August 1st, 2024 Bhakunde Beshi, Nepa
In the Peace Corps, how do you measure success? It’s a good question. There are a hundreds of Peace Corps staff paid a full U.S. salary in their respective countries to answer this very question, not to mention the big wigs in D.C. who are coming up with the standards by which we are measured.
For the first three months, the answer to this question was merely qualitative. I had stories, relationships, and ambitions to show for my three months at site, and I am excited to share some of them here in this post. Now though, I am actively measuring my impact, spreadsheets and complicated forms, and all (government style) in a program called VGR. This data-intensive process began in earnest after IST, or in-service training, which was scheduled for three months after we arrived at our permanent sites. We are expected to input all of our initiatives, classes, student progress, school clubs, teacher trainings, grants, and even this blog post, as it accomplishes Peace Corps goal number 3 (To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans).
So let’s get after goal number three shall we? I will cover my experience via three sections; host family, school, and general life in Nepal.
Family
There is a reason that I am starting with family. Today I mentioned my blog to my host family, and my Bahini (little sister) quickly asked me if I had written about her yet. I was embarrassed to say that I hadn’t. She retorted that she was going to stop cooking for me if I didn’t include her in the next one. Considering she is an amazing cook, I wont dare delay any longer.
My Bahini’s name is Prakriti, which is Nepali for nature. She is 22, and works as a nurse in Dhulikhil, 45 minutes west of Bhakunde. She only comes home on the weekends and often has to work the night shift at the hospital. She is fluent in English and stands at a towering four feet eleven inches. What she lacks in height she makes up for in personality and sass. Seeing as my Dhai (big brother/host father) is a vegetarian, the only time I can hope for meat in my house is when she comes home.
Speaking of my Dhai, he is in his forties and works in finance in Banepa, the city about fifteen minutes further west of Dhulikhil. He spent four years working in the UAE when he was in his early twenties, and for that reason, speaks good English. Like his children, he has a big personality. The entire town knows who he is, as he was the past president of Bhakunde’s JCI chapter (Junior Chamber International). I am told this organization was started in the US, but I had never heard of it before I came to Nepal. It carries a fair bit of influence here.
His name is Promod Kafle and is a devout Hindu. There is a temple for all the Kafle people about a 20-minute walk up the hill. There, people go to give puja (worship), in the form of offering food to the gods by burning it in a fire, and by chanting and playing Hindu songs. He is quite well versed in the harmonium, imagine an accordion mixed with an organ. He plays the drums and also sings into the speaker that projects all over Kafletok. In fact, it seems there is hardly ever a time where there isn’t someone serenading the community. Even now, from over two kilometers away, I can hear the sounds of the harmonium and Hindu hymns washing over the countryside. Every night after dinner, my Dhai packs a fat lip, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t join him from time to time, especially when we’re doing field work. For the culture, of course. The two of us are good friends, and I feel lucky to have him as a guardian. He has been there to help fix all the maladies in my life, from my stolen money to my broken bike (see previous post).
Who is Romeo without Juliet? That’s my Didi (big sister/host mother). My relationship with her is different because she is the only one in the family who doesn’t speak good English. In fact, she is one of my only real outlets to practice Nepali, as I speak mostly English at school. Like most Nepali couples, my Didi and Dhai had an arranged marriage, but it’s working out well enough. Didi is always laboring though, doing something or other. Cooking, washing dishes, washing clothes, feeding the buffalo, working in one of our family’s fields, grinding up cornstalks, or cleaning rice. I’ve even seen her haul rocks around (I was a good host son and helped her out). She cares a lot, and is always looking out for me. It makes me proud that with my very limited Nepali I can make her laugh by pulling out some classic Nepali catchphrases. My most successful bit is “hatterica” which means “oh, noo” or “oh shit”. A close runner up is “Amaaaamamammamamamamama” which a drawn-out version of “amaa”, meaning “mother”. Didi is always hurting in one way or another, and she says this whenever she sits down. She gets a good kick out of it when I say it.
Last but certainly not least is my host brother (bhai), Prayag. Prayag is 15 years old, but he would tell you he’s 16 because his birthday is coming up in September. He plays the drums during the school assembly, and he recently had a central role in the school play about environmental conservation. Nevertheless, I still have to yell at him not to throw his trash on the ground, a habit that is unfortunately quite common here. Despite the wide variety of vegetables in the Nepali diet, Prayag will only eat potatoes. I spend a lot of time with Prayag, and he is usually the first voice I hear in the mornings, “come, come…come fast man!”. This is what he says to get me out of bed for morning tea. Always in a rush that guy, says the same thing when he wants to play cards with me, which we do a lot. Whenever he sees me, even if it’s only been 15 minutes since crossing paths, I get a hearty “HELLO MISTER!” from him. A few times every week, I go with Prayag to play football and cricket with the neighborhood kids, many of whom are my students. Prayag gets on my nerves sometimes, but he is a good kid, and I wouldn’t trade him for the world.
