which they use to send their children to school and to buy nutritious food. After paying the women for the bags, all of the additional proceeds from the sale of these bags will go toward building safer housing for the high school students who live at the school.

If you haven't already, you should like our Facebook site: http://www.facebook.com/NepalLoktaGiftBags
If you wish to purchase some of these wonderful bags visit our etsy site: http://www.etsy.com/shop/NepalGiftBags

The trip back from Nangi...

Our trip from Nangi to Pokhara was a little more eventful then I would have liked.  Luckily, none of those events directly affected us - we were safe, but the trip took a really long time and highlighted many cultural differences...

The first part of the trip involves hiking from Nangi down to Beni.  It is a 4 - 5 hour hike that includes an elevation change of about 1500 m, which is pretty tough on the legs and the knees.  The end of this hike includes the "Stairs of Death", which are more than 2000 (I think) stairs that end down in Beni.  The "Death" part is not because it is particularly dangerous - just a tough way to end a long hike, and it always seems like the sun comes out just in time for this part.  It is also a little embarrassing to be passed by a little, frail-looking woman in flip-flops who is carrying a heavy basket of something to take down to Beni...  Not that that has happened to me, of course :-)  Anyway, we made it through this part tired and sweaty, but without any issues.

The next part of the trip involves taking a van from Beni to Pokhara.  This is like renting a taxi - we pay for it.  This used to be a 3 hour drive, but they have paved the road into Beni (most of it anyway), and so now it only takes about 2.5.  So we get down from our hike and start to load the seven of us into the van.  The van has four rows of seats, so we are thinking that this is awesome because we can spread out.  Then the driver tells us that we shouldn't sit in the back row of seats.  Hard to fully understand the reasoning, but something about it being too bumpy.  So we shrug and squish into the first three rows.  But there are a few bags on the back seat that don't belong to us - hmmmm....  So just as we are about to leave, the driver says to us that we are also going to take his sister and another woman with us to Pokhara, and they are going to sit in the back seat.  This leaves us feeling like he was a little sneaky, so at first we say no, but then we figure that we should go with it and let them come along.  Whatever...

So as we are messing around with the "are they coming or not" decision, a huge truck tries to squish past us on the road where we are parked, and it takes the side-view mirror right off of our van.  So our driver has to get out, run after the truck, and get him to stop.  So they don't exchange insurance info like we would do.  Instead, we have to wait and wait while the truck driver gets his boss - who has to come down to the van to see what happened.  Then the boss and our van driver "discuss" what happened and apparently negotiate a settlement.  This draws a crowd of people who all stand and watch the negotiations, while we roast inside the van.  In the end, some amount of money changes hands (we couldn't tell how much, but it only involved 2 bills), and off we went...

... for about 15 minutes.  Then we get to this one-lane bridge, and there is a huge back-up.  So when I say bridge, you probably think of something well-constructed with guard-rails, etc.  No.  The foundation is steel and concrete, but then there are just boards laid across it.  Not nailed in, no guardrail.  Every time we cross this bridge, I close my eyes.  Since there is a back-up, we get out of the van to see what is going on.  Not sure if the pics below will do it justice, but when we get up to the front of the line of cars, we can see a big group of people gathered around watching because a very large truck is about to cross the bridge.  Before it crosses the bridge, though, people are replacing boards on the bridge and wedging wooden blocks in to hold things in place.  Then these little, skinny men are bouncing on the boards to test their strength to see how they will hold up when a big truck drives over it :-)  After lots of mucking around, the truck takes a running start to get across it.  The man next to me says "Very dangerous" in broken English.  You think?  I would not have wanted to be that truck driver.  I seriously contemplated walking across the bridge and meeting our van on the other side, but everyone else made fun of me so I didn't.  In the end, the truck made it across safely, and so did we.

So we drove on for another 15 minutes, and then we got stuck in the mud.  It is monsoon, so it rains like crazy - especially at night.  The mud was in one of the few spots on the road that was not paved.  I am not sure why, when you pave a road, you would leave a stretch unpaved in the middle of the paved part, but I have stopped asking those questions...  But this was where the mud was, and we got stuck.  Our driver had the foresight to bring two friends who he introduced in the beginning of the ride as the "pushers in case we get stuck in the mud".  So here was their chance - they jumped out and pushed.  It took quite a few attempts, and we ended up with quite a crowd gathered to watch.  Everyone had advice as to how to get out.  Meanwhile, tractors and trucks are passing us and nearly sliding into us, but since we were already missing the driver's side mirror, we didn't have to worry about that getting hit.  After lots of rocking back and forth, etc, we were finally free.  Then we just had to wait for the guys to wash off in the river.

