Not just a vacuum cleaner

Useful though the vacuum cleaner is, an oven is more exciting. We bought a little table top oven from a departing volunteer a couple of months ago although until last week had only used it for grilling homemade pizzas (I'm not Jamie Oliver so that's what I call tomatoes on bread with a bit of cheese and a home grown basil leaf chucked on top). Last Sunday, Sheila had a play with it and cooked a veggie bake and a cake. Fantastic! Obviously the veg bake was delicious but to have a real freshly baked fruit cake was just heavenly. It was quite small and only lasted 2 days (as I finished it on Monday evening maybe it is more accurate to say 1 day) so having got the hang of it, she baked another one yesterday and is talking about flapjacks in the future. I'm looking forward to many more cakes in the winter because the oven throws out a lot of heat and I'm guessing Sheila will start to bake whenever she gets cold. Although the next household innovation is not exactly hi-tech, it is new to me even if almost every household in Nepal has one. After working out how to get the lid on and off, we finally got round to using the pressure cooker that we inherited from more departing volunteers last year. What a wonderful gadget it is; considering how much quicker they cook things why doesn't everyone use them to save on gas/electricity?

I hear reports of the floods in South Asia are now making UK news. In Nepal these were in the southern lowlands that form the border with India. It sounds as if the worst of the floods are over but there are still landslides and hundreds of thousands of people are homeless in Nepal, far more in India and Bangladesh. Most worrying is the disease and food shortages that inevitably follow a flood that has wiped out safe water supplies and crops. Red Cross and the World Food Programme are down there delivering emergency relief, however there are likely to be food shortages until next spring in many places. When you are a subsistence farmer, having all your crops destroyed is a bit more serious than not being able to go shopping because the local Tesco's is flooded. If a Red Cross collection box appears in your local Indian restaurant (which is probably run by Bangladeshis), think about having one less naan bread and donating the cost.

On a more cheerful note, another bit of modern technology that worked today is the telly on my laptop. I haven't tried it for ages because sharing a cable connection with the 3 or 4 households in our landlord's family means it is a pretty dodgy picture. But today I managed to get an only slightly fuzzy picture for Star (Asian equivalent of Sky) Sport and watched the Hungarian (or is it European?) Grand Prix. Bit short on overtaking and the most exciting bit was probably in the Ferrari pit during qualification yesterday when they forgot to put petrol in the car. My top tip for them is always put the chamois leather on the dashboard to remind yourself to fill up. Thinking Formula 1, in case anyone who knows him is reading this, does Spesh still get minute by minute updates on the Honda team sent to his phone?

Cheers

Roshan

 

P.S. Apologies for all the acronyms in Sheila's post yesterday, poor editorial control I know but apparently some of her friends will understand them. For others, INGO = international non-governmental organisation (a charity like Save the Children) and ECER = Early Childhood Environmental Rating (must be some measure of a child's carbon emissions).