The rest of my host family is living all around me. Everyone in a kilometer radius is a Kafle in Kafletok. There are at least two other Kafle teachers at my school, and around 70 of the 1200 are Kafle students. The notion of family here in general is interesting to me. No word for cousin is used colloquially. No matter how many generations removed the cousin may be, you say Didi, Bahini, Dhai, or Bhai (big sister, little sister, big brother, little brother respectively) depending on the person’s age. In fact, this ideal of fraternity is extended to the entire Nepali populous. You call shopkeepers Didi or Dhai, and the people who collect bus fees Dhai or Bhai.
Regardless, my experience, and the experience of many other volunteers is that the Nepali family extends much further than the typical American family, and that is a beautiful thing. I myself am fortunate indeed that my Nepali and American families are similar in this way.
School
Probably the best thing about my Peace Corps placement is the school. Where to even start? It’s a wonderful place and it’s getting to be even more wonderful. Always improving. Perhaps a small history lesson of my village is in order to truly appreciate the place where my school is currently.
Shree Jank Secondary School was established 51 years ago, in the Nepali year 2030. At that time, in what we would call the 1970’s, Bhakunde Beshi didn’t exist. The area was just a forested valley with some farmland. All the people in this area lived in villages high in the hills. If they needed to buy goods, they would have to travel to the ancient trading post of Dapcha, which is about a two-hour walk from where I am currently. I made this walk recently and I can confirm that it is a brutal trek almost entirely uphill. Dapcha has a very interesting history, but I will save that for a future blog post.
For the first 25 years or so of its existence, the only thing of note in this valley was Shree Janak. Then, in 1996, the BP highway began construction. This highway linked the Terai region (Nepali for flatter, farming region), to Banepa. It went straight through Bhakunde. The highway was a collaboration between the Nepali and Japanese governments, and seeing as much of it is built into the side of mountains, it is really quite impressive. I hypothesize that the BP highway brought more traffic into this valley, and caused people to settle near the road, to the extent that the population exploded exponentially. What was once a mostly empty valley is now a bustling baazar, and what was once a one-building school is now a sprawling campus of more than 7 buildings with two more on the way.
Everyone says that 15 years ago, Shree Janak was substandard in terms of educational prowess. Parents would send their children there with resignation simply because there was no better option. Things started to change when Harihar sir joined the school management team as school coordinator. He had a cushy job at a bank and was teaching accounting at the Janak College. The entire faculty came to him on the day before he was to leave Bhakunde to manage one of the bank’s offices in another town and convinced him to give up his bank salary and take up leadership at Shree Janak for significantly less money with much more work involved. Under his leadership, the school expanded and gained more and more facilities. 5 years ago, he recruited a teacher from one of the most prestigious high schools in Nepal, the Royal Academy. Within two years, Pradip sir became the Principal of Shree Janak, and this year, he was named the best principal in all of Bagmati province. There are only 7 provinces in Nepal and Bagmati is the most populous, including all the excellent government schools in Kathmandu, so this really is a big deal.
The rest of the management team is also extremely talented and well respected, but I wont get into that. I have two counterpart teachers, Deepa Ma’am and Rakesh Sir. I teach class six in the English medium section, and class seven in the Nepali medium section with Rakesh, and I teach class seven in the English medium section with Deepa Ma’am. Deepa Ma’am is 8 months pregnant, so pretty soon here I will be teaching our class all by my lonesome. That’s almost what I am doing now, but having her there helps keep the kids in line.
Rakesh is about 32 and is probably my best friend at site. He’s a man of action, and he is very close with the school management team. He has close relationships with the students. If he tells them to plant trees during period 6, or come to school to do manual labor on Saturday, they will do it. He has charisma to burn. He also works as a manager at Katumba Resort in Bhakunde, and so I go over there quite a lot to hang out. He only likes meat…no affinity towards vegetables at all. Whenever I go over to hang I can always expect to eat chicken or mutton (goat). More than once I have seen the chicken I am to later eat get brutally murdered, and I bear witness to its violent death spasms.
But I digress, back to Shree Janak. The school has many innovative programs. I mentioned some of the learning-by-earning programs in the last blog. Some notable things that I have gotten done here so far is creating a new English club room, and a Looma room. After establishing the English Club and Junior English Club, it became clear that the students would have to have somewhere to meet. A place on the school campus that truly belonged to the students. My mom was generous enough to send some English games at great personal expense, such as Scrabble, Scrabble Slam, Big Boggle, and a game I had never heard of called Rapid Rumble. It is like a much easier version of Scatagories. These games have been a massive hit, and now it is typical for 10 to 30 kids to come to the club room during lunch break to engage in English learning on their own initiative.
