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Saturdays are the only full day off, so we're writing this sat on an outcrop in a clearing on the hill opposite the village of Melanchi. It was only about an hour's walk to get over here, past the river, and the watermill where Jhungma was grinding wheat into flour. [Later on in the day we were treated to warm chapatis made with this flour; pretty certain that's the freshest bread we've ever had, and it was lovely!]

Not a great deal else planned for today – we're thinking next week we might climb this hill we're on properly and stay at the lodge near the top; then you can climb the peak very early in the morning before the clouds descend.

The rest of the week since our last entry went by fairly unremarkably – we're settling into the routine of teaching, reading, eating, sleeping etc... Whilst it does get pretty warm here in the sunshine as the day goes on, washing in cold water that's come down off the hills at 7am (when the night's been cold enough to sleep under blankets) requires a bit of determination.

The villagers are getting concerned that the monsoon is yet to arrive – the shortage of water is not good in many obvious respects, but for us this has meant warm sunny days. Also there has been pretty much no electricity for the week, so we've been eating by the fire with light from kerosene lamps and candles at night. With no lights about, and clear skies, there have been some amazing starry nights. Our candle stocks are dwindling a little from reading into the night... However, when we say 'night' we're generally going to sleep between nine and ten.

There is a half day of lessons on Friday and then yesterday was the inter-house quiz which we had to hurriedly throw a few questions together for in the absence of the English teachers. Questions from all subjects are given to the four houses – quite a nice way to end the week.

Yesterday afternoon we went to explore around the village. It was quite nice walking past lots of houses and being waved at by students who we are getting to know better. In general, everyone is very friendly – beaming smiles and namastes are the order of the day.

On the way back past the temple a young woman got talking to us and invited us to see 'Lama reading'. We weren't quite sure what this was going to entail, but thought we'd give it a go. We took our shoes off at the door of the small room that she led us in to, and were ushered into the centre of the room where we sat cross-legged on a foam roll-mat. We found ourselves beneath a gas lantern and surrounded by cross-legged women from the village on three sides of the room. In front of us sat a Lama – a forty-ish year old man dressed in a well-worn fleece jacket and t-shirt. Everybody had a stack of long rectangular sheets in front of them with prayers written in script on both sides of each sheet. After the excitement of us coming in to join them, they soon settled down to chanting away through the prayers very melodically. The Lama's bassy voice was nicely complemented by the surround-sound female vocals, and it was quite an amazing experience. We sat very still for half an hour, and were both lost in a very relaxed contemplation. When they stopped for a break, we made our exit and went off to dinner feeling most tranquil.

This morning we were treated to 'chumpas' which are balls of barley flour dough that you break apart and dip in chilli relish. Our hosts had a giggle at our rookie error of trying to chew the balls as the dough gets lodged in your gums – it's more a straight down the hatch affair. It tastes a bit like muesli dunked in chilli, pretty nice.

Computers have finally arrived but there has been so little electricity recently that Drew is not holding hopes too high for getting much done on them in the near future – ke garne?.

We are helping the two oldest classes to prepare some short plays for assembly – the idea was for us to just help with the language. The students wanted to cover the fairly weighty issues of drug abuse and discrimination, however, we are finding it somewhat akin to drawing blood from a stone trying to get them to come up with ideas and write the plays themselves however much we set them up with the framework and leave all the easy stuff for them to do. We have certainly not seen much to dispel the reputation that Nepali education has for being all about rote learning and lacking creativity or fostering imagination (although it is certainly Purna's intention for the school to be different to this, but Rome wasn't built in a day Rodders). However, both classes by the end of the week seemed to be picking up momentum and writing some dialogue themselves. We will be very pleased if they come of as well as we hope.

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