Our neighbourhood

Photo credit: Himalayan Times

I love our neighbourhood, ‘Dhobighat’, which means ‘the clothes washing place’. Across the road, down a steep hill you can still to this day see piles and piles of clothes – school uniforms etc being washed and put out on the hillside to dry. When we lived here with the children we used to send our laundry to ‘the Dhobi’ – a man on a bicycle came and picked it up and delivered it washed and ironed a few days later. Nowadays lots more people, like our landlord, have washing machines so we can do our own.

We live in a downstairs flat next door to a Pakistani aid worker and his wife, a Spanish aid worker rents the middle flat and our landlord and family live on the top level. Mohan and his wife Sharmila take good care of us all and their house. We like to sit outside in the paved garden(Fin has spent hours power washing this!) in the evening in the cool breeze enjoying the bamboo and other trees, at least until the mosquitos get too much!

Our front yard, bamboo trees – our door behind the little shrine

There is a little family Hindu shrine outside our front door. Each morning and evening Sharmila comes to offer her devotions and to ask blessing on the house and for all of us. She lights incense and rings the bells – not unlike the rituals in the Catholic church nearby which we sometimes attend alternatively with the international protestant church and a small Nepali church.  Some will say these rituals are based on fear and superstition but I find myself moved by these family acts of devotion as well as the more public ones around the neighbourhood every day outside shops and houses. Daily devotion is the habit too of Buddhists and Christians in monasteries, churches, offices, other work places in Nepal.

Hindu offering outside a home

Hindu offering outside a shop

These daily devotions are important to people who, whatever their different beliefs, all humbly acknowledge the reality of how vulnerable and mortal they are as human beings in the great scheme of things – people who have lived through earthquake, poverty, civil war, disease. So the parents and grandparents carry on these traditional rituals and many of their kids, technology devotees, come and go from school wired up to other more globally modern systems!

Behind our house is a girl’s high school, right next door is a huge mixed high school and outside our bedroom window is a little kindergarten. I find the constant high decibel sound of children’s and young people’s voices strangely pleasing and companionable, perhaps as we are 'new' and you cannot feel lonely surrounded by them – I’m sure it will soon wear off! The ‘sounds’ did turn to ‘screams’ a couple of weeks ago when we had another earth tremor which was disturbing but at 4.6 not dangerous. Still, hundreds of panicking students with raw memories of the ‘big one’ took a good half and hour to calm down and go back inside.

At the end of our little dirt road there is a main road – it’s like a big, long village – little veg shops, butchers,(goat’s head forlornly decorating the slab)  barbers, hairdresser (signed  ‘trained at Tony and Guy, London’ – might try it! ) , pet shop (new thing!), ‘Big-Mart’ (not big) supermarket, temple, shrines, stationers, tailors, mobile phone shop, five a side football court, coffee shops and cafes. At 8.30 am, after school and 5pm the traffic is manic. Crossing the road is terrifying until you get used to just walking right amongst the cars, buses and motorbikes believing that they will work round you which they do!

Photo credit: blog.nepaladvisor.com