Elle has just returned from a week in Nepalgunj and Surkhet down in the mid west where she was giving a training course on performance management. This is something that is not really in the Nepali work culture and is difficult for many managers to carry out. Feedback from the course was good though, so hopefully they will be able to follow it through. Elle was fortunate to make it back as trouble erupted in Nepalgunj over the weekend and the town has been under curfew for several days.

There has been disruption throughout most of the south of the country for a couple of weeks now (http://www.nepalnews.com.np/archive/2008/feb/feb20/news06.php), although Pokhara has been very peaceful. Elections are planned for April, and each of the main political parties and their rent-a-mobs are now jostling for position. Roads into Nepal from India have been blocked for the last week, meaning that very little fuel can come into the country, and combined with around 8 hours of power cuts a day, it is a miserable time for many individuals and businesses in the country.

It has been a good time home alone with Evie, but it is great to have Mum back!

Saturday was Pokhara marathon day, and I was pleased with the results on a day that was perfect for running. I came in 10^th and picked up my first running paycheck – at £5 not quite enough to go professional, but a nice surprise!

This was a warm up to another event that is coming up in three weeks– the yak-attack! This is an 8-day stage race around the Annapurna Himalayas that follows a popular trekking route to the North of Pokhara. When it is clear you get fantastic views of these mountains and it is going to be great to get in amongst them, but the route is pretty fierce and it is going to be hard work! A friend, Ed Lewis, is coming out for the race, but apart from us, the competitors are almost all Nepali and surviving is going to be hard work, let alone keeping up with them!

I am trying to raise support for INF through this event. If you are able to, please give money here: http://www.justgiving.com/philmorris1 You can find out more about the yak-attack from their website: (http://yak-attack.co.uk) and I’ll try and post updates during the event…

It is hard to keep track of Evie’s development - she is growing so quickly that new things appear on a daily basis.

She usually knows exactly what she wants and is developing a good range of strategies to get it. One of the first is a desperate ‘pleeeaase’, and if that fails, throwing something at you or unraveling the toilet roll is usually a good way to get attention to her cause. Sometimes she cannot understand how her parents can be so thick, and when English doesn’t work, switches to Nepali instead.

She loves being with people and is very interested in everything that is going on around her. These pictures show a group of boys who were playing cards near our house and were quite happy for Evie to come and watch – there is no such thing as personal space in Nepal!

She also loves animals. She knows the names or noises of most that you see wandering in a typical Nepali street and calls them out as she sees them – moo, miaow, cooka (chicken), gog, duck and ai (buffalo) are the common ones. Unfortunately goats are also plentiful. Evie knows them by their Nepali name – bakra – but doesn’t pronounce it quite right and happily shouts out “bugger, bugger” whenever they appear.

Additions to the family....

One of the things we were sad to give up when we left the UK were our chickens, and despite a lot of press about the spread of bird flu in India, we finally got around to replacing them.


Having always bought laying chickens in the past, we decided to get some younger ones and watch them grow, so we have just bought four little week old chicks. The first few nights we had them were very cold and we were so worried that they might catch a chill that we rested their box on a hot water bottle.







Evie loves them and wants to check on the 'kookas' first thing each morning (kookara is Nepali for chicken) and often wants set them free from their little enclosure. They seem to be thriving despite the attention and are due for inoculations in the next few days.

Last week was cold - so cold even some of the goats were dressed for the occasion! Being cold is not a problem if you're active, or there is somewhere you can go to get warm, but on some days last week the sun never broke through the cloud and sitting in front of a computer in a unheated office was hard work. We don't remember it being this cold last year, and someone from the UK would probably find it quite pleasant, but we seem to have got aclimatised to hot weather and have been suffering!






The last few days have been much better, and the weather seems to have turned a corner, giving us some superb views of the mountains.



















This week we have mostly been taking pictures of Evie.