Here are some excerpts from Wes' personal blog about his experience as a service team member in October 2010. Wes is a senior in high school and lives in Phoenix, AZ. He traveled to Nepal with his father, Paul, and Marian.
Tikapur, compared to everything else we had seen, is amazing. We were greeted as kings, given garlands of flowers, and infinite offers of assistance. We are living in a house run by a very kind family, and we spent today resting from our travel. Tomorrow morning I will be teaching how to read and use and make a map in the school, and then in the evening I will be teaching teachers how to use a microscope that we brought for them. My dad has already taught his first lesson on business to a room full of the local leaders. He explained the concept of lending, the side that the banks do not want them to know. Basically just some spread sheets showing the danger of compound interest as it relates to lending. It blew their minds as they came to realize how the banks make money and how they themselves seem to lose it so fast. I’m glad we are already helping.
When we finally arrived at the school, we were greeted like kings. A well-practiced cry of ”GOOD MORNING, SIRS!” sounded from the mass of assembled children, all itching to catch a glimpse of us. When we arrived, they formed a line in front of us, each approaching and presenting my father, Marian, and I with garlands of flowers. It was unreal. The kids are a hundred times more adorable than you can even imagine.
After our spectacular greeting, we spent a couple hours teaching the kids math and science topics, playing games, and at the end rewarded their hard work with candy. My class’ favorite game was “Duck Duck Goose,” but it was really funny because when I explained the game to the translator, he must have said it wrong to the kids because when we started playing, the first boy started walking around saying the plurals, “ducks, ducks, ducks, goosen!” I laughed because it was like that Brian Reegan routine where he talks about moosen, goosen, and boxen.
Today I talked about the Earth’s rotation around the sun and how it affects days and seasons. Pretty basic stuff for us, but it really blew their mind. Then we practiced an earthquake drill which the kids loved because they basically got to run around and go crazy without being told to behave. And the bubbles, they loved the bubbles, even the older kids freaked out when they saw that we had bubble wands and soap.
We’ve also spent a lot of time with the teachers from the local school. Their English needs a lot of work so we’ve spent hours drilling them with grammar, spelling, and pronunciation. One of our favorite ways to practice is just walking around in the garden or through the market and pointing to different things and saying their name. It’s been a total blast getting to know some of the teachers. They truly are inspirational people.
