BMS Day of Prayer

Monday is the 2011 BMS World Mission Day of Prayer. So this afternoon a group of us got together at our house to pray. It was good to spend some time together thinking and praying for the work that BMS are involved with all over the world. We were guided in our prayer by resources from BMS’s own website, which you can download by clicking here.

It’s also a special couple of days as we know tomorrow churches across the UK will be praying for the work of BMS and on Monday the BMS offices in Didcot and others all over the world will also be joining in prayer. So if you want more information follow this link to the BMS Website.

BMS Day of Prayer 2011

A week at KISC

Stealing an idea from another blog we read we thought we’d do a week in our lives. This time we’re with Dan.

Monday
In the Secondary school we have assemblies on Monday and Friday. This week was exam week for our senior students at KISC so our assemblies are always slightly disjointed as we try to fit 80 students into a room setup for 40 to take exams. However, the students gather round and sit on the edges of tables and we carry on regardless. After assembly I was running the Secondary Leadership Meeting, the “workhorse of the secondary school”. This week we were trying to finalise our assessment policy to cement changes that have been taking place over the last 2 and a half years. One of my key roles is in managing all the curriculum and assessment of the whole school, and while we are mostly a British Curriculum we try to be as truly international as possible to enable our students to study anywhere in the world after KISC. So setting up an assessment policy that enables that involves a lot of work and development.
The rest of Monday saw me teaching Grade 8, but a bonus free as Grade 12 were in exams.

Tuesday
Tuesday begins with homeroom, and I am the Grade 8 homeroom teacher. Grade 8 is the biggest year group in the whole school at 19 students, but of course that’s small compared to the UK.
This term we’ve been looking at slavery in PSHE, so I gave them this morning’s homeroom to work in groups looking at some of the tactics of the abolitionists in the 17th & 18th Century. Next week we will be comparing slavery of that time to modern day slavery. I actually had no classes after that as the rest were in exams, and so I had a productive day of work, doing some planning for my classes over the next few weeks. Tuesday evening is our house group where we meet with a bunch of other expats to study the bible and pray together.

Wednesday
Wednesday is always my teaching free day, so again it was a day of getting admin done, this time focusing on updating all our handbooks for the various different sets of parents and staff ready for next school year. At the beginning of March we will be asking the students to select their IGCSE and AS options ready for me to plough away at the timetable for 4 months. We’ve also decided to completely restructure the daily lesson times and move to a two week timetable, so I will have all that to factor into next year.

Thursday
Thursday was a slightly crazy day and went from a massive high to a deep low as the day went on, but it all worked out ok in the end. Since Christmas we had been having problems with some very important software, our whole school database. We have a very impressive system, which contains all our staff and student and parents details as well as all the details about the courses students are studying and their grades and reports. However, this wasn’t working and our technical ICT staff had been working all hours to try to fix it since the start of term, they had got it working in stages, over the week but crucially we still couldn’t get any outputs working. Having a lot of data stored in a computer with no way of getting it out is fairly useless. Finally, around lunchtime, we were able to print out some data and I was very happy. However, about an hour later we realised that the data it was pumping out was old and didn’t include any recent updates, including the reports a number of our staff had been writing. We thought for a while it had all been lost, but then thankfully it was retrieved and now we have a fully working system.

Friday
Friday often focuses on SMT (Senior Management Team) for me. This is made up of the heads of each section of the school and deals with all the big issues of the whole school. This Friday we focused on our staffing needs that are ongoing and we were discussing how we get “the right people on the bus” to enable us to continue to be the best school we possibly can. It was a good end to a busy week.

Some news articles on Nepal from the BBC:
Working by Candelight
Prime Minister at last

Happy Christmas

We were trying to think of what to write for a blog this week, and the best idea we’d had was a traditional Christmas Family letter style blog. Till Wednesday when we had a fun morning out.

Kathmandu is getting very cold at the moment and so, with no central heating the evenings (at 5oC) are uncomfortable without a heater. We’ve been using a gas heater which had been playing up a bit with the flame shooting up a lot higher than it was supposed to, making us reluctant to use it. So rubbish at DIY Dan decided to investigate.

