It has been pretty surreal listening to the news on the BBC world service recently, with floods in the north and west of England taking top billing.

Just so you know, we share your pain! Monsoon has arrived here with a vengeance - it has rained almost non-stop for the last week which on the one hand is nice as the temperature drops right down, but everything in the house is now damp and starting to smell a bit...

Pokhara is apparently one of the wettest places on earth with an annual rainfall of over three metres, nearly a metre of which often falls in July. We are lucky here as the rain quickly runs off into the rivers, which are in deep gorges and do not tend to flood. People down stream are often not so lucky, and there have been many deaths from flooding this year in Northern India and Bangladesh. The drains quickly overflow here though and flood the road, adding to the general filth and making cycling a dangerous business as you can't tell how deep the potholes are!


These two pictures show the Seti, the main river running through Pokhara. Most of the year there is a whole industry on the side of the river quarrying and sorting rocks and gravel - all by hand. The first picture shows the Seti in full flood after a big storm, filling its gorge. The second is taken from the same point two days later and shows the banks of the river re-emerging and people getting back to work.



Landslides are a major threat here and the local roads are often blocked. This picture was taken near by, where attempts to build a new road had destabilised the hillside, which came crashing down after a heavy shower, fortunately just missing houses on both sides.

Evie pictures of the week.

Evie was recently given a little pushchair to wheel her toys around in but was very excited when she found she could fit in it herself...

Just when we were thinking that we were settling in to life here and thinking that we understood what was happening around us, something happens that completely takes us by surprise and makes us feel very alien again.

There aren't many main roads here in Nepal, but those that do exist are homes and sources of income to a whole mass of people. The thin strips of tarmac or gravel are tightly hemmed in by a maze of stalls selling everything from Britney Spears T-shirts to goats, workshops, garages and shacks that have been built on every spare bit of land and are home to sick looking dogs, cows, buffaloes and children.

Of course there are rules governing who could do what on the road sides, but like most rules in Nepal, they were either just ignored or avoided through the odd backhander here and there. Then, one morning earlier this week I noticed groups of people standing around on my ride in to work, obviously concerned about something. Soon after that the police arrived, looking nervous. And then the bulldozers.

Over the course of a couple of days, a strip about 10 metres either side of the road main Kathmandu road was cleared, flattening houses, shops, walls and petrol stations, from the centre of Pokhara to the edge of town. It looked like the aftermath of a war, piles of rubble everywhere and people milling about – surprisingly they didn’t seem angry, just frustrated and confused.

We were angry - it just seemed so pointless and wasteful and prejudiced against the poor who had no where else to live and other way of earning a living. Many Nepalis we have spoken to are not nearly so concerned. Apparently everyone knows the rules and this clearance has been planned for a while.

Two days later, shacks are already starting to reappear selling clothes and vegetables, just waiting for the next round…

Due a combination of our poor organisation and D*ll's (lack of) customer service we left home nine months ago without a lot of the software we thought we needed for our laptop.

Since then we have - legally - aquired almost all the tools we need without paying a penny. I have been amazed at the quality and quantity of programmes freely available on t'internet: OpenOffice for word processing and spreadsheets, Irfan photo software, Pegasus for email, Antivir virus protection, OnlineBible and Motzilla's web browser, not to mention google and skype. We are already using a few of these tools in the office and there is talk of trying to go completely MS free in the near future - for an organisation that has to account for every penny it receives, that would be big benefit.

One thing we are missing though is a calendar or scheduling tool that reminds you about deadlines and tasks that have to be completed. We used to find that the ability to link emails to tasks and set reminders was the main benefit of MS Outlook, and you can't do that with the tool we use.

If anyone knows of something that would do the job and is freely available, please get in touch.

This is a painful time for Evie, with a whole host of injections now due. She's had five in the last couple of weeks with plenty more to come. Fortunately most of the vaccines we need are readily available here and we get good advice and support from the expat doctors.

She hasn't been her normal self for the last few days and has come out in a bit of a heat rash, but still smiles a lot and is great fun. One area we are struggling with is discipline – when she does something deliberately naughty like throwing her food on the floor, we try to scold her, but she just laughs at us and we then find it very hard to keep a straight face. We are suddenly very sorry for all the grief we gave our parents!!

We covered a few miles last week. Elle had a good time in Kathmandu, shopping (why she really went) plus a little bit of working in the office and getting jabs for Evie (her justification for the trip!).

I travelled West, taking a bus to Nepalgunj down near the Indian border. Nepalgunj was hot – I only spent one night there, but it made me appreciate Pokhara even more! I picked up an old motorbike there that we are buying from some friends and travelled the 150km to Dang where I planned to help with some training. The bike is only 125cc and has a top speed of ~50km per hour, so it was a long trip!

The next four days were spent with the INF team in Dang, plus some local organisations that INF works with, trying to help them with fundraising and proposal writing. The aim was to give some teaching, but most of the time was dedicated to practical proposal writing. They seemed to enjoy it, and as ever, I was really impressed by the Nepali people's ability to stand up and talk, tell a joke or even sing in front of a group seemingly without any nerves. Trying to prseent in Nepali was hard work, and there were so many blank faces at the end of the first session that I reverted to English – fortunately there were a couple of people who could translate.

These local organisations were groups who campaigned for the rights of the disabled, ran awareness campaigns to prevent disability and gave training disabled people to help them become indenpendant. Most of them worked in very remote areas and were often the only source of hope for disabled people who are often seen as a curse and locked away out of sight. INF works with these groups and tries to develop them and help them to become independent, but it is very hard for them to raise their own money without proper access to the outside world and with corruption in local government taking away what little official funding they should get.

The ride home – another 250km – was spread over another two days. After the long straight roads of the Terai plains, it was great to get back onto the 'bango-tingo' (zig-zags) of the mountain roads and a real relief when Pokhara finally came into view. We are coming to the end of rice planting season here and the fields are beautifully green with paddies flooded and rice shoots coming through.