I thought it would be a nice touch if the postcards were all of Jumla. I looked in tourist shops in Kathmandu and Pokhara but couldn't find anything. Being that Jumla is not really an established tourist destination, it isn't really surprising there are not postcards. Yet. So I decided to make my own from the photos from last year's trip. I found a shop that had handmade Nepali paper which was pretty thick, who were willing to cut me pieces to size so I ordered 80 pieces and got 80 pictures developed. I glued them all together and drew lines on them to make them look like proper postcards.
I had wondered whether I could get away with "THANK YOU FROM NEPAL!" 60 times but I decided to actually write a proper individual postcard to each person. They deserved it! And most of the people who contributed were people I know personally. I also decided to write them when I was back in Jumla so I could talk about the training, the project and my feelings generally about being back. I set myself a goal of 10 a day. I didn't exactly stick to my goal but I had written almost all of the 60 postcards by the end of the trip.
Although likely to take an even longer time to be delivered, I liked the idea of posting them from Jumla also. Saroj (my newly-appointed production manager and general godsend) and I went along to the post office to see about buying 60 stamps for postcards sent to the US and UK primarily. This was a little more difficult that I anticipated. A group of men were sitting around outside and when we said we wanted to buy stamps a couple of them got up and led us inside. We explained that I wanted postcard stamps for the US and UK at which point one of them rummaged through the drawers on the desk and pulled out a small paper booklet. One looked at it for a while, then the other and eventually Soraj took over, trying to find US, UK, America, England or anything that might give us an indication of which band each country was in so we could buy the appropriate stamps. Eventually Soraj found it! Rs 25 for Great Britain and Rs 30 United States. Brilliant. The only trouble was that the only stamps they had were Rs 5 and Rs 10 and the stamps were so big they covered half the address as the cards would need three each. Why I thought they would have postcard stamps in Jumla when they don't have postcards is beyond me!
They would have to be posted from Pokhara. At least they were more likely to arrive if I posted them from there. Shyam and Savyata, my Pokhara family at Bishnu Lodge, helped me stick the single stamps we bought from the Pokhara post office over chiya (tea) and ladoo (my fave Indian sweet which I bought when we went into town to buy the stamps).
And that was it! Job done. As it turned out, it took over a month for them to arrive, but I was expecting that. The postmark on the ones I have seen is about a week later than they were actually posted.
What I wasn't expecting was the fact that is seems most people can't read my writing! One of my more cynical friends in LA said, "You should have just written 'thank you'".
But it is the thought (and effort) that counts, right?
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