What I learned from volunteering abroad.
This is a story about transformation, inside and out. Let me tell you how it happened, because it was never meant to.
It starts like this:
It had been a long time since I’d seen the mountains, ever since I’d visited Dharamsala in 2001 when traveling around India. I’d wanted to go volunteering abroad for a while ever since helping the homeless, for a number of years in England. So, since I hadn’t been to Nepal (and I’d heard good things about the country) I looked around online for NGO’s I could volunteer with.
I found one that worked in the hills of Pokhara, about 200km west of the capital, Kathmandu. So I booked a flight and a place on the volunteer programme and flew out to Kathmandu, for the first leg of my journey for a short orienteering session into the culture and language of Nepal. Then once complete, I took a propeller plane east over the fringes of the Himalayas to Pokhara and finally the bus up to the village of Moidan where the community centre lay.
LIFE IN THE VILLAGE
First day volunteering was surprising. The kids didn’t really want to learn anything, I don’t blame them. I mean they’d been to school in the morning so why would they want to learn more with me? It was hard to teach them, they seemed to just want to play. I heard bingo was something they really loved so we payed that a lot. At the end of each session I’d need to rub out the numbers and redo them with new ones for the next morning – what a chore!
So the days continued: I’d get up pretty early, have breakfast with the family, dhaal and rice (surely that’s a dinner meal?) Then go to the community centre and teach the kids. I taught them how to make paper planes and paper chains.
However I couldn’t help but feel frustrated.
I came to the village to teach the kids, I’d put alot of effort into this cause — did a weekend TEFL course to understand how to teach english a foreign language abroad and paid to fly out to Nepal on the expectation of what i wanted being fulfilled. But it wasn’t happening. I wasn’t getting the adventure I was looking for.
The kid’s didn’t want to learn, they wanted to play, which was fine but it wasn’t my intention when I set off on this journey.
What could I do?
TRANSFORMATION
One day while going down to the local town I noticed driving through that all the buildings laid bare – none were painted. I pressed Kailash, (the local NGO) curious to know why. He told me that the Light Community Development Centre who go around the Nepal building the community centres leave them bare once erect because the paint costs a lot of money in the rural towns.
So, the village remains colourless. Save for the colourful characters of the people who live in it of course.
Paint costs a lot of money in Nepal, so the charity leaves them bare.
I started to put a design together to pose to the board of the community centre. Using my camera and Kailash’s old school laptop, that thankfully had photoshop on it. The board accepted my design with open arms and we set forth to start the painting process.
For the design, all I used was a pencil, a piece of bamboo as a ruler and a piece of string to use with the pencil for a compass. The board hired a painter who could help me to get to the high spots on the building, who made a ladder out of bamboo (quite a feat of engineering). Kailash pitched in too as well as a few other villagers and also a Dave, a new volunteer who started about two weeks in.
Day by day the community centre was slowly being transformed.
Villagers began to take an interest and started come and visit and check on the progress. And day by day I began to enjoy my experience in the volunteer programme more.
I never foresaw this adventure, but it was one I relished. Using my design skills for the benefit of the village was so rewarding. I came out the other en a better, more fulfilled, more confident person. It also made me understand that you need to create your own opportunities if stagnation and frustration are setting in.
