Playing catch up

I am sitting at an internet cafe one block from the house, Isha and Gerrit just returned from a quest to find "cold beer" and since today is the only day off we get (one day a week) I've got a couple of cold ones next to me now as well. Before I go and let off a little tension, I wanted to say "Happy Mother's day" to my Mom in case I don't get an opportunity to phone tomorrow. I'm thinking of you. Liam and Teresa, you have been a big topic of conversation with the children I've been working with, I brought pictures of you. They all say that you are beautiful and your hair is very pretty. Dan, they all want to know where your hair is, but you are pretty too :) I miss you all very much.

Onto the journaling...

May 4th

We left the hotel moonlight this morning and moved into our new house in the suburbs. This place is huge! There are 5 floors with a kitchen, 2 bathrooms, a common room and 5 bedrooms. We also have a hired cook and house keeper. There is also a homeless guy living in our shed withing the walled and locked compound. He was evicted before us but had nowhere to go so the landlord lets him stay. We've been assured that he's safe as long as we don't talk to him, especially when he's drunk. We were supposed to get a tour of the neighborhood after lunch from Gocool, but after waiting for 3 hours we were starting to get antsy. Luckily Robin and Patty showed up before we decided to go exploring on our own. They had just interviewed for all of our site positions. I will be working with Sarah and Isha at an english boarding school for ages 3 to 15. When we finally went on the tour it was starting to get dark and the streets around here are very convoluted. I'm not sure I got any of it. We saw two group homes run by our hosts (orphanages) and were given extensive insight into funding and social politics in Nepal around these sights. However if anyone is interested, a mansion in Nepal rents for $740 US a month here. Comes with solar panels and everything! We returned home by bus via the now infamous Ring Road and had to jay-walk across 6 lanes of chaos to reach our street.

When we got home Garrit had left his wallet out on his bed and found that $100 US was missing. Someone around here won the lottery! I'm glad that we were already locking everything up in our rooms, we have triple lock safes for this reason. The cooks made us spagetti for dinner which was a nice change. The noodles were overdone, but we weren't going to complain!

I'm sorry I was going to type out all of my past entries, but the chair is very uncomfortable, I'll try to finish more tomorrow.

Subaratri! Good Night!