So I keep meaning to take photos of the orphanage, but it hasn’t really happened yet.

But, here is the orphanage from the outside!

There are 31 children living here, aged 4ish to 19. There are about 15 older girls, and 15 younger girls, and 2 boys, who are 18 or 19 and 22. Eli said they used to have lots of boys, and less girls, but they had problems with the boys so decided to stop taking them in. All the boys they did have had family to go back to except the eldest ones. There are only a few known orphans at here, and a group called ‘lost children’. The others have family who can’t care for them fulltime – I guess like when kids go into foster care in NZ.

  

The house is very tidy, and every morning I wake to the sound of sweeping. I would say it is clean – but I’m not sure since the dogs come and go through the house, and the puppy piddles everywhere.

This morning after breakfast I went downstairs and helped one of the older girls de-corn some of the maize that was drying on the porch. It didn’t take long before there were 25 helpers, and these kids sat for an hour and took the dried kernels off of the corn, then tidied up and dragged the sacks to the shed, no problem. I got blisters on my thumbs, so went and grabbed my camera feeling a bit pathetic that Sabina, a 4 year old, had tougher hands than me! I can’t spell the girls names, but the one I had started with had her cellphone out and was playing American pop music through it and singing. She loves Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift and Rihanna apparently!

 

 

The maize comes from the fields next door. I’ll get some photos soooooooon, but on the top photo you can see there is a fence along the wall top. This got put in last year, because of a leopard that was terrorizing the cows, dogs and children! It would come out of the corn fields and sit on the wall during the day, then at night sneak down looking for the dogs. Oh the problems one faces in Nepal!

P.S. I just ate the hottest food I’ve ever eaten, and my stomach is buuuuuuuuuurning. I snuck off very quickly after lunch to have a lie down.