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We've been trying to organise a film night for the circus kids for so long now. We want to show them that circus is not what it used to be. Those big tops full of sawdust and elephant poo still exist, yes, but there is a lot more to circus these days. We want to nurture their creativity, so that we can come closer to giving them creative control over their circus company. People often say that Nepali people just aren't very creative, and when I hear this, I want to slap them. Also, I want to prove them wrong. We also want to give the kids a chance to do something different, something social, show them that it's not all just push-ups and handstands. After constant set-backs, cancellations and miscommunications, we managed to finally have our film night yesterday. In the morning.

They loved the videos, all of them. In that way, at least, we succeeded. Amazing to show them one of my favourite old clowns, George Carl, and see those Nepali kids just lose it. That's what it's all about, it's not exactly high-brow comedy, but the universality of clown  is beautiful to behold (and to readers who hear the word clown, and think of Ronald Macdonald, or some other over-the-top technicolour nightmare, check out George Carl. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0eAVjaQrUA ). It's funny to watch if you grew up in a middle-class family Hawthorn, Australia, and it's funny to watch if you were sold off to be a child-slave in India at the age of 5.

I'd pictured the film night as an opportunity for the kids to unwind and open up. A casual thing, you know, groups sitting around tables, maybe some couches, bowls full of nibbles on each little table. I'd imagined promoting dialogue by asking simple questions, getting to know what people think, letting the kids talk freely. I got to our venue at 9:30 a.m. to see that it was set up like a cinema: rows of seats, all facing forward. Oh well, I suppose they were only trying to help. Between video clips, I stood up there and made an idiot of myself, asking everyone what parts they liked, what parts they didn't like, trying to talk about the difference between contemporary circus and old-school circus, or trying to tell them that if there were any skills which they wanted to learn from what they saw, then we could work it out together. Everything I said was met with mystified silence. I might as well have been talking Swahili. It reminded me of way back when I studied physics, and would sit in those massive lecture halls, with that little lecturer rattling on about quantum theory, completely oblivious to the chorus of snores and text messages all around him. I felt very alone just then. Towards the end of the session I finally gave up and just snuck around the room, chatting to people individually. This worked much better, and I discovered many of the kids' secret aspirations, and fears. I was explaining to one of the girls that these acts take years to master, and she said something like "But you're going to go away in a few months anyway, like all of the volunteers". I replied that I'm going to stay for at least a year, and she seemed genuinely pleased. It felt good to say this, because I'd been trying to decide how long I'd like to stay for, but now that I've said this to the Sapana kids, I have to follow through with it. It will be sad to dwindle away my last reserves of money by staying in a volun

Since that morning of the film-night-morning, I've been hitting the Nepali books hard, I'm determined to get enough fluency with Nepali that I can break down this language barrier. Then we can really start making progress towards building this company together.

I don't tell them about this blog

My experience as a volunteer.

I have been in Nepal for over a month now, although it feels like so much longer. People are always saying that something feels longer, or  that it feels like shorter. Never will you hear it said that it feels exactly as long as it appears to be. Why longer? Because each day is stuffed full of new exciting experiences. Our new house is next to an army barracks. I assume it’s an army barracks, because of the razor wire, and gun turrets. Those lonely men in their gun turrets, gazing out onto a suburban street. Army uniform, khaki, and it occurs to me that khaki is a very Nepali-sounding word, I wonder where its origin lies? Last night as I rode my bicycle home, one of the men had night0vision goggles on. I’d never seen night-vision goggles in real life, here in the poorest country I’ve ever seen I was not expecting something so futuristic. I smile and wave to those men in the gun turrets. Usually they smile and wave back, grateful for something to break the tedium. One day I will have a conversation with them, tell them about my life back in Australia. Sometimes when I smile and wave, they look back at me with a look of foreboding, uncertainty with a gun. This is the worst kind of uncertainty. I don’t blame them though, things are different here.