Changing the gas bottle worked, but on closer investigation I realised the gas bottle seemed to be leaking a little, but only when it was turned on. So I decided to change the regulator to see if that helped, it didn’t, the bottle still leaked.

Now the fun started while trying to change the regulator, as the plastic pipe going to the regulator was attached so tightly I couldn’t pull it off, so out came my trusty penknife to slice the pipe off (gas turned off by this point). To be honest I’ve always thought my pen knife was a bit blunt. My thumb proved otherwise…

And so, a dash up to Patan Hospital. Now I had picked the best time of the week to do the slicing, 8.45am on a Wednesday morning, as the Foreigners clinic is at 9am on a Wednesday. So we stuck our head in and asked if they did stitches. The two doctors and one nurse were having a quiet morning with no other patients in so they were happy to help.

Becky, being no fan of blood, needles and other such stuff, elected to wait outside the room while the doctors and nurse set to work. While trying to put anaesthetic into Dan’s thumb (right on the middle knuckle) Dan decided he’d had enough and passed out through the pain.

So Dan ended up having his two stitches done, while lying on the floor of the room, with two doctors a nurse, and now Becky in attendance.
And now for something completely different…

We wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a Wonderful New Year. May you know God’s Blessings as we celebrate the birth of His Son Jesus Christ, our Saviour.

Media

Here are two videos we've enjoyed recently, to do with our life here, kind of...

KISC - "This Is Us" is a selection of photos taken around school by a professional photographer on her recent visit and put together with music.

KISC - This Is Us from kisc school on Vimeo.

This video has been put together by a good friend of ours and the voice over is from another good friend. We thought it was quite funny, not that we are advertising the organisation (International Nepal Fellowship) or suggesting that these gifts would make excellent Christmas presents, although of course they would.


The KISC website has also been updated and relaunched recently. To take a look go to www.kisc.co. There is loads of information about KISC on here, which wouldn't be interesting to most of our readers, but some of it might, particularly the galleries page. You may also want to look at the vacancies page, just in case you know anyone you might be interested in working at KISC.

Festivals

“In honour of the auspicious occasion of Dashain Festival and Tihar Festival 2010 we are happy to present this offer of buy one BrandName Cup a Soup, get one free”

Monsoon is finished. The weather is cooling. The fields are green and the rivers are full. School is on holiday. The first kites are being flown over the housetops. The nights are drawing in. Festival season is upon us.

I saw the above offer in a local shop yesterday, and felt it was almost too good to turn down, but turn it down I did. However all the shops have banners of various sizes wishing us a Happy Dashain 2010 (or 2067 depending on how Nepali they are) and there are many billboards expressing similar wishes.

Dashain is the biggest Hindu festival here in Nepal and consists of 10 days of festivities where various things are celebrated and worshiped (including cars!) and is followed by a week of visiting family etc, a bit like the week between Christmas and New Year in the UK. So in total about 17 days of worship and festivities. It starts tomorrow but the first few days are usually quite quiet and schools and work continues until the bigger celebrations next week.

Tihar then follows at the end of the first week of November. Better known as Diwali this is the festival of light, and we blogged about it last year.

Although Nepal is now officially a secular country, Hinduism is obviously still the de facto religion. It can be a difficult time for Nepali Christians who don’t wish to partake in the celebrations and festivities as there can be pressure from family and community to join in.

We’re spending the holiday by heading of to Pokhara for a 5 days of rest and relaxation, and 3 days of trekking. Thought we’d give trekking a go with Samuel, to see how he, and his porter Dad, find it. We’ve not been to Pokhara since before Samuel was born, so it will be nice to go back, and spend some time away from the hustle, bustle and pollution of Kathmandu.

The photos on this blog were taken on a recent walk (and we confess none by us but by our skilled photographer friend, Catherine).

One Year On

This week we passed the one year anniversary of our return to Nepal as a Family. Looking back over that year it has been an interesting time with some good times and plenty of challenges. We thought for this update we might highlight some of the more significant ones.

