New Year and a fresh look to the office

We had some surprise visitors this week and we love to have visitors.  Birtamod is not such a nice town to look at but we hope people like our office and to see what we do.  On Thursday, we had visitors from UK, South Africa and Australia come to see us.  It was so good to show them what we made and they asked lots of questions about how do we do things.  They loved to see how we don't paint our designs but make them in the clay and then slice them.  We showed them how we use our slicing machine and they were interested to see how we are all involved in setting the prices of the items.  They said it was good to see that we knew all the costs we had to cover like how much is it every time we turn on the generator and how much is it when we use our silver and Japanese beading wire.  They liked our Black and White range very much and all bought a necklace.  In fact, only the men in the group did not buy things.The day after their visit was New Year's Day and two of the visitors, Steve and Ana from Australia, stayed in Birtamod longer and came to our celebration day at the office.  So did a snake which meant we kept out of THAT room.  We had a fantastic time eating sweets and dancing and singing.  We sang our National Anthems and Steve taught us some games and Ana taught us Greek dancing.  It was very ramailo (enjoyable!)On Saturday, the ladies left for Kathmandu and we were relieved to hear that they arrived safely as there were bandas in both Jhapa and Kathmandu (Bandas are strikes where only rickshaws and bikes are allowed to use the road.  All shops are shut and businesses/ drivers who flout the banda are threatened or beaten.  Bandas have decreased slightly over recent years but cripple our country).  At first we were afraid they would not be able to travel but they were allowing buses at night.It was back to work yesterday and today we had to reorganize our office to move our cupboards as the rain has been a huge problem and this is meant to be the PRE monsoon.  Someone thought that it would be a good time to do some organizing and tidying so we used the chance to try and think about what would be efficient ways to store things.  We also worked out some things we don't use and will see if someone else can use them.  We are all really happy with how the office looks now and hope that we can keep it so neat all the time!