Making the Adjustment

We arrived home safely yesterday, Mar 3. the flight went well and we arrived at Newark a half hour earlier than expected. All luggage was collected and we were on our way.

One of our people hand-carried a Nepali broom home with them. Unfortunately immigration saw it as having some living spores on it and it was confiscated. Following this we met our two drivers who brought us back to Hummelstown, PA where families were waiting to greet us all.

This trip was unique in that to my knowledge it was one of the first work team projects that we have had in the south Asia area, and that it was totally coordinated by the local partners. They planned for our involvement and had laid out all of the plans for the development of the SPICE hostel. Most construction in that part of the world begin construction by building a parimeter wall. This was what we were able to assist in with them.

The other thing that this group did more than many others was to spend quite a bit of time directly with the students in the Hostel. They came prepared to lead in several activities with the children. There was instruction in knitting (Particularly meaningful to me since my Mom used to teach hostel kids how to knit); a singing class where guests learned songs from the children and vise versa; and a great time of learning and playing some new games.

It was different being in Nepal during the time of a bundh (general strike). Fortunately it did not impact us very much. One activity had to be cancelled, but otherwise it only impacted our ground transportation. We did a lot of walking and riding rickshaws. There was a parade of nine rickshaws that took us to the airport. On arrival we were picked up by a bus from the Xenial Hotel.