20 pounds in 20 days, with friendly support of diarrhea.
Arrived in Kathmandu I’m feeling not the same than last year, no big impressions that we haven’t seen before. So this time we know what to do. Taxi to Thamel, the tourist part of Ktm, also the price for the taxi is still known, so that nobody will take us to the cleaner.
Three days waiting for Jolana, and thamel gets annoying (wanna smoke? Hashish, Marihuana?) Just two steps out of the hotel and some strange people want to sell you third class crap. So we took a walk to a part of this big city where they sell tools and all you need for building something. The quality was nepali, but i had the plan to build a working station for the Youthclub. Yes, sometimes also Frank has a plan :) We just checked the prices, because we had enough weight with us. We wanted to buy at least in Dumre, the next bigger town from Aandhimul.
The next day we took a walk to a big temple on a hill. To get there we crossed something like a river. They follow a succesful system here. Waste dump and canalization are one. Now only waiting for monsoon and everything is all right again. At least the whole excrement flows into the ocean. But are we better? We are burning our waste and the high toxic filter dust we put under the earth in old mines. In the western countries everything looks clean, and here in Ktm it stinks to heaven. And that is what no picture and no tv can show you. The heat also.
On the third day we met Jolana in Thamel. We took a last good meal and Andi and me we decided to start the trip to aandhimul next day. Jolana needed one more day for organizing things. A great welcome in aandhimul again, flowers and red powder. And i wanted to start my plan as soon as possible, and it worked really good. They’ve bought a blackboard for repairing a classroom door, but it wasn’t big enough for this, so i asked to use it for building a working bench, and they agreed.
The very interested youthclub by my side, i began to put out all the tools i brought with me from Germany. We made a plan, how to use this blockboard most efficient. They watched and learned how to use something like a circular saw and a drill for screwing. I also had the right screws. You can ́t get them in Nepal, but I brought enough.
The next Day we organized further thinner blockboards, two for building little tables and two very thin for repairing the classroom door. We made a plan again, they just looked, because they could not understand after they’ve seen the result. Little tables for the school. I let them use this dangerous circular saw, and i also told them about the danger. They done good work, and they had fun in learning, so the learning was very easy.
The next job was to repair the door. I filled up the wholes in it with wood, put a few screws to stabilize it and sticked the thin board onto. Because of other problems in the village i couldn’t finish this till leaving, sorry. There were several leaks in the new water system and after digging out the pipe we saw that someone drilled wholes into, what makes andi very angry.
Yes they are like children. If there comes no water out of the valve, let’s look if there is some in the pipe and drill a whole in it. I repaired the first leakage an the youthclub watched me. I also explained what I was doing, and the next leakage they repaired alone. SUCCESS!
The last thing to repair was bigger. An old water system on the other side of the village didn’t work anymore. The people showed me the whole system from the valves, the collection tank to the intake. And here was the problem. There was a wall around the spring, a little sea. This wall was damaged, so that the waterlevel sank about one meter. No water could get into the intake and so they also removed the pipe that lead there. I found an inspections cap, that lies at the ground of the intake, about one meter deeper than the old intake. That should work. And it did.
We put a PVC tube into this inspection whole and proofed it with an old t-shirt. The highest point of the system was the next problem. This one meter was missing, and the result was, that they had to dig out the pipe on a way of about five meters, to put it in the earth again one terrace deeper. Not much work, but at this time I was ill, and I also thought, that they were interested in a functionable water system. But no one came to do this work. This was very dissappointing, and I decided to cure myself. I still don’t know if they repaired it till now. I told the youthclub what to do, so that they should ask them.
The money from our festival Röbbeck Röcks I gave to Jolana. It should be for a youthclub building. And now while I’m at home, i got an email with a picture of the building site, and that makes me happy again. I think this was a successful journey, because they started something by there own, they see that they will reach something, if they only try... ... i still don’t know, if i do this again next year. It was not so easy this time.
But Röbbeck Röcks will start again.
Frank
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