January comes around again

We are already entering the fourth week of January. It’s hard to believe. The coolish mornings and evenings have been very welcome – no air conditioner or fan required and I’m even able to drink tea without overheating! Even the swimming pool water has been a bit too cold for swimming. The reason is that although there is sunshine and heat during the day, no thermal protective covering is used at night and the water looses all its heat. Still no air-conditioning in the office and possibly next week the weather will still be reasonable. But in February the real heat resumes . . . In Nepal, they celebrate the 15th January as the coldest day of the year. And it is true. After that, you can actually feel the temperature warming incrementally. To me it feels much the same here.

Classes have almost finished and we’re now in the examination and marking phase. Now this process seems to be much the same anywhere you go but here, you are struck by the sheer numbers of students and the amount of student work to be corrected. There are so many students that they submit work in pairs or even trios thus reducing the number of papers to be corrected. There are many staff who are overloaded, somewhat like Mexico, but that’s the way it goes. What is constant in my daily living is the TV channel France 2. It keeps me in contact with the wider world. I used to watch the France 2 news on SBS TV in Aus so I know the presenters. In recent years, I even got to watch a program or two on the Internet. The quality of programming is very good and it means I don’t have to change channels too often. It’s wonderful for the French (language) of course – those on the screen actually speak to you intelligently!

I think it is the little things that make life worthwhile here - the kindness of the baker as he wraps the freshly baked baguettes in paper especially for me, the haberdashery vendor who looks forward to a chat when I go to buy one small spool of thread, the curtain maker who finally got my poufs filled with clean cotton after two months of waiting. I think I mentioned that most clothes are custom made. But have I told you about the sewing machines? Well, they are mostly the treadle-type Singer or Chinese equivalent, some with power connected but most still running with the treadle. The obvious advantage is that no electricity is required, a real plus during blackouts. You can put a treadle machine anywhere – on the street corner under a tree, in the outdoor workshop under a canvas awning, in the regular workshop to work alongside the electrified machine. And then there are the irons. There are the electric irons, of course, but many people still work with charcoal-filled irons dipping the iron surface into water to cool it down. Here such irons are not a museum item. Even one of the biggest hotels uses one. They had an electric iron but it was found to be left on overnight, so the owner had it replaced with the irreplaceable charcoal-filled one.