I am a trustee of the UK-based charity Pipal Tree. This is a blog I wrote for them during my recent 3 month visit.

I first visited Shree National Basic School in Bhatighadi at the start of November 2022. During this visit, I immediately experienced the very supportive and caring environment that was provided for students by the staff. So many happy faces in a small, under-resourced school. Classes range from kindergarten/nursery up to grade 8. Class sizes aren’t huge but the school does not have sufficient teachers for all of the classes.  The school is built on a nice plot of land with a small garden, but the facilities would benefit from some structural improvements. In fact, one block is prone to flooding during the wet season and needs replacing. This is something that Pipal Tree is working on. The school was extremely grateful for the laptops and extra classroom provided by Guy’s Trust, and all students were excited at the prospect of hands-on IT lessons rather than the purely theoretical they, and most other students, are used to. After grade 8, the students have to travel 5km along a busy road to the nearest secondary school.

Having a native English speaker in school, who is also a teacher, seemed too good an opportunity to miss so I was paraded into one class after another for some very impromptu English teaching activities in every class from the nursery to grade 8. Deciding to share ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’ with grade 1 was great fun, if slightly taxing on the back and knees. The students and teachers really enjoyed it. In fact, so much that as soon as that lesson finished, the English teacher, with a big smile on her face, herded the kindergarten students in to experience the same song. I was about to launch into a repetition, but then thought it was a good opportunity to develop the teacher’s skills and I invited her to run through the same song with the new class. She did a great job and my back got a much needed rest.  

Heads, shoulders, knees and toes may be great fun for smaller children, and for their teachers to watch a rather sweaty English woman perform, but not really appropriate for older children. They do, however, still like to have fun and participate in interactive learning. Teaching vocabulary provides some good opportunities for this and with the help of some very quickly prepared flashcards (i.e. pieces of paper with the words written on them) I was able to demonstrate a variety of activities. Grade 8 were working on a chapter based on journalism so, using some very simple language structures, I modelled a short conversation with a student and then the rest of the class worked in pairs, with the help of a substitution table, to conduct their own interviews. All good fun, if slightly chaotic due to the unplanned nature. I did realise from this short visit that further input in some areas of language teaching, particularly phonics, would be beneficial.  

When my friend, and former teaching colleague, Brooke, told me she would be visiting Nepal over the New Year, I thought it would be a great opportunity to return to the school and deliver some very small-scale teacher training. Together we planned a selection of phonics activities using flashcards and demonstrated various activities with grades 1 and 2. The activities were interactive and the students really enjoyed participating. Considering this was the first time they had encountered phonic sounds, they did extremely well. As did the local English teacher, who was eager to replicate the activities herself on the second day! It was very encouraging to see how well received the input was for both English teaching and for increasing the use of the laptops. So much potential here. 

All work and no play is not a mantra by which the school operates and dancing is such an important part of the social aspect of the school, especially when there are visitors. We finished our input with some basic action songs for the youngest children and their classroom was soon filled with teachers and older students….and music….loud music. I suppose given that we were encouraging active participation in the lessons we demonstrated, it was only fair that we should actively participate in the dancing. Nepali songs seem to be quite long and we soon began to gradually remove the many layers of clothing the cold weather of the Terai had necessitated. It was really a privilege to experience this hospitality and for the grand finale, one of the grade 8 boys impressed us with his Michael Jackson inspired routine. Not what you would expect in a small rural village in Madesh Province!

In addition to visiting this school, we also dropped into a couple of the Community Learning Centres (CLC) in the area. These centres play a vital role in the education of the children. Unfortunately, the local education system, for various reasons, does not provide the input necessary to succeed. Extra tuition is vital if students are to pass the exams. The communities with which we work do not have the financial resources to provide this tuition, so with the help of our local partner, Mithila Wildlife Trust, we have invested in a number of CLC that provide this extra tuition to disadvantaged children before and after school. A small salary is paid to older students to help the younger ones with lessons. This money also helps the older students with their higher education.

The first CLC we visited was in a Dalit community near Bhatighadi Forest. On a cold and foggy December morning we called in to see tens of students squeezed into two classrooms, working diligently on their homework. Seeing their children succeed often has a positive impact on the parents who may have previously had no hope of ever getting out of a never-ending cycle of poverty. Now parents can be seen to engage in less destructive behaviour and homelife has improved.

The second CLC we visited was in a former leper colony. Leprosy is no longer a problem here, but the community are very disadvantaged and looked down upon by others in the area due to their caste and the fact that the adults earn a living by collecting garbage in the area. During my first visit here, one of the boys was very upset and did not want to return to school as he had falsely been accused of theft when something had gone missing in school. The two tutors here are both studying a bachelors in education so we thought it would be good to demonstrate some of the phonics activities, even though the students were of a very mixed age range. The tutors were aware of English phonics, but judging by their reaction and responses, had not actually been able to put any of the teaching theory into practice, which I expect is often the case. It was a very short input here, but at least they had a taste and we left them with some flashcards. Hopefully, we will be able to host some online resources that the teachers can access and help with their professional development.

For any teachers working in either their own country or on the international circuit, if ever you felt under-appreciated or jaded by the profession, spend some time, no matter how brief, in one of these environments and you will be filled with such positive energy from the students, if a little sadness that you can’t do more.