Thanks to a project by Rotary Club Kantipur, with financial support coming from Spain coordinated by Juan José Rodriguez, a multisports court has been built in Bhimphedi village.

Everybody was talking about it some time ago, cause it has been a long process: first its planning, then its construction process. And now it is finally completed, and everybody can play whatever they like: basketball, football, volleyball, badminton …

Although many villagers were already using the court some days ago, the official opening will be held on April 25th. The project promoters are coming to Bhimphedi from Madrid and Kathmandu, along with the sports minister and other personalities from the country. So, on April 25 a big event will take place in the village of Bhimphedi!

About one month ago, event organizers asked Laura and me to organise an exhibition basketball match with the children in our home and the children in the village. So, this month we really had to work hard, because children do not forgive any single training!

Every afternoon from 4h to 6h, and some days even in morning time from 6:30 to 8am, we had to go to the sports court and teach them how to play basketball. And most of the times we had to stop them, otherwise they would have kept on playing on and on, until midnight!

Both boys and girls have learned to play very quickly and plus, promoters offered us team t-shirts and sports shoes for the two teams, which we delivered on the events day. They all looked like real teams!! It was great to see how good they played while wearing sports shoes, after having trained wearing flip-flops! (Almost everyone in Nepal wears flip-flops, no matter it is summer, winter, rainy, must climb a mountain, or must work at construction sites). Ram Raj, the star in one of the teams, achieved to reverse the score in favor of the orange team, while executing his attack movements very well, but still having to count his steps loud, cause he had only been doing them for one week: “One, two, toss!”

After the five minutes basketball game, the speeches came. Two hours of speeches where everyone was getting infinitely bored… Finally they decided it was enough and let the local kids do some dances, “but do it quick, quick, it’s about to rain!,” master of ceremonies said…

But it’s not the rain what closes the event. The ground begins to shake… it’s an earthquake! We look at the village and we see many town houses starting to collapse, everywhere. And, far in the mountains, where many detached houses used to be, we can only see some smoke plumes.
After a long minute, the ground seems to be still again; but we are not looking at it the same way we did before: everybody is scared. Nobody had experienced an earthquake like this before… Everybody is very concerned about the consequences this quake might have had, and also to know whether it is stopped or it will have more afterquakes. We all head to the village very quickly…
On April 25 there has been a big event in the village of Bhimphedi! Although it was totally different event than what we all expected …
If you want to know what happened the next hours and days after the quake, read the next post about the earthquake.