Here are the kids initial thoughts and observations on Nepal…  This is a LONG OVERDUE post, and I hope to include more of their words in the upcoming posts.  Here, I’ve included a piece that each of them wrote soon after we arrived.  In addition, I interviewed them asking questions like: Tell me about Nepal ; What do you like about school ; Tell me about some of the work you’ve done at school ; What do you miss from home ; What are the names of your classmates…  This is completely unedited — all their words!  I added a bit in brackets when explanation was helpful.

Please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section!  I will share it with the children 🙂

Sumanth:

Writing (late April): I laaic Nepal. On the rods in nepal thar is dust. today i am going to start sccool. My school is cold the british scool. my clas is cald fawndashun. the end. Translation: I like Nepal. On the roads in Nepal, there is dust. Today I am going to start school. My school is called The British School (TBS). My class is called Foundation. The End.

Interview (mid June): These are the things that I really like about Nepal. I like getting books from the book stores in Nepal, and I like going to birthdays at Moksh [this is a FUN place with several businesses – restaurant, book store, music school, yoga studio, art studio, cycle shop, rock climbing wall, and coffee shop] and going to Swayambhu. In Swayanbbhu I like the monkeys and I like the beautiful view when you get up the stairs and go to that golden thing. Some of my favorite things about British School are that Dr Moore [school principal] said we can play inside a field that the workers were making and I’m very excited that the workers are making my class a new playground and I like that I have an old big playground that I get to play in.

I like getting house points. Getting a house point is like doing something good and getting a house point. Like you can write all of the colors that you know on the white board or write how high you can write from zero on the while board or A B Cs all the way to Zed. [There are 4 houses at TBS: Makalu, Dhaulagiri, Kanchenjunga, Annapurna.  All children are placed within a house and various school competitions occur between Houses.]

I am learning all about mini beasts at school and mini-beasts are bugs. Even we have done research about them, even we have maked our own information about mini-beasts. We have learned about wasps, bees, spiders, ladybugs, leeches, all kinds, and caterpillars.

The kids in my class are Miles, Ollie, Prathista, Nadeen, Phorpa, Jhumpai, Samaira, Tanuska, Nimarose, Freya, Poppy, Norzen, Ariya and Yuvaan.

Sajjan:

Writing (late April): My thoughts about Nepal. Nepal roads are not as dusty as India at all. Nepal has much more variety of trees than North Carolina. The water from the tap you can’t drink. You will get sick if you drink tap water. You have to drink filtered water or bottled water to not get sick. The ground is dusty so you have to wash your feet before you go to bed. There is no traffic lights so the road is loud. The road is loud from all the beeping. We only have 12 hours of electricity per day.

Interview (mid June): I like British School because it is almost the same as Heartwood [Montessori school the kids attended from 2010-2013] and schools in North Carolina. The similarities are that in both schools they speak English. Both schools I like. I like British School because even though we are in Nepal, we don’t have to speak Nepali in the school.

I like Nepal because we can walk closely to our school, we don’t have to bike or drive or ride a car. And I like my school because everyone is nice to me. I enjoy playing football on the football field. And I enjoy football club. Football club is on Thursday. I like tennis club and craft club and all my clubs!

We were learning about nature and we all stood in a circle and we got into pairs of two and we each got a thing. Like we could get water, the sun, the trees, the birds, some part of nature. And then there was this big ball of yarn. The yarn started with the sun and then the tree needed the sun and then the sun passed the yarn to the tree. And we kept passing the yarn. The tree passed the yarn to the plants. And then the plants passed the yarn to the soil and then the soil passed it to the tiny little animals and the tiny little animals passed it to the water and then the water passed it to everybody again. And that’s how we feel that nature is all connected but climate change is destroying it so we have to make it better.

I miss from NC the fun parks and the water parks like Great Wolf Lodge. And I like getting books from the book store, but what I don’t like about Nepal is that there is no library so we just have to get books from the book store. And I don’t miss my house because we are going to get another house!

The kids in my class are Yulo, William, Shaurya, Ishat, Max, Anna, Iona, Keito, Honami, Hanon, Emily, Jack, Nitesh, Musa, Fayaz, Aayan, Seoyoon, Kirsten and Sangye.

Janani:

Writing (late April): Nepal is very cool! It is very different from USA. One big difference is that there is two power-outs a day. Power-outs are when there is no power so the refrigerator and the lights don’t work. But in our house, there are windows on the roof so in the daytime, we get lots of light. It is so awesome when everything is dark! Another small difference is grocery stores. Most grocery stores in Nepal are very small but they can fit lots of things in it. Also the people in Nepal pay with Nepali Rupees instead of dollars. Nepal is so different from the USA.

Interview (mid June): Some things that I like about Nepal is that our house isn’t that big but we can have so much things in it and it is easier than living in a big house. And at school, I go to the British School and it is really fun because we do lots and lots of different things very often. And we have breaks very often and we do fun things very often. And just last week, I went to a soccer game to play against another school and it was really fun! We do projects, big projects, so my teacher gives us the projects after half-term and we have until the end of term to do them. And for this term, we’re going to do three big projects about WW2 and I am going to make a collage on a picture of WW2, and I’m going to make a fact file about kids in WW2 and I’m also going to make a board game that involves facts of WW2.

At Bristish School, we have a lot of unique assignments. In English we watched a film with no words and it was very interesting and it had music. Then we were supposed to make our own film that only used music, no talking, and the film had to use the music that the film that we watched, that one use. So we had to create a film and act it out and make a video of it and it was really cool and it make us think a lot. Math is not that unique. And I don’t really remember the math assignments…

In Nepal there’s lots of differences than North Carolina. We have to clean lots of things like body parts and things that we buy before we eat them or play with them or do anything with them. For example, when we come home we have to wash our feet unlike North Carolina because it is so dusty. And I’ve noticed that there’s much less buildings than NC. Well, like the buildings, there are lots of buildings but not very much of them are very big. And they all seem to be made out of the same things – bricks. And they don’t look very new, they all look so old. And the weather is very hot, not like NC [remembering how NC felt in April when we left!!].

There are lots of things that I miss from NC. The thing that I miss the most is all of my friends and also I miss how clean it was and that we could just like drink any water, like from the tap or whatever and that we didn’t have to wash our feet when we came in from school. Well, one thing that I don’t miss that much is our car because I feel so good when we are biking and walking everywhere because we don’t like use so much pollution, I mean make so much pollution. It’s really fun biking and walking, it is much more fun than sitting in a car doing nothing. I kind of miss school because there is not so much British accent and people that don’t understand me or I don’t understand them because of their accent and because the words the words that they use like loo, trousers, trainers [toilet, pants, sneakers] and all that!

The people in my class are Yashasvi, Sana, Mina, Yuriko, Harira, Soyun, Jini, Miyu, Chinyue, Prama, Charlotte, Isabella, Amodini, Shloka, Samir, Dan, Daniel, Dorjay, Rosheen, Karou, Kyoungmin, Letti.