Hello to home!
It's been a year since we updated you last, but it's not our fault! Both of us have had some great projects coming up at work: At Cathy's work they've celebrated 3 years of SAATH's shop Danfe and welcomed the new beneficiaries for which Cathy's been preparing sone math classes.
At SCLC, a lot of maintenance is going on to prepare the farm for summer: we've made new bottleways, building a new washing place and a new cow-shed. At the moment we have a lot of visitors and interns from College coming to learn about social work, when I'm showing them around, listening to their discussions or planning projects with them, I'm learning a great deal about the importance, approaches and difficulties of Social work today.
Of course, we're doing more and more exploring as well: together we went to Nagarkot for a dayhike where we saw a beautiful sunrise, Cathy went to visit friends in Sindhuli, Tilly has been looking around the monasteries and Hattiban forests in her village. Kathmandu is becoming more and more familiar to us as well, very slowly we're making our way around and are slowly able to understand more about Hindu and Buddhist culture everyday. Having had the time to accustom to the "Nepali ways" that might seem very funny in the beginning, we're both now shopping at the market, taking local buses and making friends with Nepali grandmas.
One of our favourite moments from last month was definetly Christmas Eve, we've celebrated it with two of our Nepali friends, a Finish girl who's volunteering and a Dutch traveller. We had dinner in Thamel and spend a great night wandering around the busy streets where both foreigners and Nepali people were wishing each other a merry Christmas.
Cathy spent Christmas day with friends , cooking and Tilly with the family of a friend from her work in the Garden of dreams.Needless to say: special celebration Momos were involved.
All in all, NYE and Christmas were very different than at home, but we can gladly say that it was nonetheless a day to spent with friends that kept us busy so we didn't miss our families too much, still we were both a little extra happy that we could see them on a videocall, and lucky too because we called them right before a powercut.
At the moment, we're crossing of one more destination of our list: Chitwan. We will just tell you one thing which is, of course, #visitnepal2020. We're also really looking forward to seeing the projects of the NGO alongside Julie next month.
Namaste,
Tilly and Cathy