My posts will be rather thin this week as Bev has had to go back to UK for a few days and I am left literally holding the baby. At fifteen months Alisha is quite a handful but a very delightful one at that. I have vowed that I will never complain about having a child. It used to rankle with me hearing others in the past sharing their difficulties with their children unaware of how greater was the pain of childlessness in some in their audience. One particularly thoughtless woman once told Esther that she was lucky not to have had children.
Today I distracted Alisha with a trip to the zoo, this being her first ever. I am not a fan of zoos at all but I do still remember clearly my first trip to the zoo and the positive impression it made upon me. Maybe this visit, and subsequent ones, will serve to imprint upon Alisha an awareness for animals at an early stage. The zoo was nowhere near as bad as I had expected it to be. OK, it was very Nepali with some animals in the wrong compounds - the buck deer (as depicted on our Christmas card mosaic) were labelled as being "barking deer". Other compounds had no guide signs at all. There was a very splendid mountain partridge (chukka), which I recognised from a previous mosaic that one of the girls had made, wandering around in another cage apparently unidentified. Some signs were in English, some in Nepali and so on...
Most shocking of all was the shrieking of the pupils in the visiting school parties that was potentially so disturbing for animals without any effort being made at teacher restraint. And in spite of the signs outside the zoo asking visitors not to tease the animals, clearly some teenagers were causing some provocation as they went along. Nepal is a very benign and easy-going place to live but this teasing seems to be endemic. It also seems to go hand in hand with stigma and what the animals have to endure at Kathmandu zoo mirrors a cruelty that in our experience disabled kids, street kids, prison kids and former circus kids have to live with in their daily lives.
