Here’s some photos from our ‘Scouring the City and Gathering Materials” outing. (See the complete set here.)
We first picked up bamboo and old furniture from Boudha- huge thanks to Norbu Sangbo for the donation! One the way back to Jawlakhel, we stopped off in Jhamsikhel to pick up a whole bunch of bottles that some medical shop had dumped there ages ago. Samir met us there…Mer and I were riding in the truck with our awesome driver Navraj, and Samir was on his cycle. I was sure he would beat us across town, but he showed up in Jhamsikhel just a little after we did, saying he was late only because he had gone home to eat 
After a long lunch break, we set out for Round 2, trying to find bricks. It seemed like it would be easy with all the bricks around the city as buildings and gates get knocked down so the roads can be widened. (There are so many better uses of money to fix up the city- its frustrating to see things being destroyed to make room for more traffic, but that’s a whole other rant). However, I guess most people are reluctant to let them go. We asked one houseowner in Sanepa about his bricks since the new wall had already been completed. He said that the road department would be using them to fill in the gaps and ditches, so he we couldn’t have them. I get what he was saying, but I am pretty sure the Road Department would not have noticed a difference if they found 50 bricks less at any give site.
I was *slightly* less than enthusiastic for going to a second round only because I was tired and reeeeally wanted to work on getting this blog up, and this refusal kind of dampened my mood. We decided to go by the river where Navraj had seen bricks earlier in the week. We found one area…the bricks were too broken to be useful, but we found tons of tiles, large chunks of concrete, and large stones. By this point, my enthusiasm was up and we were all really excited searching for stuff…and at some point in all this, I found a tape measure. Santosh was with us for Round 2 (he was super excited to ride in the back of the truck) and began snapping photos, as lots of people stopped to see what we were doing and stare. Some people even helped out.
Special thanks to Sam, who had just turned up at Sattya and wound up getting sucked into collecting heavy stones by the Bagmati. And, of course, Samir (who was basically doing all the heavy lifting!), Yuki, Shreyans, Santosh, and Mer. It was fun!
It was an amazing experience working with Chakraby. Chakraby’s mission is through resourcefulness to bring the Kathmandu Cycle City 2020 campaign up into the next gear by encouraging more people to ride bicycles and thereby promote environment sustainability.
