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Yesterday was a big workday for us. Out the door at 7:45am, back in the door at 7:45pm. We were met by a cleaver-wielding drunk, bitten by a leech, took our lunch at an hourly-rental ‘love hotel’, had a grapefruit sized rock hurtle down the hill where we were interviewing and smash into the precious Leica M8.

We were also directly exposed to the Nepali education system for the first time. We visited two schools where Little Sisters attend, and neither Amy nor I was quite prepared for the experience. That is to say, I think we kind of knew, on paper, what to expect–grubby, windowlit rooms packed full of eager kids in uniforms being made to copy (and occasionally read aloud) indiscriminately selected passages from books which seem to have little insidem at the hands of teachers who literally may not have more than a 10th grade education.

And indeed this is what we saw. We have agreed that since Amy is the education specialist in our family, she’ll talk about matters of curriculum and education style. That saves me the trouble of writing my impressions of the teaching we saw, which would for the most part not reflect well upon the administrators and teachers who were gracious enough to allow us full access in their facilities and classrooms.

At the end of the day, as we were headed off to sleepyland, Amy asked what was my favorite part of the day. I answered that it must have been the moment we walked onto the first campus. I was rolling tape, following Saru as she arrived at school. And I was reeling.

It was immediately clear from the facility that this was a place where EVERYTHING we saw would be new and interesting to us. Anthropology Scott and Photography Scott just got switched on, hardcore. I had to  overcome a binding sensation brought on by the overwhelming rush of pictures I wanted to make.

There is so much cultural information contained in places like this. I am a great believer in the ability of photographs to help decode the meaning of a place. It’s not an unlimited, literal decoding, but an interpretive one, subjective, impressionistic. It is not the work of a morning.

This cut paper stone hanger was literally the only decoration we saw in the whole school.

The blackboards consist of a plaster-smoothed area on the concrete or cinder-block walls, with some black paint splashed on.

Permit me a long moment of artistic woo-woo? The collective weight of the photographs that I saw and could not take in that first school nearly imploded my eyes. You know that feeling when you press your thumbs into your eyelids and you get the crescendoing psychedelic show? And you’re afraid it’ll stay with you long after you stop? Felt like that.

I grew anxious with a fear that I would not be able to do the place any kind of justice–moving as we were, quickly, making video of what we saw with scant time to consider the shots or the way they fitted meaning into the frame.

This “time thing” is a luxury we are constantly straining against. We are blessed with a good  chunk of time here, but we also have an infinity of possible stories to identify, connect with, and distill. Do we go wide, or deep? What serves our artistic and documentary and do-gooder mandates better?