Closing Ceremonies

From the official NELTA closing ceremony of our program. Many speeches from all of us. 

Pictures from the closing ceremony of my school on my last day teaching one week later:

Scenes From These Last Days

On my last day, the school staff discusses the election of an education representative.

Scenes from my last day of school.

Students returning from their tiffin/lunch break

The vendors line up at the school entrance

A lot of work in the fields owned by my household at the start of the monsoon season

In the valley by my school

Bamboo poles placed in the fields  of my house to grow vegetables. They were originally about thirty feet long and some of the heavier things I've had to carry up hills in quite some time (I volunteered so that the family would not think I was too lazy for waking up at noon). 

Base of the bamboo grove at my school, still charred from when there was a fire across the whole cliffside by my school a few months ago. I organized a bucket brigade. 

I started playing a game of karom on my way home after school

In Patan on the way up to the Lazimpat flat, the streets are flooded

Comic Strips in the Classroom

For a recent school assignment, I took Garfield comics like the one below:

(Pls don't sue JD - It is because I enjoyed your work so much growing up that I use it now for educational purposes)

I digitally removed the speech bubbles and then photocopied them for my classes and told them to fill in the blanks with anything they liked. The students took that visual stimulus and came up with some very interesting and varied narratives...

Garfield cavalierly comments upon Jon's creeping insanity

Jon's callous unconcern for Garfield's well-being

A reversal of Garfield's defining character trait or a medical problem?

Fashion statement

It was all a hallucination!!!

Before I presented this lesson, I was told by teachers that it might not work because students are not used to writing completely original sentences. I was a little worried about it too, but in the end the students excelled at this project. The idea for it came from the webcomic Hark, A Vagrant. A friend of the author did something very similar. I think this is the sort of creative activity that is very useful for classes with several students that have very different levels of English ability. 

In the same vein of absurdist Garfield humor, I would also recommend Garfield Minus Garfield. 

Graffiti Politic

The streets are a political forum. This is the ubiquitous graffiti of Nepal, long messages that stretch along the walls; messages of the parties, slogans and notices for events and dates. I've seen people carefully painting Devanagari on the walls, usually at night, stenciling the straight lines and carefully painting the characters. 

In 1992, a political analyst named R. Andrew Nickson noted similarities between Nepal's situation and the situation in Peru in the late 1970s. He correctly predicted the rise of the Maoist insurgency and the People's War four years before it began. One of the pieces of evidence presented in his article "Democratisation and the Growth of Communism in Nepal: A Peruvian Scenario in the Making?" was a comparison of political graffiti:

"In April 1978, a tortuous political slogan, over 50 metres in length, had appeared overnight beside the zarcón, the urban motorway which links the Peruvian capital of Lima with the fashionable coastal suburb of Miraflores. Denouncing 'United States imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism, and Chinese revisionism', and praising 'the shining path of Peruvian socialism under José Carlos Mariategui', it provoked the amusement of commuters and political analysts alike... By 1992, just 12 years later, Peru was in a state of undeclared civil war...

In October 1990, a 50-metre long political slogan appeared on the wall outside the luxury Himalayan Hotel in Patan [Kathmandu Valley]. The text, which bore many similarities with the Peruvian one of 1978, read 'Down with local feudalism, Indian expansionism, American expansionism, Russian social imperialism, Chinese revisionism and all kinds of reactionism!' Like its erstwhile Peruvian counterpart, 12 years earlier, its appearance was treated with a mixture of contempt and derision by local political analysts." 

So it is probably a good idea to read the writing on the walls. It would be a very interesting project to catalogue the development of political slogans and graffiti. I find the slogans difficult to read because of all of the political vocabulary, so I took a picture of two slogans at random and took a whack at translating them (I'd welcome improvements):

सैनिक सॅयन्त्र भित्रको लोन-रोन प्रवृति मुर्दावाद । सर्वहार क्रान्तिकारी पाट्री 

sainik sanyantra bhitrako lon-ron pravriti murdabad - sarbahara krantikari patri

"Down with Lon-Nol Behavior in the Federal Army! - Revolutionary Proletarian Party"

This was followed by the sickle and star. As Prime Minister, Lon Nol overthrew King Sinahouk and became the President of the short-lived Republic of Cambodia before the communist takeover. I think the phrases murdabad/jindabad correspond to English "Down with...!"/"Long live...!" Jindabad means "lifepath" or "lifeism," while murdabad means "deathpath" or "deathism."

सॅविधान सभाको म्याद थाप्न पाईदैन । नेशनल डेमोक्रेाटक एलायन्स ।

sambidhan sabhako myad thapna paindaina - neshonal democratak elayans

"Constitution Deadline Cannot be Extended - National Democratic Alliance"

This one was timely a few weeks ago when the deadline for the Constituent Assembly ran out for the second time with no consensus on a constitution. For two weeks the city was shut down almost every day because of strikes. Most of the them were scheduled, but they would often fall on unpredictable days and it was almost impossible to teach. There was a massive protest the night of deadline, and at the 11th hour the party members agreed to compromise and extend the the Assembly for three months. One of the provisions was that Prime Minister Jhala Nath Khanal would have to step down at a suitable time.

Just the other day Prime Minister Jala Nath Khanal spoke at the 50th Anniversary of the Fulbright Program. 

The signature on the slogan above is interesting because "National Democratic Alliance" is rendered phonetically in English, as opposed to the Nepali rendering of the Communist party name. Also, there is an interesting typo in the word 'democratic': (डेमोक्रेाटक) - the third syllable has two different vowel symbols on it - both 'cra' and 'cre.' This suggests that the sign writer was unsure if the English word should be pronounced 'democratak' or 'democretak.' 

Politics!

I came across Nickson's article in Understanding the Maoist Movement of Nepal, edited by Deepak Thapa, a very interesting read. I also recently saw the documentary "Sari Soldiers," a film that is still quite controversial in Nepal because of its depiction of some highly-publicized accounts of the human rights abuses perpetrated by both the Maoists and the Royal Police. The film follows female soldiers, guerillas, and activists during King Gyanendra's takeover of the government and the intensification of the Maoist insurgency. 

Graffiti Art

I've mentioned graffiti in Kathmandu a couple times before, but really only in the context of trying to figure out the meaning of Prem Bad (see my blog posts here, here, and here):

Manokranti ('Inner Ascension'), with the upside-down unity symbol, is a less-common variant of Prem Bad/Lovism.

Just recently, though, I've been seeing a lot more Western-style, artistic graffiti:

I believe this is north of Rani Pokhari.

This is near the entrance to Thamel. Same artist?

Long political messages along the sides of a wall are not unusual in Kathmandu. They're everywhere, in every city in Nepal. I hope to make my next blog post on that phenomenon. But this one struck me a little differently because of the giant block letters, and because it was in English.

"MUMMY TOLD ME NOT TO DO POLITICS"

Also there's a little self-portrait of the artist at the end.

"Trapped in the Terai" and "The Living Goddess' Mother"

My good friend and fellow Fulbrighter Simon runs the renowned blog Nepali Time. He has written about a few of our adventures that I haven't had a chance to post on this blog, and so I thought people might be interested to read about our time stuck in Bardia National Park during the strike and our visit to the house of the Patan Kumari:


Trapped in the Terai


It's not everyday you meet a living goddess (and her mother)