Hey, let's make this room bigger. TODAY!

January 13, 2010
Today was just any other day in Nepal. Ok, not really. Not at all in fact. Except for the fact that I had no idea what to expect when the day started! Well, after breakfast, we began moving Uncle’s office up two flights of stairs to the third floor so that we could expand the sitting room, which was far too small for everyone! Imagine 20+ people sitting in a room that only fits 3 chairs and one couch. A tight squeeze! So, we doubled the size by knocking out the wall between the office and the sitting room. Now, thankfully, this wasn’t a typical Nepali wall of solid cement. Rather, it was a wooden wall added a couple years ago when Uncle moved his office downstairs. We pried it this way and that, pulling off siding until finally the frame was ready to come out.

We reuse everything here (I’ll be very eco-friendly when I come home!), so Asha, Manisha and I started pulling the hundreds of nails out of the siding, with Manisha pounding them on their point to drive them backwards, me pulling the pounded nails out by pliers, and Asha collecting the rusty, sharp collection with a magnet we found! We had a great assembly line going; we put the boys to shame!

As soon as we finished, we had a new job ready and waiting- to paint all the dirty spots in the sitting room, along with the white lines where the way once was. Well, about halfway through painting, Uncle decided we needed to patch the holes the nails left with cement, so I handed off my brush to Asha and Laxman and I began to fill holes with cement filler, our hands, and a scrap of wood! Quite the experience :).

After cementing, we were back to painting, and we finished the job not too long later. Which meant that we were now ready to wash all of the curtains for the sitting room, all 12 of them, by hand. We pulled water and rub-a-dub-dubbed them, bubbles flying here and there as we bathed them in sudsy water. Then, Ranjita (who happened to stop by for the day; a great day to visit!) began to soap them all and scrub them thoroughly. After she finished, Manisha and I proceeded to roll up our pants to mid calf so that we could use our feet to dance the dirt right out of them (don’t worry, we washed our feet first!). Step here, two hops there, a right foot front with a left foot back. To my amazement, bubbles just kept coming. There were about 4 times I thought we were finished, and we just kept going! Finally, they were ready to rinse, so we kept doing our little dance, adding water to the buckets to rinse. The most unusual rinse cycle I’ve ever seen! We finally got them clean about 2 hours later, our muscles moaning, skin shriveled, feet freezing.

Meanwhile, Isha reminded me like the kids in the Von Trap family from the Sound of Music when they’re hanging out of the trees over the street. She was standing on the window ledges, hanging outward, washing all the windows. After she finished one, she’d swing right over to the next one, and so on until they were all sparkling.

Finally it was time to move the couches from my room downstairs. We moved them down, and the completed sitting room looked amazing! I was floored at how nice it looked with more space. The kids and I collapsed into the awaiting chairs, basking in the sunlight, reveling in a moment of stillness. That might have been about as tired as my muscles have been in a very long time! And tomorrow, we get to wash the rugs :)...