Hills Away From Home: Gorgeous Scenes and Jungle Steams

It's hard to believe we haven't even been here for 2 weeks! We've seen, explored, and tasted so many new things already. Thankfully, we still appear to be healthy despite some of the worrisome things we've consumed. Our experiments with cooking for ourselves are looking more and more positive, and the best part is that we just bought 20 lbs. of produce for the equivalent of $5.5! We've also been practicing our Nepali with teachers, students, and friends. We are finally able to decipher the once foreign sounds and pick out a couple words from conversation. The good news is that we have 8 1/2 months left to learn!


Nepali girl tending to her goats. This is only a 15 minute walk from home! In a couple weeks we should be able to see the Himalayas from here.

Another gorgeous day in banepa.


The women here are superheros! They make food for the entire family, clean the house, do the laundry, take care of the kids... Oh and they work in the fields all day with 50-100 lb. baskets that they strap to their forehead. Needless to say, Elliott and I feel pretty weak in comparison.

This year we are based in Banepa, but we will be doing a lot of traveling to more remote villages to do various types of outreach. Last Sabbath was our first village trip. Elliott went to the village of Capin and I went to Kosideka.
We started the morning an hour later than planned for the 2.5 hour bus ride. We crowded onto a local bus with about 30 too many people inside. Naturally, every person in the bus had to stare at the American giant clumsily towering a foot over their heads. We were glad to have a relatively uneventful ride to the end of the bus route where we proceeded to walk for another 2 hours to get to Kosideka. While walking down the trail I went to take a picture of this mud and bamboo shack only to realize that it was the Kosideka church. We had a great time at the church in Kosideka but had to leave in a rush to catch the bus home. Somehow the village kids figured out that the huge pair of shoes outside the church belonged to the American, so they filled them with a parting gift of dirt clods! We hiked out a different way than we had come. This time, we were in for a HOT and SWEATY hike out through the jungle. When we finally made it to the bus stop, we were stoked to end up on the same bus as Elliott and the Capin group! We all shared our snacks and told stories about our adventures.