LEAVING my flat at 6.30am, I take the path that climbs steeply up the hill behind the town of Besisahar.  

It will take me more than two hours to walk to the school where I will be working today, almost 1000 metres above my home; similar to climbing up Ben Nevis before doing a days work!  

I've now been in Nepal as an education volunteer with VSO for more than a year, working to train teachers in schools in the foothills of the Annapurna Mountains. The work is challenging in many ways, but never mundane or boring!  Each day is an adventure, as I never know what I will encounter.

 The twelve schools I am working with, all of them more than one hour walk from where I live, are part of a project to encourage more girls to go to school, stay at school and not drop-out, as often happens with girls in this part of the world. 

My role is to make the schools more girl-friendly and to improve the teaching so that students are more involved in lessons and girls are more included.  This may sound simple, but Nepal is a patriarchal society where boys are considered much more important than girls.

I see this ethos acted out in many of the schools I visit; teachers talking predominantly to the boys in the classroom, girls sitting quietly while boys dominate the lessons by shouting out answers to the teacher's questions, boys usually chosen to read or take part in lessons, and some staffrooms full of male teachers, where the few females are relegated to teaching the youngest classes, which are considered too simple for the male teachers.

 The girls in the project, the 'Little Sisters,' are being helped and mentored by older girls from each community, the 'Big Sisters', who have completed their education, and so are good role models. 

Each month we work with the Big Sisters to organise special fun events for the Little Sisters at their school, often competitions with exercise books and pencils as prizes.  As parents normally have to buy these for their children, this is another way of supporting them.

 The Sisters for Sisters project also pays for special catch-up classes to help girls who have missed school to stay with their peer group.  

At the end of each school year all pupils have to pass an exam to qualify to move up to the next class. If they fail they have to remain in the same class, so the exam is very important and hopefully this coaching will help.

Some headteachers have told me that there has already been noticeable improvement with the achievement of these girls. The extra classes are held every morning, usually between 7 and 9 am, before the school day starts at 10am, so it is quite a commitment to attend.

 Around 50% of women in rural areas have had no education themselves; so find it hard to know how to support their daughters at school. At one community meeting we attended recently, a group of mothers asked if they too could have some basic literacy lessons with their daughters, as they had not been to school themselves, so had never learnt to read or write. 

 The government schools in Nepal are poorly funded, with only Victorian style benches and textbooks being provided. 

The school has no spare money for classroom resources, so most lessons are based on the textbook. 

One of the training courses I have been running for teachers is how to make teaching resources from scrap or waste materials and how to use them; counting with small sticks or pebbles, word games from scrap cardboard, puppets to encourage spoken language made from crisp packets turned inside out and numbered skittles for addition games from empty plastic bottles. How different from classrooms in Devon! 

 After I had written to one member of Tavistock Rotary club, telling about observing a maths lesson on measuring shapes where only one child in the class actually had a ruler to use for the work, the club kindly donated money, enabling me to buy basic mathematics equipment, enough for a class set, for each of my project schools.  Thank you Tavistock Rotary Club!

 Nepal is a very interesting country, but with much poverty.  In the rural areas most people are subsistence farmers, growing rice, maize and millet on a few terraces, vegetables around their houses and keeping a few animals if they can. 

People eat what they can grow, with little or no money to buy extra and often shops being too far away. 

The seriousness of this was brought home to me while on a visit to one of the hill-top schools, when there was a very violent hailstorm.  The young maize crop was completely broken and the leaves torn to shreds.  The headteacher of the school, surveying the damaged crop, said to me: 'There will be a lot of people here go hungry later in the year, because of this storm!'

 At the moment it is harvest time for the rice crop that has been growing on the terraces around the valley.  Whole families are needed for this important work and so attendance at school is poor at this time.  

Lines of people can be seen, working their way across the paddy fields, cutting the rice stalks and laying them on the ground to dry. Later, the grain is removed from the stalks by hitting them against the ground, and the bare stalks are then built into a round hut-shaped haystack.

I think that harvest time 200 years ago in Britain, before mechanisation, must have been quite similar to this.

 Most visitors come to Nepal to go trekking, in fact tourism is one of the country's biggest earners. 

The two treks I have done have been fabulous experiences; walking high in the mountains through unspoilt valleys with snow-capped mountains all around. Imagine walking for eight days with no vehicle noise to disturb the peace, through villages where the lifestyle and culture of the mountain people has been almost unchanged by modern technology.  

Annapurna Base Camp, encircled by some of the world's biggest peaks, was awesome in the true sense of the word and I shall never forget how I felt on reaching it.  For anyone who loves walking and mountains, Nepal should be on you list of places to visit!

 

If you would like to read more of my adventures and experiences my blog can be found at annmarcerinnepal.blogspot.co.uk