Village Hike

This semester, we have had another spell of extreme busy-ness. We are posting some news and pictures on our blog to try and catch up with the things that have happened. It may seem strange, but we're back-dating the posts so that they are dated on the blog around the time that they actually happened.

Today, we are looking at the middle school hikes that we last Saturday. We went on a hike with a group of middle schoolers to a nearby village.

The village, called Kaplani, is about five kilometers away, but Beth made sure to keep our students entertained with little learning opportunities along the way. Here, she is sharing some information about the fact that the Himalayas used to be at the bottom of the sea. Before the Indian techtonic plate crashed into the Eurasian plate, these same rocks were underwater. We could even see the ripples made by the waves when we took a close look.

After a couple of hours of hiking, we made it to Kaplani. To mark the accomplishment, we took a nice group shot overlooking the village.

We then walked down to our destination with great views of the valleys below.

This wasn't just a hike, though. The walk was made in conjuction with CARE (Community Awareness and Restoration of the Environment), a program that we help run in the middle school. We went to Kaplani to work with some school children in planting seeds and cleaning up garbage. We ended up picking several bags full of trash from the hillside.

On our walk back, we stopped at a nice shady hill and enjoyed our packed lunches.

It was a long walk and a good bit of work, but the students were all happy with the difference that they could make in this local village.

Dave and Beth