Sunrise Farm

 Happy Nepali Mother's Day (from Friday the 6th)! Yesterday was momo night AND a blessed day without rice, so really there's cause for celebration all over. I've been here at Sunrise Farm since leaving Lukla on the 30th but it feels like much longer than a week. Though the farm is more urban (about 1km from the monkey temple, if I can mention that without Patrick getting PTSD) than the rural setting I was imagining, life is definitely back to basics here. This would be the longest I've slept in the same bed since January, but my sleeping quarters are a mat on the floor. The toilet is the squat variety in a shed outside and the shower is a pipe coming down from the rainwater tank into the other side of the shed. Shower temperature is controlled by the sun, so I've been aiming for late afternoon showers to maximise the day's heat. That being said, nothing fazes me much anymore and I'm very comfortable here and fell into a routine quickly. Despite the simplicity of the living quarters, and Kathmandu electricity only working a few hours a day, the WiFi is the best I've experienced since leaving home!

The family that owns the farm are the parents, Saroj (the only son still living at the farm, though his brothers live nearby), Prabina and Sabina. Prabina and Saroj speak decent English, though the parents are very limited, but also very kind and welcoming. The family has about 70 people who live in the area, and every day different brothers, aunties, nieces and all sorts stop by, always with a big smile and friendly "namaste!" As well as the family, the other permanent residents are a pregnant cow who is taken for a daily morning walk to enjoy a nearby pasture, a collection of noisy chickens and ducks, and Tuku the dog.

I found Sunrise Farm on the WorkAway website, when I was looking for opportunities to volunteer on an organic farm. I chose Sunrise because they are part of the Himalayan Permaculture Centre, a learning network about sustainable agriculture. Many other young and restless idealists have the same idea and I've met interesting other volunteers, both resident here like me and those who come in for the afternoon to work on a particular project. When I first arrived, there were three young men from Italy, France and Ireland, though they all left in the next day or two. An American girl left the day I arrived, as she is heavily involved in a farming project in India, and just checking out other projects. The only person remaining from my arrival is Doreena, a young German woman studying at the University of Sustainable Development near Berlin. She is really lovely and makes a true effort to pick up bits of Nepali to converse with the family. We were joined by another German girl, Renka, a recent graduate, yesterday. Each weekday, IDV (International Disaster Volunteers, a British charity) comes to work on building a new cowshed.

The work I've been doing has been about 75% farm work/gardening and 25% sanding and painting windows and doors on the main building, which is being repaired post-earthquake.
The "farm" is more like a very large garden, mostly designed on two levels. There are over 120 plants being grown organically- radishes, tomatoes, coffee beans, macadamia nuts, cucumbers, peaches, mulberries, etc. And absolutely masses of marijuana sprouting up all over. My farm work has included hoeing the land, mixing and filtering dirt/ash/compost/sand to make a fine soil suitable for planting vegetable seeds and replanting delicate macademia nut seedlings in polybags, watering the rows of plants in the evening, destemming mulberries, and peeling coffee beans. I'm getting blistered palms from the shovelling and hoeing and digging and stained fingers from dirt and mulberries, but also pretty nice musculature and a tan!


Mama cooks up three meals a day and it's been really good food, albeit mostly quite similar. Eating mulberry jam on pancakes the day after picking them is pretty wonderful though. We had a momo feast last night, with myself and then two Germans massacring the proper momo-making proceedings but sharing a lot of laughs with the sisters, whilst the youngest prattling away all night put all the Nepali speakers in stitches. Delicious momos were a much-needed break from dal bhat and rice!!

 

After three months of full-on travel and moving from place to place, I'm not leaving the confines of the farm much. The day after arrival, the Irish volunteer Jack took Saroj, Doreena and myself to a stupa high up a hill about 40 minutes away. Even despite the haze, the view over the city was wonderful, as we climbed to the open-air roof of a partially-built three storey building. 


 My only other excursions have been to yoga and ice cream (fairly certain one balances out the other). There is a free yoga class down the road I've attended twice. It's more active and aerobic than traditional yoga, but enjoyable nevertheless. The instructor and all other participants are Nepali, hence the class is run in the language, so I just guess what's going on by looking around the room.

I was planning to stay at Sunrise till I go home, but Doreena visited another farm about 2 hours away, and on Monday we're both going to move there for a week. Apparently it's much larger and I'm also looking  forward to being a bit further out from the city. My lungs are already desperately missing the mountain air!

Saroj and my German friends peeling coffee beans prior to roasting