I sing to myself on the bicycle. Mostly I sing ‘Stormy Weather’, the Peggy Lee version inspires my rendition. It is not my song, but then again, it is not my bicycle either. I am borrowing it from my housemate Noah, while he is away ‘in the field’.. Before that, I had another friend’s bicycle, my other friend was away in ‘the field’ too, a different field. Her field was a village, the poorest village she has ever seen, one of the poorest places in Nepal, and therefore, almost perfectly wealthless. Apparently there are 7 aid organizations acting to help that village in some way, but their help is not apparent. Not slightly. Meanwhile, in London, people take to the streets, burning things, smashing windows and going midnight-shopping. Everyone is eager to attach meaning to this, condemning it as mindless or comparing it to historical revolutions. Political unrest? Why not? Opportunistic looting? Certainly. Flecks of meaning swimming through a soup of chaos, a feedback loop fed by alienation, disempowerment and innumerable personal stories that should not be hidden under blankets. No-one who has lived in London, who has been poor in London, should be surprised. Here, it is a different poverty. In some ways better, in some ways worse. Better in the way that people know how to make things out of junk, how to fix things rather than throw them away, how to grow their own food, distill their own alcohol and most importantly how to come together as a community, how to look out for each other. Worse in that they have no hope for the future, they are stuck where they are, and sometimes food just doesn’t grow. They leave in the thousands, once again I cannot remember the figures because I cannot fathom them, let’s just be conservative and say that thousands of Nepalis try to cross the border every month. In many cases, cowboy-NGOs and celebrity-endorsed charities catch them, stop them, send them back to starve in their own village. Tick, job done, the NGO-workers catch a group of women at the border, take them to the police for a severe beating, vision obscured, dollar signs in the eyes. The women are sent back to their village, and of course they leave again, are again caught, this time by the charity I work for, and so this story comes to me. We don’t do border rescues, as far as I can tell we are way less dodgy than the big players. We are a small charity, and very transparent about what we do, how we do it.

In Brisbane, I used to steal things from supermarkets, just little things. And the more the supermarket experience annoyed and nauseated me, the more I would steal in kind. In kind support from Safeworth. In this way, instituting my own pay-as-you-feel system, I found the supermarket shopping experience bearable. My housemates found it hilarious, which only encouraged me to steal more, and to steal weirder things. A particular favourite of my housies was a large bunch of bananas (my own obscure protest, for at that time bananas cost $12/kilo), which I just held in my hand throughout the whole shopping experience, so that when my time came to check out, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to continue holding it, no-one in the world would dare question it, least of all disillusioned supermarket staff. Aren’t we all just monkeys anyway?

Here in Nepal, I would never steal from a shop. Authorities predict that violent conflict is just around the corner, and I would not be surprised. It was certainly not what I expected, this place. The lovely people at the charity I work for asked me to write a couple of paragraphs about my time in Nepal so far. Something personal, entertaining, something they could quote. I accidentally wrote this. I should start again.

I left a very nice life in Brisbane to be here. I worked a little every day, teaching circus and sometimes performing. The rest of the time I would do my own training, or go to the beach, or visit my friends, or listen to live music, or drink delicious coffee.  Life is very different here. Every day I work in the office. EBT-N is a small team that does big things, and so there is always a lot to do. I came here to be a circus trainer, and for 6 hours a week, this is what I do. The rest of the time, I do things I never expected to do, not in my wildest dreams. Things like working in an office. On the street corner nearby, a man sits and mends umbrellas and shoes. People ride around the neighborhood, calling out in a special guttural voice, perfectly tuned to reach through the farthest window. Sometimes they call out “Aap!” which means they are selling mangoes, other times they call out what sounds like “Talagag gag Talagag gag”. I don’t know what it means, but I think they’re collecting junk to recycle.

I ride my bike through streets where staying on the left side of the road is not so much a rule as a guideline. As far as I can tell, there are only two road rules: Look everywhere all the time, and don’t hit anyone. Once you get used to it, and so long as you’re not in a hurry, it actually works really well. When you cross the street, just keep walking and the cars, motorbikes and miscellaneous vehicles will dodge around you like a school of fish.

I was only supposed to be here for three months, but now I want to stay for longer, at least a year. I don’t know why exactly. There is something beautiful about this project. People in Nepal need hope. If we can rescue a small group of kids, give them hope, and then let them share their hope through the medium of circus, then perhaps we can spread this hope. Who knows? As my friend would say, it’s worth a red-hot go

Why monkeys do not talk, the volunteer and the cake, and other stories.

Yesterday I learned a phrase, "Hawaa lagyo", which means "Taken by the wind", and is used to describe the effect of globalisation and Westernisation on Nepal. Nepal opened its borders around 60 years ago, there are many people alive here who remember when it could have been described as a medieval kingdom. Kathmandu is progressing and Westernizing like an avalanche, unaware of where it's heading and completely unable to stop. Hawaa lagyo.

