Across the center there are all kinds of trees: blue and red mimosas, mangos, lychees, lemon, pomegranate, a kind of apples / pears (“aru” and “naspati”), banana… The easiest way to know when a picture was takes is looking what fruit the kids are eating. Now it’s time for the grapefruit.
Arati with a grapefruit, they love it with salt and chili.Kul peeling a grapefruit.Basu showing another function for the trees.
The third terrace where we are planting potatoes and burning the non-organic waste, there is still some space to use. In that land there are some small lemon and banana trees planted last summer that Ricardo, a super-volunteer from the Basque country who has been working to improve the kitchen-garden for the last three summers. We will protect them better because we have one of the walls of the center has to be rebuilt, so some goats use to come in to eat everything they find. But we will fix it!
With the kids we decided that we would put more trees to get more fruit in a few years. The surprise was that one day, when we came back from a trip to Hetauda, we found a dozen brick circles protecting the newly planted mango and “Aru” trees. Next to the cercles two kids with a proud smile from ear to ear: D: D
One of the jewels of the center is its magnificent kitchen-garden. In total is about 5,000 square meters, divided into four different terraces. In the two higher terraces (in the south) all kinds of vegetables grow. These vegetables we eat with the two daily plates of rice. Now, in these two areas of the kitchen-garden, we can find ginger, cabbage, parsley, spinach, pumkin, garlic…
Two of the kids of the center pretending that they are working meanwhile I take the picture.Santamaya planting more spinach.
Now is the time to grab the onion seedlings and plant them, but our seedlings have not grown enough yet, so we buy some in Hetauda and plant them. Every step very manual…
Santamaya, Beli and Edu starting the Onion planting.
Once we have planted all the onions I’m exhausted, but the three “didis” of the center don’t think it’s enough… so next time we go to Hetauda we will have to buy many more seedlings of onions, three times more than last time, to finish filling the piece of land.
To be able to update this blog and have good communication with the office of Amics del Nepal Kathmandu and Barcelona, we decided to get a phone line and Internet in the Children’s Home. This sounds to me like a new adventure!
Ram (the super-cook), Papu, Edu and Daniel (myself) go to Hetauda with infinit determination. First minute in Nepal Telecom and we realize we have done a big mistake, on Sundays (not holiday in Nepal, only Saturdays) the Internet office close at two. We have to go fast! Let’s see…
First lead to the office number 10. We fill a form, give a photocopy of Nepali ID, passport photograph, fingerprints… and they tell us to go to the office number 9, then the office number 15, then 11, then to pay in the counter, and come back to the office number 10. Easy? Well, this was only the begining… After visiting 6 or 7 different offices 4 or 5 times, they tell us it’s enough for today. In five days they will call us and then we will have to go Hetauda again to buy telephone cable, a phone set, a router and pay the first month internet service. Then the technicians will come with us to Bhimphedi to make the installation. Sounds relatively simple… we will see…
Nepali queue.In fact it’s quite entertaining.Office number 15. You can read in Nepali alphabet: “out side” ¿?On one of these piles will come our application…
Hetauda is about 20 km south of Bhimphedi. Bhimphedi is still in the mountains, but Hetauda is already at the entrance to the plains of southern Nepal. This area, which in some regions the forest, elephants and some tigers are still preserved, is known as Terai. We take the 8am bus, and just over an hour later we are already there. We’re very lucky because Bhimphedi is the first bus stop, so we can find a seat (although knees hit the seat in front, even though we are not very tall…). There are thirty people sitting in the bus, but in the corridor there are thirty more… the more people enter in the bus, the more comfortable our seats seem. The “kalasi” walks through the crowd collecting the money from all the passangers. Everyone just seems confortable! it’s a common day, “garné ke” (Nepali expression that means “what to do”).
After about fifteen minutes walk from the bus stop, we arrive to the hens “shop”. They show us some chicks, but they tell us the chicks are all booked… In any case we do not want chicks, because it would take months them to grow and give eggs, plus the risk to die in the cold nights. Then, they show us some chicken with the perfect size. But after a while they say they are just for meat. Why can’t we use them to get eggs?? They are all cocks… It seems today we will not succeed…
Finally, when we were about to lose all hope, they bring us to another house, and yesssss! They have some young hens, about three months, only a month to give eggs. They are big and strong, we will take ten of them! It’s two euros per kilo. We tie them from the legs and we go.
Edu celebrating we have found our young and strong hens.Papu helping to have very soon our hens ready to take home.Papu and Ram, the cook, weighing the hens.
In the next house we buy some food for hens, we put it all in one electric tricycle, and we go to the bus stop! The poor hens will still suffer quite a lot before they reach their new home, but once there they will have a couple of years to be happy, well-cared and provide eggs for our children.
After leaving the chickens near the bus station we go to do some shopping. We have to use the days we go to the city. We buy three bags of rice husk in the mill so the hens can be very comfortable. We buy seedlings of onions and we go to the Hetauda office of Nepal Telecom to request for the installation of phone line and Internet, but that is another story…
Finally, we head to the bus stop, we load the hens and sacks on the roof of the bus and we sit at our reserved seats. After an hour of a bouncy road (poor hens… will they be alive?) we reach to Bhimphedi after a long day in the city, without having had time even to eat (neither we nor hens). In the Bhimphedi “bus stop” there are 7 eager children ready to help with all the load and bring it to the children’s home. At the door of the center, the younger children receive us shouting: “kukhura aayo!” the hens have come!
So fortunatelly the hens arrive home healthy and save. Kush brings them some water with sugar so they can slowly recover, and he leaves some feed so they can eat when they are strong enough. The Edu’s torch will be with the hen tonight. From tomorrow they will start the routine. Let’s hope that within a month the hens will start giving us eggs!
