Holidays

The past two weeks have been filled with celebrations and trips and friends and festivals and hikes and books and naps. I'm really living the good life here :) We have had such an irregular start to our school year because of holidays that happen to fall back to back here in Punakha. Frist was Losar (the New Year), followed the king’s birthday, and then a religious festival called Tshechu.

We did have two and a half days with students at school, however no classes were taught. The days were filled with organizing students into class sections, cleaning the school grounds (which the students did while I was told to “supervise”), and distributing textbooks. We also had a lot of free time and spent it having tea with my 8^th grade girls, discussing differences between life for my students here in Bhutan and students in the U.S., and many lessons for me in Dzongkha.  School was let out on Wednesday, not to resume until the 2^nd of March, which meant that I was faced with 11 days of no school and no plans.

The only time that I really socialize with others in my community is during school. So I knew I had to go out of my comfort zone and make a point to go visit people. I've had many colleagues say things such as “come over for tea sometime during the holiday”. And in my head I respond with, when is sometime? What if I come over and I’m interrupting something? What do people even do here in their free time?? In the end I did manage to get myself out of my hermit hole and was rewarded with successful social interaction! One time I tried to go help a fellow teacher from school who was moving houses. But instead of allowing me to help, she sat me down in the sun with a book and made me tea. It’s not what I intended, but it was a good start!

For the King’s birthday, I went with my principal and a busload of students from my school to a celebration and an exhibition of reading programs that schools are implementing. The celebration happens every year and our students prepared cultural dances to preform for head officials in our district and spectators. The exhibition of reading programs, however, was new. The King has declared 2015 as “Reading Year” so each school is meant to develop a new program that will foster good reading habits and a love of reading in the students. I was sent with the principal as a representative of the group of three teachers that are responsible for developing Dechentsemo’s reading program.  (If I haven’t already mentioned it, Dechentsemo is the name of my school).

Students from Dechentsemo handing the Ministry of Education officials pamphlets and explaining our reading program. 

Along with students, the celebration also had professional masked dancers. 

The boys from Dechentsemo performing their dance. 

I also got together a good amount with fellow BCF teachers over the holiday. One friend, Dylan, was in town to photograph a marathon and he took me on his borrowed motorbike to Sebastian’s place on the other side of the valley. The biggest morale booster that I've experienced sine being here is getting together with friends who are going through the same thing and with whom there is no language barrier. Sebastian and I also took a trip up to Gasa to visit the hot springs and the Gasa Dzong. Gasa is north of Punakha, and significantly colder. The hot springs were lovely, and the view of the surrounding mountains even better.

I have never been so ill prepared for a trip as I was when we left for Gasa. I naïvely assumed that the Gasa hot springs were probably a tourist destination and being such, would have accommodations that tourists would be used to. Luckily, while trying to catch a ride to meet Sebastian and leave in our arranged taxi, my principal picked me up and discovered that we had not brought bedding, food, or anything to cook our nonexistent food on. He made a couple quick calls and we found ourselves stopping on the way to pick up a rug and sleeping bags from my principal’s brother who teaches at a school that’s on the road to Gasa. Then, once there, he hooked us up with his wife and children who also happen to be vacationing in Gasa so that they could cook for us. The guest houses where vacationers stay were booked up, but by a stroke of luck, the manger had some cancellations, or a miscalculation, or maybe it was the deities of Bhutan looking out for us, but he found an empty room for us to stay in. We made friends who drove us in the back of their pickup truck to the Dzong and who cooked us lunch and dinner the second day. If it hadn’t been for the incredible hospitality of the Bhutanese, we probably would have ended up sleeping under the stars in our clothes and surviving off of crackers and oranges.

That being said, I never felt stressed during the trip. Although I’ve experienced a rollercoaster of emotions since being here, stress is not one of them. The couple of times that I have started to feel stressed or frustrated with situations, I realize that I feel even more out of place because no one around me is stressed.

For now I’m off to PunakhaTshechu and will probably have pictures from it next time I blog J

The Gasa guest houses where we stayed. 

Our room inside the guest house. Thank goodness for the borrowed run and sleeping bags! 

The man who gave us a ride back to Punakha from Gasa, me, and Sebastian in front of Gasa Dzong. Although now used for administration offices and monasteries, Dzongs were originally built as fortresses. 

My village of Thinleygang! Taken on one of my hikes. I live in the big pink building on the left.