27TH DECEMBER

7am breakfast: peas and roti bread. 7.45 assembly: the students sing a prayer, the Nepal national anthem and the Tibetan national anthem. It sounds beautiful. I have never seen kids, or anyone for that matter, sing a national anthem so passionately. They throw themselves into it and it sounds fantastic – you can feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up.


After assembly three hours of exam supervision and then lunch. After lunch Ronne and Eva (the two Dutch girls) and I set off across the river in front of the monastery. We cross by a long suspension bridge and then climb up over a ridge. The people were all friendly and there is no traffic as today was another Maoist strike day (called a Bunday). We came to the Bat Caves and again I only went in and out the entrance. The girls scrambled and crawled out the exit.


On the way back we were able to get some good photographs of locals and stopped at a village blacksmith to watch him work. He had a small pile of charcoal, a small fire and bellows made from a goat skin.

After tea there was an hour and a half prayer session (punja) for a Lama who had died. This was very interesting, especially when one of the younger monks kept falling asleep. The first night the girls were here they got me to remove a cockroach from their room as Ronne in particular was 'scared' of cockroaches. As luck would have it, in the middle of the prayer session a cockroach (probably the same one) scuttled across the middle of the room. I could sense Ronne starting to fidget and squirm, but it got worse! The cockroach stopped right in front of her and turned and headed straight for her. It scurried along the front of the bench we were sitting on. She spent the rest of the prayer meeting checking the seat under her.