Working in Tulin

One of the villages RIDS Nepal works at is the village of Tulin.
It is approximately an hours walk from the field office in Dharapori, along the trail going to Tibet from Simikot, the district centre of Humla.

In this image, it is of the Karnali river, with the trail going towards Tibet on the right side of the valley, with Tulin along that trail slightly on the right of the image.




















This image shows the way many of the houses are stacked on top of each other, with steps cut into logs, leaning against the roofs that people walk up and down. I did have some problems with some of these, as some steps cut into the logs were not big enough for my feet.























They also have some livestock on the roofs of the houses, as shown by the kids (baby goats) in this photo.


















The solar lighting that RIDS have installed uses a tracking solar panel frame, which rotates following the sun, generating more power to charge up the batteries for use at night. The tracking system was broken, as some wires had come loose, so the sytem wasn't rotating following the sunlight.

The next image is of Sher Bahadur from Humla on the left, and Paras Karki on the right.
Sher is the field maintenance guy, who collects the data, and fixes any of the solar systems that need repair, and Paras is the electrical engineer from Kathmandu University, who revises the datataker programs, designs any electronic work that is required, and has done alot of the programming with Manish Pradhan for the online databank.



















The next image is of some of the typical scenery you see around Humla.


















A few days later, Paras, Sher and I went to reprogram some of the monitoring equipment (yes I have been working since being in Nepal). This image is of Paras looking at the monitoring equipment next to the battery bank.


















There was a problem that arose, in the room next door, they started cooking for there lunch.
One of the projects that RIDS Nepal implement is implementing each of the houses with a smokeless metal stove.

Smokeless Metal Stove

Now I did not realise how significant a difference it made. The room next door was using a udon, a metal frame stove with an open fire beneath it. Even though you cannot see the smoke with the photo, the woman cooking also had her eyes half closed from the smoke.
















The smoke was making us cough and our eyes water. This was only after a brief exposure of the smoke. The people in humla often cook like this, in rooms with no ventilation (it may be to cold at 2500m) You can meet children with problems from continual smoke inhalation.

So I was forced to work outside with my laptop, to remove myself from the smoke. However, after about 5 minutes, the local village children went to see what I was doing, and proceeded to start trying to type on my laptop. Now as I only know a little Nepali, I was unsure of how to say "Please don't do that" in Nepali. The children thought what they were doing was quite funny and okay, so I was forced to go back to the smokey room to continue working. Working with my colleagues in a smokey room was a better option than in the open air where at least 5 village children were insisting on typing on my laptop while I was trying to write a program.

The next image is of some of the children who followed me back into the smokey room. Sher the RIDS staff member managed to convince the children to leave me in peace so I could finish the programming.






















There was some urgency to finish the work soon as it was close to getting dark. As the walking trails are rocky, with a cliff leading down to a freezing river on one side, it can be a little dangerous in the dark.