Vice Principal

Our return a year ago signalled the start of Dan’s work as the Vice Principal of the Secondary School. Although a lot of the main parts of his job description he was already doing before, such as the timetable, assessment and being a member of the SMT, it’s amazing how just having a title placed on you increases the amount of what we like to call “dukkha” that comes your way. (I’m sure no translation is needed).

We’ve already mentioned in other blogs and letters about the biggest challenge in that time has been being without the Secondary Principal for 6 months, however she is now back and Dan is enjoying being part of a principaled team!

Dan would say he’s enjoyed so much of the work that he has done over the last year and taking on the challenges of the role. It helps that he’s working in an great school that has some fantastic students, and really great staff too.

Motherhood

While Parenthood began a little longer than a year ago, it was the return to Nepal that saw Dan go back to work full time and Becky become a full time house mum. This brings with it extra challenges living in a city like Kathmandu with it’s lack of green space and activities specially designed for one year olds. However, it also brings with it a great community. Becky has built up a strong relationship with another first time mother of a baby just a couple of months younger than Samuel. She’s also been able to join a mothers prayer group, a singing group and frequented at least two other mums and tots groups from time to time.

Becoming One

Samuel has faced all the normal challenges of a 3 month old to a 15 month old and taken them in his stride. He has learnt to sit up, walk, start to talk and have lots of fun in the process. He has a good friend in William, the son of Becky’s close friend, and managed to see more of the world than the average one year old. As you can see from the photo above he's adapting well to the culture. Next month he’s off on his first trek!

Transient Community

The mission community is always changing and during this year we have said goodbye to some great friends with whom we built up good friendships during our first, Samuel-less, stint here. There are always people leaving Nepal, and of course arriving, but saying goodbye always seems much harder than the joys of the Hello’s. Also, the longer we are the harder it seems to build good new friendships, as in the back of your mind there is always the thought, we’ll just have to say goodbye to these guys soon. However, we do try to fight that and invest in new relationships and are thankful for the new people that are always arriving. The photo is from a get together with two other familes we had, one of which left Nepal last week.

New School Year

Tomorrow is the start of the new school year. We’ve had a lovely five week summer break, of which nearly four we spent in the UK. It was great to see loads of family, the photos on this blog are of Samuel and his Grandparents, and quite a few friends while we were there, sorry if we didn’t get to see you.

Regular readers will know that a key issue is always staff. As my role in the Secondary is managing the timetable and allocating all the staff; working out exactly how many we need and to do which jobs is one of my main concerns. Well we are delighted to be fully staffed for the start of this year, thanks to a number of new staff that are joining us for this year.

In the secondary we have a new Art teacher from Holland, and a teacher of junior Science who had joined us from India. We have a guy from Switzerland on his gap year here for 8 weeks to work as a teaching assistant. We also have a couple from the US who’ve come out with their 3 children. He’ll be helping teach some of the music and she will be one of the Primary class teachers. We’ve actually got 2 other new Primary class teachers, one in her 20’s and another who’s a bit later on in her career who’ve come from the States. The primary are also blessed with quite a few gap year students this year who are coming for one or two terms, including one I met on Friday who’s come out from Northern Ireland to do some PE and Art. But best of all (from my point of view) we have the returning Secondary Principal who’s back after 6 months home leave in Australia.

I was talking with her and the Head of the whole School on Friday about our staffing and while we are extremely pleased to have so many good new staff coming we also realised that we were the only 3 Mission members of staff who are committed for longer than the next two years. This is part of the nature of the school. So many staff come and go during each year it does make some things hard.

However, so many of the staff have a huge impact even in just a short space of time. One that springs to mind is a Northern Irish girl that came out to help with PE for 6 months at the end of 2008, but had to leave early due to a knee injury. Many of the students remember her well and are looking forward to her return in January 2011. Another is a couple who came from Australia in January, she is now taking on the role of Head of the English Faculty and he is about to run the school play this term. They are due to return to Australia at Christmas, but they will leave a significant legacy from just one year’s service.

Update

Opps. Forgot to mention one new member of staff in the secondary. A certain former KISC Geography teacher who is returning this term to teach some of the A-Level. Goes by the name of Becky!