We have just come back from two weeks staying in the village of Kaskikot, north of Pokhara near the Anapurna mountain range. It was the final step in our 10 week long language learning marathon! As such we thought we would take you through our time there using some of the new words we learnt.
Muso. This was the first word we learnt, it is Nepali for mouse but also, as we quickly discovered, for rat. Let us put it in context for you….
We arrived in the pitch black in the middle of some serious rain. After meeting our host Ama and Baa (Mum and Dad) we were shown by torch light up a ladder in the house to our room. As we climbed the ladder we were told “there may be muso’s up here at night”. The next morning and after no sleep Lucy was able to confidently say in Nepali “yes there are very big muso’s at night!”. Thankfully six days later we added the word Mareko to our vocabulary which means dead.
We would often help with some of the picking from the harvest first thing in the morning (7ish), most village houses have fields as agriculture is the main source of food and income. Mainly we picked Kerau (peas) or Wah (Barley), which lead to hours of sitting in front of the house where we were often joined by kids from the village and could practice our latest phrases on them!
The kids adored Tom, and very quickly we added the word Gamble to our repertoire. This is a street game that the kids played daily, involving a tower of rocks and two teams battling to either rebuild the knocked-down tower or “kill” the other team by hitting them with the sock-ball first. We spent many happy hours playing with them all and some of the big kids of the village as well. Tom soon became the local hero and we would wake up in the morning to calls of “Tomji Tomji…” from some excited little voices hoping to play before they went to school.
Onnuntis is another important word, this is 29, the number of dal bhats (lentils and rice) we ate in a row during our village stay. Whilst all were meito cha (tasty) and had a surprising amount of variety for a meal that consists mainly of two things, we were day dreaming about something other than rice by the end. Khana (food) is eaten twice a day, once around 10am and again at 8pm. In between, cups of Nepali Chiya (milky sugary tea) are consumed and normally some Khadja (snacks) around 4:30 in the afternoon.
“Pani lyauchu” (I bring water) and Lucy did each day from the communal tap. Women in the village work very very hard at home and in the fields from 6am to 9pm so it is difficult to get to know them if you are not working alongside them. Whilst we spent some time working with Ama at home, it was still difficult to infiltrate the world of the women in the village without our own house/field/children. So each afternoon the water was turned on for a couple of hours and all the women gathered at the local tap to fill up their tanks using water carriers. Lucy took on this responsibility for the two weeks we were there, and after a few days of bruised hips got the hang of things and happily sauntered back and forth with the 20litre water carrier until the tanks were full.
Garung gurung/melkano these are the words for thunder and lightening. Early monsoons struck the village when we were there, with lightening so bright it blinded you for a few seconds when it struck. Each afternoon, just after the water was collected, the heavens opened and it would rain typically until late in the evening. This was made all the more spectacular by the tin roof which when combined with the rain played its own music to send you off to sleep!
