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Now two days into school. It was a little odd starting the week on a Sunday. Even more odd when in the first lesson we observed the teacher wrote the date on the board as 2066-02-31 (the date as we understand it actually being the 14th of June 2009). The Nepali calendar is a bit different to ours (it certainly doesn't seem like we've jumped over 50 years into the future up here!)

The days starts off with us walking across the village with Purna to get to school. We realised we'd only seen a small part of the village, as most of the rest of it lies on the other side of a ridge. It's actually a fair size (650-odd people). All very picturesque though. It's unbelievable to look at the very steep hillsides overlooking the village and realise it would take days to get to any of them on foot.

The school day starts with assembly – there are four houses, and the students line up in eight rows; girls and boys in each house in ascending height order. The little ones at the front are very cute. Each class takes in it turn to do a little presentation on the small stage at the front of the assembly ground. They also do some 'drill' including standing at ease and to attention, singing the national anthem and school song.

For the first few lessons of the day, we accompanied a young teacher who has classes with the primary students. He's a good teacher and they were good classes – he had them laughing and participating a lot. In the afternoon (after an enormous lunch at the in-laws' house, complete with more butter tea) we sat in on some classes with some of the older students and a different teacher. We came back home a little unsure of how we were going to be able to contribute all that much beyond some very minor suggestions.

We went down to dinner at normal time (6.30ish) to find the kitchen full of village folk. We sat down cross-legged in front of the stove, and were given butter tea ad nauseam. We're trying to work out the tactics, as when it gets cold it's even worse, but if you drink up quickly you just get refilled over and over again. It's obviously a big part of local culture to be generous with your hospitality, so it's really hard to say no when offered more food and drink. We saw the Tibetan tea being made in an ornate wooden cylinder, which we had thought might be a traditional weapon or something. Seeing how much butter goes into each pot did nothing to increase our enthusiasm for drinking the stuff though. We ended up sat that for ages, getting really uncomfortable after a while. Jhungma seemed to take pity on us looking hungry and made us a bowl of gruel (porridge oats with hot water) each. An hour or so later, with aching legs and backs, the guests has gone and we ate about 5 portions of dhal-baat each. We went to bed (after yet more butter tea) feeling a bit sick and sore. It's weird to be complaining about being over-fed, but we really will have to work out a way of saying we've had enough without offending our hosts.

Next morning, resolved to say no to seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths... however we still managed to end up eating two bowls of noodles and greens each for breakfast.

It was class 9's turn to do assembly this morning, and they were the first group to have boys and girls dancing together. It was a hindi film-style dance, and was very good.

We started the day by sitting in on a Maths lesson, which was geometry with compasses and set squares. They seemed to making everything a bit more complicated than it needed to be, but again not obvious how we could do much to improve matters. The rest of the day we were taking lessons by ourselves, as a few of the teachers are away on a training course. We were thrown into the first one with no warning, so we ended up resorting to the old fall-backs like hangman. We have also agreed to help classes 9 and 10 (the oldest students, up to 18) with their next assembly presentations. The idea is to get them to be more creative (most assembly pieces are verbatim from books etc... and there are very few original creations). Both classes seem happy about the idea of doing some sort of drama in English, and had some interesting ideas about topics to focus on. Some pretty weight subjects – discrimination, drug abuse, and girl-trafficing. However, when we started trying to tease some story outlines from them and get volunteers for roles such as director, writers as well as actors, they seemed to dry up a little. We may end up doing more of it than we intended ourselves. Our challenge is to get them to do as much as possible, and not spoon-feed. We also need to figure out what we can do with some of the other classes.

On a positive note, Drew was very pleased to use his favourite sentence to illustrate nouns, verbs etc... - “The little boy runs fast” (hard not to say it in Sinhala though!) and we had the first unintentional double-entendre when, filling in for an Accounts teacher, Drew asked “what is the definition of double entry?”.

At lunch there were 3 generations of Jhangmu's family sitting around the stove trying to slap more food onto people's plates before they have a chance to decline. We saw the villagers' technique of pulling their plates out of reach when the ladle of rice is brandished, or putting their hand over the mug / bowl when they've had enough tea. Down at dinner tonight, with fresh resolve to say no, and Jhangmu had prepared a lovely stew (bakpe) of potatoes, greens and pasta-like nuggets. We think we did okay at turning down thirds with our newly learnt techniques, but we're still not quite sure if we have quite cracked the balance of being polite and not turning into Mr & Mrs Creosote.

Computers were meant to be here today but have not made it. They are still to be brought on the bus from Kathmandu and then portered up. Hopefully they will be here in time for Drew to do something useful.

No electric at the moment, so we are writing this by head torch and candle light. The electric is very sporadic.

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