White Water Circus project

A lot can happen in one month in Nepal. Plans can go astray, and life can end up more exciting than you had expected. The initial plans for my last month in Nepal were to start with two weeks of hard kayaking, compete in an international kayaking competition and then spend the last week working on a project teaching kayaking to Nepalese children.

The month started with a down hill slide for my kayaking. I wasn't enjoying paddling, and had even taken a couple of swims on the Seti river (the warmest and most swimmable river in Nepal!). Luckily, all of us paddlers felt we'd rather be working on The Project, than paddling, so we packed up our stuff and headed back to Sukute Beach.

The Project is The White Water Circus Project which teaches Nepalese children circus and kayaking. It is a mainly Swedish project, run by my friends Inka and Britta from Sweden and Ram from Nepal. I had met these guys while teaching kayaking in Dala Floda (Party capital of Sweden) during the Summer. Most of the other volunteers on the project were young Swedes, but there were also some Nepali kayakers. We all were all friends of one of the project leaders. It was basically a bunch of friends doing something useful in Nepal.

My time working on the The Project was extrememly interesting because it was organised in a low key way. This meant that we all got a say in how the project should go, but also meant boring meetings. The fact that the leaders hadn't decided the goals of the project before we started and to some extent they still didn't agree when it was finished, made it extra challenging.

The thing that makes it particularly difficult to run a project like this, is that the culture gap between Sweden and Nepal is huge. In my opinion, Swedes are highly privileged, for instance they get paid to have babies or to find new work, and sometimes I think they don't realise quite how lucky they are. Nepal is on the other hand a very basic society where people are mostly just concerned with looking after their basic needs. For instance, in our village, only some children got to go to school, and the girls seldom attended for more than a few years. As
The Kiwi Girl, I was neither Swedish nor Nepalese, so I had a unique viewpoint. As only an English speaker it also meant that everyone else could talk about me behind my back!


As it turned out, we had too many of us there to teach kayaking and not enough equipment. I had come to teach kayaking so this proved a little frustrating until I solved the problem on day two. That day I woke early and headed down to the beach to find the children already running about. From that day on I became The English Teacher.

That first day something amazing happened. I was helping Inka and together we taught the children a few basic phrases, "Hello my name is Clare", "I am twenty six years old", "How are you?", "I am fine". The amazing thing was that in the morning only some of the kids knew the phrases, but by that night the big ones had taught the small ones, and everyone knew the phrases.

That night we went up to the village and celebrated a festival with the locals. First the children dragged us 20 minutes down the road to one of their houses and put nail polish on us for a tikka Then we went up to village. While climbing up the dirt path in my jandals, I realised why so many festivals follow the moon, as even in the forest the bright moon lit the way and meant we didn't need a torch. At the village we were shown the alter surrounded by offerings and were given huge flower necklaces, as we were guests. We were encouraged to dance, and I even got the chance to play their noisy trumpet-like instruments (actually a reed instrument), and this huge thing like an over-grown trombone.

As the week continued I felt I learnt so much from the kids. They tried to teach me Nepali, and except for "Ticha" which means both "Are you okay?" and "I am okay", I was a poor student. Luckily they were better students of English than I was of Nepali. There is only so much English you can teach in a few hours, so I wanted to teach them things that I believed would help them get their foot in the door. Initially, I taught them manners, "please", "thank you", and how to look someone in the eye when you speak to them. Obvious stuff for us English speakers but not so for Nepalis.


After that I wasn't sure what to do next. Day three, I found myself alone on the beach without a translator and that is when I realised that I really wanted to do this alone. You should be able to teach English without translation! It was hard at first, but it was the start of one of the most amazing things I have done!

Many of the children were young so my first challenge was to keep them amused. We started the mornings with the phrases, and as their attention faded, we started playing games. First I taught them body parts, head, shoulder, knee, foot etc. This was great as the action of pointing to the body parts, kept everyone interested. After that we started singing nearly the well known song, "Head, shoulder, knee and foot, knee and foot". As the kids really liked to sing this worked really well.
The next breakthrough came that afternoon when I found some time to teach English just to the girls. The girls were generally older, but had not spent so much time at school, so they were very shy about their English. I was playing a game with my Nepali dictionary to get them to practise, where they would look at the Anglicised version of the Nepali word and guess what it was. It was then I realised that many of them knew a lot of English, the main problem they had was with pronunciation. From my problems with learning Swedish I knew exactly how they felt!

So from the next morning onwards, I started going through the alphabet and practicing the sounds. I would draw the letters in the sand, and then we would all practice until they could all make the sound. The difficult letters were s, f, l, b, v, and p, and of course th. I had never taught English before, and had no language to explain how to make a sound, but somehow I managed to communicate what was needed. For example, th is the breath out of 'h' and then the lips of 't'. So we practiced 'h', 'th', 'h', 'th', and made it into a game getting faster and faster.

Every morning we would still play the body parts game, when the kids started getting restless. This got more and more complicated as the days went on. The kids really enjoyed the addition of 'bottom', and 'aeroplane'. 'Aeroplane' was a joke which I couldn't resist when I saw one of the kids doing 'arm', with both arms out like an aeroplane. The amazing thing was that they also got the joke! We also played the action game, so they know eat, throw, kick etc. The body parts were really useful, as I used them when I was looking for a word to go with each sound. No A for apple here!

After a week I believe the kids were speaking a lot better. For instance, if I wrote a word they knew in my sand blackboard they could say the word. It was a great feeling. All I wanted was just to make the lessons last as long as they could. To do this I had decided I would like the children to get a copy of the words we had learned, together with the sounds so they could remember them. Unbelievably one of the kids had the same idea, so he drew a picture of the body and I filled in the words. All that was left was a fun expedition to the town 30 minutes away by local bus, to find the photocopy machine - of course there was no sign in English but the local people pointed me in the right direction! The local people were very friendly, one even tried to chat me up while I was waiting on the top of the bus to go home!

During the week, I was also involved in teaching kayaking which was somewhat more difficult. On the water we always had a Nepali kayaker doing the instruction and we were simply there to help out and rescue the kids. It is a real challenge to help someone on the river when you don't have the language skills to tell them what to do, but luckily the kids were so strong and had good balance so it was never a problem. However without language, it proved impossible to persuade them to tip over and do a wet exit. To teach kayaking was a special thing to do, particularly to teach the girls who were so strong but would normally not get the chance to go kayaking. I just hope they continue kayaking - in a few years they could be some of the strongest girl kayakers in the world. Go girls!
It was very sad when the week came to an end. We had a final circus performance at the Himalayan Challenge competition, which two of the older boys introduced in English - I was very proud. We also had a small kayak race, and all of the kayakers did very well, one even went straight through a small hole and stayed upright! Afterwards it was time to say goodbye, and it was a very sad time.

The local parents thanked us with more flower garlands, and painted our faces red. There was a party with Nepali music and dancing on the beach. I joined in the dancing and the music making with stones from the beach. After a while, some of the local women also joined the dancing which was special for me. Afterwards, I was really tired and sad and emotional. I just didn't know what to do next. I ate dinner and went straight to bed!

All in all, an AMAZING experience!