Matza pokhari

On my first workday back in Sundrawoti, Buwaa Samoa got together to build a matza pokhari on TBT’s model farm.That last sentence contained a lot of Nepali, so let’s take it one at a time.

1. Buwaa means father, though Monisa somehow picked up the habit of calling Dan Bahadur dai ‘Daddy’ (whether this is cultural erosion by television or exposure to volunteers is unclear). The female counterpart of Buwaa is Amaa; go another generation up and you get Hajurba and Hajuramaa, respectively.
2. I will translate samoa by analogy: in Nepali, ‘American Samoa’ would mean ‘American group’. Tal and I meet with Buwaa Samoa once a week, usually to talk about things related to agriculture, and Buwaa Samoa’s enormous debt (more on this another time).
3. Matza, I learned only a week before, when Balaram inexplicably began to sniff a piece of matza and announced, after a minute or two, “This is not matza.” Balaram was indeed correct in that the enormous cracker he held to nose smelled nothing like fish.
4. Pokhari, I know from a place in the Kathmandu called Rani Pokhari – the Queen’s Pond.I hope Queen Rania manages to visit Nepal before the Hashemite regime gets toppled. (Having been a bit out of the loop for the past few months, I apologize if this already happened.)

In any event, I took a few pictures of the construction, and while they’re not particularly beautiful, I figured it can’t hurt to share some of what I’ve been up to as a volunteer for Tevel b’Tzedek and not just as someone who happens to be living in a Nepali village for three months:

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