Mercator Blog

Education has been the only escape for me.

I was raised in one of the most primitive village. I had to walk two hours to and from school daily for my primary education. We had no shoe or slipper to assist us. I still remember those cold winter morning when my feet would burn with cold on my way to school. The sensation of feet would go numb after a while. By the time I reached school I had to run to the fireplace to warm them up.

I wore a grey short and a blue shirt to the school. I had a small brown sweater on top of the shirt. Everything was fine in summer. The torn parts of shirt and sweater on my elbow would act like the ventilators. The space below from the shorts would allow the air to pass up cooling the under stuffs. But things got quiet difficult in winters. The cool air of summer would get really cold in the winters. And the under stuffs and elbows would virtually freeze on the way to school. My parents did their best to patch up the torn parts but those patches were never as good as the new ones.

The classrooms were big empty rooms. There were home made rugs and carpets on the floor. There was a single chair and a blackboard for the teacher. The school didn’t have sufficient class rooms. Whole of the class had to sit in a single room. We were two hundred in our class and we had to cramp in a single room. The books were freely distributed by the government. The copies were expensive. We mostly used a slate. Slates were reusable. We could write on both sides of it and then erase it after showing it to the teacher. We used to run to the river to collect the chalks. We used to collect the special white rocks that could be effectively used as chalk.

I loved going to the school. The walks were difficult the mornings were chilly but the idea of going to the school was beautiful. There were only few children that went to school from our village. And it really felt great walking out in the morning with a slanted bag and a water bottle on my hand. The new things learned at the schools were very much appreciated by my parents. My father would repeatedly ask me about it. And I felt a sense of pride in retelling him with every inch of detail. He would then look at me with ardent admiration on his eyes. He would then carry me on his shoulders and we would head for a walk. This always drove me to get the best in the school. The schools were fun too. I loved learning new things. I heard about the buses and planes for the first time in school. That day I pestered my father to tell me each and every detail of the bus. By the end of it, I had a beautiful picture of house like structure with four wheels and many windows walking through the hills. I read about the capital city Kathmandu for the first time in the grade two. That night I dreamt of going to the capital with my father. These fascinations and desires always drove me to the school.