So then the drive is uneventful for a long time.  I am watching the clock and the "mile posts" to Pokhara.  I am estimating that we only have about 15 km left to go - we'll be there in about 20 minutes. Hooray!  At this point, it is probably about 7 pm.  We usually get back to Pokhara between 4 and 5 pm.  We didn't eat lunch, and we are all hungry, tired, and smelly.  Toward the end of the trip, near Pokhara, the road flattens out and you drive through rice fields with houses/villages on the sides of the road.  There are no sidewalks - the rice paddies come right up to the edge of the road - and so everyone and everything (people, cows, oxen, dogs, etc) walk along the side of the road.  As we are driving through this part, our driver suddenly stops behind another stopped vehicle in front of us and goes running out of the van.  We all look at each other in bewilderment.  What is he doing?  Motorcycles are passing us. We are tired and hungry and just want to get there.  Finally, he comes back and says that there is an accident up ahead.  Everyone gets out of the van and joins all of the other people to go up and check it out.  Apparently, a driver was speeding through this part of the road, hit a young child, spun out of control and ended up with his car flipped upside down in a rice paddy on the side of the road.  By the time we got there, the child and the driver had been taken to the hospital.  We heard that the child was killed, which was heartbreaking.  The mother was working in the rice fields, and the father was in Qatar working.  The grandmother was watching the child, and they were just walking down the road.  After Kami having been hit by the car in November, the situation really made me sad.  At this point, though, the cultural differences became very noticeable.  In the US or here in Singapore, if this had happened, the police would arrive, they would help the injured and then move everything to the side of the road so that cars that were not involved could continue to pass.  This was much different.  The entire accident was off of the road, but someone had put large stones across the road so that traffic was stopped.  Even after the ambulance had left and there was no reason to block the road, they wouldn't move the stones.  It was raining and getting dark.  There was a huge back-up of cars.  But no one seemed inclined to open the road back up.  After awhile, a mob of local people started to form.  When motorcycles started to try to drive through, the people grabbed onto them and stopped them.  I am not sure how long we waited, but it was probably about 2 hours.  We were a little nervous, but we were well back from the mob and so we weren't too concerned.  It was just hard to understand (for us) why the police didn't show up, take control, and open it all back up.  After a really long time, some Caucasian backpackers walked past us up toward the accident and mob.  I think that they were planning on trying to walk through it and get a different means of transport on the other side.  We were actually kind of worried for them.  Luckily, just after they passed us, the road was opened up and they turned around.  As we drove past where the mob had been, there were lots of Nepalese police in riot gear - chest protectors, shields, etc standing there.  Just so different than what we are used to.

We finally made it to Pokhara sometime after 9 pm.  Whew...

Gift Bags

Jessica's gift bag idea is really taking off.  She sold a lot during Food Fest and County Fair at SAS.  The wine bags were in the biggest demand, so we asked the women to make 1000 wine bags for us.  They made the most beautifully colored paper, so the bags look really nice.  I don't have very many pictures of the bags, but this one shows the paper that they made for the bags:

It was a little more problematic to get 1000 gift bags back to Singapore then we had anticipated.  They took up about 3 suitcases worth of space.  Bruce took one big bag of them with him to Mumbai for work (he flew straight to Mumbai, worked for the week, and then flew home to Singapore).  Both the Nepalese government and the Indian government gave him a hard time about taking that many bags into/out of their countries.  He was able to talk his way out of the whole thing, so the bags all eventually made it to Singapore safely.

Composting toilets

Bet you've never given too much thought to toilet design...  Well, the one thing that Mohare has in short supply (except in the monsoon season) is water.  Flush toilets take a lot of water.  So our other project was to install a composting toilet.  Basic concept is that every time you go, you add some extra organic matter (wood chips, or something like that) into the chamber.  Then after about a year of use, that chamber gets sealed, and good bacteria turns it all into compost.  While that is happening, you move the toilet over a second chamber and use that, and then just keep switching off each year.  Composting toilets don't use any water, don't generate any hazardous waste that has to be disposed of, and wind up with compost material.  What's not to like about them?

So when we got there, they had four toilets already installed - two at the lodge and two outside the dining building - all of which required water.  Our original plan was to build a totally new (small) building to house the composting toilets.  But after looking at all of the options, we figured out that the best thing to do was to use the two existing bathrooms that are attached to the outside of the dining building as the chambers and make a bathroom inside on the second floor of the building above those chambers.

This was a bit "out-of-the-box", and it was initially met with some skepticism.  But after we talked everyone through it, they were into it.  We didn't have all of the wood that we needed, so we got it started, and they will have to finish it for us.  Since the Home Depot is kind of far away (like, on another continent), the Nepalese people make their own wood planks by cutting down trees and sawing the trees into boards.  So they will have to do a bunch of that to finish it up.  But it is nice and warm up on the second floor, and I think that having a nice warm bathroom is way better than having to go out into the cold...