After only one day, the hens are still very afraid of us…One of the hens has already chosen her box.
Everyone is very happy with the success of the mission. Kul, one of the most helpful kids in the center, ensures us that they will fix the henhouse with some more cement. And younger children of the center, who are very eager with the new “farm” are already thinking about the next project! But I do not spoil anything, you will have to wait for a while…
Noooo! We have a small attack of “Urush” (a type of bug) in the girls room. Immediately girls change of room and we disinfect the chamber. Good opportunity to paint the room! And we will also paint the small kids room, it has been already 3 years since we last painted it, so it’s time to do it again. Children say that the “painting party” begins! Fortunately, Arun, one of the kids who left the center a couple of years ago, currently studying class 12 in Hetauda, will come on Saturdays to help us paint (he worked last year painting walls, so he is an expert) .
It certainly end up being “painting party”. Some of the older boys, Sujan, Jay (now he claims his name is Anish… here in Nepal some kids change their name before class 10, it’s very confusing … ), Papu and Ashok join to the painting team with Arun. In two days both rooms are clean and well painted. They look so good now! The small boys room smells so good now that even Tomi, one of the dogs of the center, when noone is looking, sneaks in to the room to make a nap (but he gets scolded, so he may not repeat…).
The volunteer kids painting the small kids’ room.Job finished.The quality control team: Beli didi, Sita and Kush. Also Som in the background checking his bed is ok.It seems that Manoj is happy with the result. Nice room!
Edu, a volunteer from Barcelona, has brought four top quality bed covers. Great! Some of the small kids some times pees in the bed. We tryed to put some plastic covers but the small kids didn’t like them, so in the middle of the night they used to take them out of the bed. And then, Beli didi had to clean everything every morning. The new covers absorb pee so everyone is very happy, children and didi.
Now all the kids want their room painted… “bistarai, bistarai” (slowly, slowly) we tell them.
The henhouse is ready, but we have to think about what they will eat as well. We need crushed corn. Fortunately we collected some few months ago from our kitchen-garden and we left it drying in the attic of the volunteers’ house.
The corn we got from our kitchen-garden on August.
Shelling the cobs, cleaning the grain, bringing it to the mill. It’s not as fast as it sounds…
Maya didi cleaning the corn using a “nanglo”.
Hens will also eat the organic foodwaste and a little bit of mixt-cereals that we will have to buy.
Everything is ready to welcome the hens. Everyone is eager and excited, tomorrow we will go to Hetauda to buy hens!
Before the hens come we have to have ready their home. We have a space that is very appropriate in the north part of our land. There are three houses where some time ago thre pigs lived. Two of thte houses are quite demolished, but one remains standing, just like the story of the three little pigs. Next these pigs houses there is another house, a little bit bigger, it just needs a door and a few minor improvements. We decided to use this 5m2 house to accommodate our future hens! So let’s work!
Edu, with the good help of Papu, begins to build a door out of nothing. An old bed frame, a hammer and a few rusty nails become miraculously a door frame. Then, with a plywood and a piece of metal net, they build a door foxproof and hopefully childproof as well… because none of the kids misses any of the project events, and some children are very curious and some times some things are broken.
The older kids, eager to work on the project, find in the store-room a bag of sand and another of cement (left over from old reparations), and start working to seal the frame of the door and put a patch to the henhouse.
Sujan, Kul y Papu making cement plaster to seal the henhouse door.
Meanwhile, Edu has already learnt to love to work with rusty nails, wooden slats and rickety chairs, and he has already built two boxes where the chickens will feel very safe to lay their eggs.
The boxes are inside the henhouse.Edu locking the henhouse. Everything is ready.
Advantage that we Hetauda, the city closest to the people, to bring a child to become a medical test and buy all the materials we need to take a manger and buy a water dispenser. The chicken is now nearly ready!
Paula, a doctor volunteer of Amics del Nepal, arrives at Bhimphedi with two assistants, Susana and Anae, with the aim of doing 40 medical checks in two afternoons.
Just after arriving, they open their bags and prepare all the equipment to measure height, weight, arterial pressure, visual acuracy, heart auscultation, skin afections, check for louses… After some hours of hard work, the team has completed the job in just two days!
Some kids in the line to have their medical check-up. Do they look worried?Susana introducing the results of a check-up to the database.Paula and Anae making the check-up to Ashish.
One kid shows an arrhythmia, but after some extra tests (in Hetauda and Kathmandu) everything looks good. He is now on the way back after a few days of “vacation” from school. No problem, he is very clever, so after a day or two he will be updated.
In Hetauda, Eating a chocolate doughnut just before doing some medical tests for the arrithmia. Nobody seems very worried, so everything is going good.
Some other kids and staff showed some vision problems, so we will have to visit the ophthalmologist.
With 30 children in the center, and even more that will come next April, most of the budget is going to buy food. But in Bhimphedi Childen’s Home we are fortunate to have about 9,000 m2 where we have a nice garden that gives many vegetables. Now we also want have some animals! We will start with ten hens to get enough eggs for all the children and staff! In addition, the hens will eat the organic waste and we will get compost so it can be used to fertilize the kitchen-garden (nowadays we have to buy it).
All the kids are very excited about the idea of having a small farm. They keep asking when we will bring the hens, how many we will have, if we will bring also a cock… But there are still many things to do before we can bring the hens from Hetauda (the nearest town from Bhimphedi).
This month we have a volunteer from Lleida, Edu Juanati. He is leading this project. Kush, one of the children studying in class 7, is also an expert about animals. he helps everyday an old woman to take care of her hens, ducks and goats. So, surely we will succeed with our new project!
