Aaaaa...Uuuuu....Mmmm (Om)

Friday, August 24^th

Today we are flying to Pokhara to attend a Buddhist meditation and yoga retreat for the weekend.  We finish the retreat Monday morning and have booked ourselves in for paragliding. What I didn’t really give much thought to is how do you actually get started parasailing. Well, the answer was pretty straightforward. You have to run and jump off a cliff!

The Internet at Mountain Fund went down last week on the 18^th or 19^th. They figured out while we were away that someone had hacked into the account. So since we have been back everyone is going over to the Pro World house, another of Scott’s volunteer houses, which is right beside the Mountain Fund house. The Mountain Fund house now seems somewhat deserted. Between the departure of all of our closest new friends and the house staff migrating over to the other house, the main house seems somewhat deserted. We have been staying in the Family house all along but head to the main house for meals and to socialize. Katia is now the only person in the main house. As a result her entire experience is and will continue to be quite different than ours has been. She was also going to volunteer at the Orchid Garden however on her first day they put her in the classroom that I had been working in. That was about all she could take of that. She quickly realized that as I was saying, there is very little we have to offer these young children and that work in that classroom is mostly helping the teacher keep things under control so that she can try and work with the children individually. It turns out that there is another school which deals with older kids 10-14ish (I wish I had known this sooner) anyway Katia has asked to be moved over there. Like me she too feels that she has come all this way to try and contribute and that is not happening in the Orchid Garden’s pre-school class.

Hailey was not too thrilled at me when we arrived at the airport two hours before our flight. She said I always do that, I get anxious and we end up showing up well before we have to. That being said last week I heard that one of the volunteers headed to the airport two hours before his flight thinking that would be plenty of time but then got stuck in traffic and almost missed his flight. Our flight only took about 20 minutes so we were settled in and having our first meditation lecture and session by 3PM. The location is nice and the accommodation modest as are most places in Nepal and it is clean but I put my laptop on the shelf and as I sit here typing there are little red ants crawling out of the keyboard. That can’t be good for it?? It is an early day tomorrow and we are suppose to be focusing on our internal selves so I think I’m going to shut down for the rest of the weekend.