Day 96 - Shukranagar

We made it safely to our final farm, though we went a little too far on the bus and the subsequent cab driver we relied on got lost and took two hours and a phone call to find the farm. The Bhattarai family is incredibly nice, warm and welcoming. When we arrived there were four other volunteers (3 from France, 1 from Norway), so quarters were a little cramped. There are two rooms for volunteers in a small building detached from the main house. The girl from Norway graciously gave up the room she had been staying in to allow Laura and me to move in, and she squeezed in with the 3 French girls. It made sense considering that one room has only a single bed while the other has two.

The work has been fine and the schedule incredibly volunteer-friendly. There are two meals a day and Balram, the head of the household, does not want volunteers working without eating. The first meal, however, usually falls sometime between 10 and 11, so we could theoretically sleep until then no problem. Usually, though, we wake up between 7 and 8 and just hang out, wander into the village, or read until breakfast. Sometime after we’ve eaten (with no particular emphasis on time) we begin work. The first day we irrigated the mustard fields. The second day we broke down haystacks into a giant pile of hay in front of the house (which the village children spent hours playing in). The third day we dug four holes, making a square, and put logs in them. The fourth day we built a giant haystack in the area with the freshly placed poles. The fifth day we dug up some grasses and replanted them along the irrigation channel (the grass, which grows in bunches to be quite tall, is used to feed the buffalo). Then, it was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and we were allowed to rest and celebrate.

All six of us volunteers decorated a small tree out front as our honorary Christmas tree. We prepared meals based on foods our respective countries eat (though the French girls stole Mashed Potatoes so Laura and I made hashbrowns with eggs and corn-on-the-cob). We exchanged small gifts. We sang Carols in three different languages. It was nice.

The other four left the day after Christmas, though two of the French girls say they will be coming back the first week of January. There were two things the French girls were excited for: harvesting honey and seeing the pregnant buffalo give birth. Both have happened since they left. The day after Christmas (just one day too late to rightfully name the baby buffalo Jesus), Laura and I ate freshly roasted corn kernels and watched a live buffalo birth. It was surprisingly less disgusting then I anticipated, and the mama buffalo handled the whole thing with incredible ease and strength. Neither Balram nor Dorga (the matriarch of the family) intervened until the baby had plopped onto the ground from three feet in the air. Laura and I continued to watch and shout encouraging words as the baby attempted its first steps. We christened her Janeane Garbuffalo. Laura calls her Buffy for short.

Today we helped harvest honey. It was slightly nerve-wracking having bees flying all around while Balram stole the honeycomb frames from the box-hives and brought them inside the net (which was riddled with holes that let bees in, not to mention all the bees that clung desperately to the frames of honeycomb). Dorga scraped the layers of wax off the frames with a knife so that Laura and I could load them in the cylindrical machine, which is operated by spinning a handle and uses centrifugal force to spin honey out of the comb against the walls of the cylinder. The honey (and any hopeless bees that remained in the comb) oozes down the sides, eventually finding the hole in the bottom and oozes out a pipe into the waiting strainer and bucket. It’s amazing we didn’t get stung. Balram, on the other hand, with no bee suit like you see in the movies, gets stung hundreds of times invading the hives. He says stings are good for your health. I don’t think Macauley Culkin’s character in My Girl agrees.

Tomorrow we harvest more honey. Stay tuned to hear how that goes. Hope you all had the happiest of holidays. And Happy New Year if I don’t get to post before then.