I've been reading a book of Nepali folk stories. They are delightfully random, and often contain no discernible lesson or moral. Refreshing. Probably my favourite so far is the story of why monkeys do not talk. Basically, there once was a man who had a loyal and intellegent monkey companion. This monkey could understand everything that was said to him, and this made the man perplexed: he wondered why the monkey would never speak. He contrived a way to make the monkey talk by setting him an elaborate task, involving minding a bowl full of Buffalo butter which sat in the sun. The man hid nearby and watched when, as planned, the monkey could bear it no longer and called out "Sir! Sir! The butter is melting!" And at that, his head exploded.

And that is why monkeys do not talk. The end. Shaun and I have been talking about making a stop-frame animation of this and other Nepali folk tales.

I woke at 5 this morning, so that I could watch the gymnastics training that some of my circus students undertake. There are concerns from some of the caretakers at the refuge that doing gymnastics at 6:30a.m. then going to school all day, and then circus training in the evening, might be a little too much strain. My initial stance on the issue was that if the kids want to go to gym so badly, then they should be able to. Nothing is uncomplicated here, and I've since heard that the gym class is causing falling grades at school, and a couple of kids are missing breakfast in their determination to take gymnastics class. On the other hand, one of these kids has been rated amongst the top gymnasts in the country, and would have been sent to the Beijing olympics if he had come from the right family. Also, some of the circus students have been getting injured at gym class. The only thing to do was to go and see for myself. So I woke before the sun and made my way to the hall where the national gymnasts train, a ramshackle little room, stuffed full of mats, rings, high bar, etc. It was arranged by the people upstairs that a certain gentleman ex-Gurkha would accompany me. He has a politeness and a presence which commands respect, and of course the Ghurkas here have an almost celebrity status (their name decorates walls throughout Kathmandu, my favourite one "Show me a man who claims not to fear death and I say he is either a liar or a Ghurka"). Unfortunately, he never showed, partly my fault for not mustering the courage to call so early in the morning to confirm that he was coming. Partly I guess I wasn't really sure what I was doing there, what I would say to the gym coach, wanted an excuse to bail on the whole thing. So rather than meet the gym coach and say all of those things I thought of afterwards, I tried to talk to the circus students for a while, about being responsible, careful, safe, about the importance of school, about all kinds of things which I was the least qualified person on Earth to be preaching about. They got suitably defensive, and I felt like a real twat. So I shut up watched training for a while. What I saw was that the two circus students were there with their friends, were away from the refuge in the hills and in the heart of Kathmandu. I saw that they were having a great time. I left, feeling like I had made a complete mess of this supposed meeting, and that I would have to answer for it to my pseudo-military pseudo-bosses, but on reflection I can say that if nothing else, I got to see the circus students there at the gym class, being away from the refuge, amongst friends, having a great time.

There is a cafe near the office, which I frequent, espresso coffee and a small machiatto-stain of guilt. The place is nice and cool, has comfortable couches, and therefore it is usually full whitey bidesi folk, from the vast array of NGOs that pepper this part of Kathmandu. The owner of this cafe is a nice guy, with an interesting story of returning to Kathmandu after living in England for some time, so that he could grow his own coffee and live his own version of the dream. He was telling me that a Swiss NGO has offered to send top-shelf bakers to his cafe, to train up the staff there to make croissants and other such delicious pastries. These pastries would go to the mouths of the NGOs, and was therefore a wonderful real life allegory of the Trouble with NGOs. I do not know the name of this NGO, but it occured to me later that "Let Them Eat Cake" would be an excellent name.

I reflected on all of this as I sat in Cafe Soma this morning, after leaving the gym where I couldn't pluck up the courage to cross those cultural barriers and language barriers and try to talk to the gym coach, try to call the gentleman Gurkha, try to do all of those things which should have been so easy. I sat, drinking good coffee and eating a delicious brownie in one of the poorest countries in the world.

Someone told me that there are literally hundreds of NGOs here whose aim is to clean up the Bagmati river, but none of us have seen a single person actually picking up rubbish from that festering stream of junk. This is among the nicer NGO stories I've heard. That's enough stories for now.