Charpi, dinner by headlamp, leeches... village life in a nutshell

We just spent 3 days of training in the most spectacular setting, a village nested in its own valley just south of Kathmandu. Everywhere you could look you saw either rice patties or mountains. The houses were nestled in the sides of the mountains and the rice patties occupied the entire valley in the middle. Rice patties are basically little ponds of water with the rice plants growing out of them. The women in the village work out in the rice patties all day.
Our family was soooo nice. They understood our western eating capacities, i.e. the fact that we don’t eat a mountain of rice for dinner like Nepalis do. Every meal from now on is called Dhaal Bhaat, rice and lentil soup, with some other vegetable. Nepalis eat that for every meal their entire lives. For each meal they eat HUGE amounts of rice, yet they are surprisingly all very small people.
The children there were so beautiful. They were so much fun and so happy. Their lives were so simple, but they knew nothing different! The family’s kitchen consisted of the floor, a campfire, and metal plates and tools for cooking, yet they were not poor, it was just their way of life! They had everything they needed, just very different compared to our standards.
The bathrooms are called “charpi”s. They are an outhouse building with literally a hole in the ground in which you cannot place any paper. You do not use toilet paper, or if you do you have to take it with you yourself (we call the envelopes that shitvelopes). They have buckets of water in the charpis and that is how they do it.
There was no running water in the houses. There are public taps along the village where the families fill up buckets of water and bring them back to their houses. The house we stayed in had a Gatorade-like cooler/dispenser where all the family’s water came from. We used this cooler for washing dishes, our faces, our feet, laundry, and everything else. It was really nice staying there, and our family was so happy that we hardly missed our western comforts!