Here is a picture of the steps that Jess, Alex, and Bruce built to go upstairs:

And one of Jess standing on their stairs:

Here's what the outside of the building looks like.  The doors on the left go into the existing bathrooms. So the way it was set up when we got there is that trekkers had to go out of the dining area from the door on the far right, and then go into the bathrooms from the outside.  Now they can stay warm and dry inside the whole time.

One of the first things that had to get done is that the wall between the two existing bathrooms had to get knocked down.  My kids and Alex enthusiastically did that part.  They are very good at destruction...  It was hard to get a picture of it, but this one shows Brad and Jess checking out what had to happen.  The toilet will go inside the building on the second floor above these existing bathrooms.

Jessica and Alex drilling a hole in the wood using an old-fashioned hand drill.

We ran out of PVC elbows and Ts, so they cut the pipes at a 45o angle and "stitched" it together with wire to make the exhaust pipe.  It ended up looking like a giraffe.

This picture is a little hard to figure out, but it was taken from the second floor of the building - looking down into what will become the chambers.  The man is sealing the chamber with concrete.

Here's how the concrete got up to Mohare...  Some farmers with horses put the concrete on the horses, and then they hike up the mountain.  After they get it up to Mohare, then guys put it in baskets on their backs with a strap over their forehead, and they carry it up to where we needed it.

A broader view of the dining area:

Water Collection

While we were in Mohare, we put in a water collection system - gutters and 10,000 L of storage capacity.

All of the stuff for the projects had to be carried by porters from Nangi up to Mohare. I could barely carry me up to Mohare - they carried pipe, tanks, concrete, etc. it was amazing to watch.

We used PVC pipe as gutters. Here is a picture of the kids cutting the pipe for gutters:

Here is the back of the eating area at the beginning of the project...

Digging a trench for the pipe. This part was a bummer!

We got a water purifier called MIOX mostly donated to us. It takes salt water and converts it into oxidants that kill bacteria and viruses in the water. This way, hikers can drink the water without worrying, and the cook doesn't have to boil so much water. Here's me teaching Tek and Kim (not sure how he spells his name) how to use it...

Here's the installed system. They will fix up the area a little more, but it's basically done. Monsoon had started while we were there. In one night we collected about 5,000L of water, so they'll have no problem filling up tanks. As they get more hikers, they can add more capacity by adding more tanks...

Mohare

After spending a few days in Nangi, we did the 5.5 hr, 1100 m elevation change hike up to Mohare. I didn't remember the hike being too tough, but I'm getting old, and this year it felt much harder :-)

Mohare is on a ridge at 3300 m elevation, and when the sky is clear, there are amazing views of mountains - Fishtail, Annapurna South, Annapurna I, Dhaulagiri, and others - at least 2 of the top ten tallest mountains in the world. Here's the view in one direction...

And the view in another direction...

In Mohare, they crossbreed cows and yaks. The result is a dzo. We had fresh dzo milk for breakfast a few times -yum! I think that this one is a yak..

I think this is a mom and baby dzo...

Mohare has a lodge that can sleep 20 people and a cozy eating area. It is part of a hiking trail that goes thru Nangi, too. So the money that is raised from the hikers is used for the school in Nangi. Here's a picture of a room in the lodge:

And here is what the eating area looks like. There is a wood burning stove in the middle, and so it is really warm and comfortable, especially when it is cold and rainy outside.

The outside of the dining building...

Here is a view of the lodge from up by the eating area...

These are some of the guys who we worked with:

While we were in Mohare, we worked on 2 projects... The first was for a water collection system and the second was for a composting toilet. Both of these were important because there isn't a water source at Mohare.

Solar Bulbs

So i had great intentions of updating this blog a little each day, but I never seemed to be able to get my hands on an ipad while we were up there. So this is all posted after the fact. And then I thought that it would be easy to put photos that I took with the iPad into the blog that I was writing using the iPad - but I was soooo wrong. So there has been a lot of searching, a steep learning curve, and a few apps downloaded in the attempt to get this to work. This is my first attempt, so we'll see how it goes....

The first project that we worked on in Nangi was installing solar bulbs, which Brad and I learned to do in Manila. Here are pics of the teachers learning to make the bulbs:

After making the bulbs, we let them dry overnight and then installed four of them to start. Here are some installation pics:

This is Brad showing Chandra how to fill them. We used half water and half cheap vodka to keep the bottles from freezing in the winter. We also added a little bleach to keep it clear.

That's the vodka... The villagers also make something called Raksi - it's basically a homemade millet (grain) alcohol, and they said that they might use that instead of vodka.

Climbing up on the roof is a little sketchy...

The first one went into the teachers' bathroom. Even on a cloudy day it lit the small room up.

The next one went into a girls' student hut. The picture above shows the bulb just to the right of the beam after it is installed.

Here is Chandra installing one on a boys' hut. He had the hang of it by the end of the day, so now he can do more and teach some students how to do it.

The last bulb went into a storeroom roof, but I didn't get any pics of that one.