The Looma room is a bit different. Peace Corps has partnered with an organization which has created a computer/projector system that is specifically designed for the Nepali curriculum. I pull my kids out of their classrooms almost every day and bring them to the room so that we can do more activities together utilizing the new technology. A past Peace Corps Volunteer, the librarian at my high school library, Erin Chekal, gave my mom about thirty of those old projector sheets that used to be so popular when I was in elementary school. You know, the kind that teachers, especially math teachers in my recollection, would write on with expo markers, and the light would shine through to be projected onto the wall. I have since taped them to pieces of cardboard with white A4 paper glued on to create low-cost mini white boards, which have absolutely transformed the learning methods in my class. I play a lot of games with my students, and whereas before, there would be only one student coming up with the answers to my questions, now, all the student frantically try to come up with the answer together, and write it on the board.
In my last blog, I mentioned that there was another volunteer coming to my site to help incorporate technology into the school and into extracurriculars. His name is Jeff, and he has been great. He brings with him over 20 years of teaching experience, and two years of service with the Peace Corps in Morocco near the beginning of his career. It’s been really interesting to learn from him, and although our paths don’t cross super often given our different roles, its nice to have someone around who understands the experience of being an American in Nepal. Jeff helps me out with the English clubs, and I am also very excited to collaborate with him on a project to paint a map of the world on the side of a campus building.
Looking towards the future, there are three major projects that I have undertaken beyond my roles as a teacher and a club facilitator. The first, which I mentioned in the previous blog is vermicomposting. This project has been underway for a few months now. In May, some members of the Eco-club, a few teachers and I went to a vermi-compost training center about four hours away. For those who don’t know, vermi-compost is using worms to quickly compost waste. The trip was a big success, and the schools own vermi-compost troughs will be constructed as soon as the school gate is finished in a few days.
The next project is more ambitious because it involves lots of moving parts. My idea is to create a new Peace Corps program called “Global Classroom” in which Education volunteers in different countries but similar time zones get their students to videocall each other such that the only way they can communicate is to use their only shared language; English. To do this, there needs to be an abundance of coordination with other volunteers, and the equipment has to be in place as well. I am currently writing a grant for 24 headphones with microphone attachments, as well as 24 webcams. I am in contact with some volunteers serving in the Philippines. I will keep you updated how all this turns out.
A little bit further down the line will be the creation of a fish pond at the school. The school has an established animal sciences program, and the study of fish farming is indeed an important part of the curriculum. Not only would having a fish farm on site be beneficial for the science department, but there is a high demand for fish in my town because there are no large rivers or fish farms in a close proximity. Once the fish farm is built and stocked with fish, I plan to start a business club to manage the operations of the business aspect of the farm among other activities such as an Investopedia stock market simulation challenge.
Life In Nepal
For better or for worse, I have been so busy recently with all the things going on at school that I don’t have much of a life outside my host family and work. Some of the fun things I have done are related to the manual labor of subsistence farming with my host family. My experience with all these kinds of jobs is that it’s a lot of fun until the novelty wears off, and then its just work. Work that makes you really sore the next day. I have harvested lychees, and mangos with my family. I have plowed fields, planted seeds, and turned over the rice fields to get them ready for action.
One thing I will say about fruit here is that it is just different from whatever we get in the United States. If you have never eaten a mango in Asia, then you likely never had a proper mango. If this upsets you, I’m sorry, but if you ever do get that mango in Asia, you’ll know what I mean. Lychees are hard to find in the States, but in Nepal, they grow everywhere during the month of June. Lychees are sweet and sour perfection, I highly recommend. Picking them just requires some tree climbing skills and long arms. Next year, I think that a stick with a knife attached to it will go a long way. Harvesting the mangos is a bit trickier. Our family mango tree is located on a 45-degree slope next to the temple. My dhaai climbs into the tree and shakes it like a madman, while Prayag and I dodge the falling mangos and do our best to find them in their final resting place far down the hill.
Besides talking with friend back in the States, volunteers in other parts of Nepal, and hanging out with my host brother and his friends, my main social activity is spending time at Katumba resort with Rakesh. Usually, we do this Friday night and we get into the local alcohol called Raxi. In a time crunch, I go to the local butcher and pick up some Pangra, or chicken gizzard. Its so good when its cooked properly. Namely, spicier than the devils you know what. However, on special occasions with more people, we butcher a goat.
In my time with Rakesh, I have learned that the most delicious part of the goat is its intestines. They are a favorite not only of Rakesh and I, but also the teachers and management of the school too. They gather at Katumba regularly to hang out. In fact, Harihar sir has an ownership stake in the resort itself. The intestines have to be cleaned and cooked properly of course. First, you have to funnel water through the intestines, much like filling up a water balloon in order to get the shit (literal shit) out of them. Next, you boil them with turmeric to disinfect them. Finally, you fry them with lots of spices, and they come out to be so wonderfully tender and flavorful.
I have grown close to the general manager and head cook of Katumba, who does this sort of thing often. His name is Savin Bro. Savin’s last name is actually Lama, but Rakesh and I call him Savin bro because a bro is exactly what he is. I hang around in the kitchen a lot to watch him cook. Unfortunately for me, and fortunately for him, Savin bro just got a visa to work at a pizza shop in Romania, he left a week ago.
Rakesh also it seems is not long for this world (my world), as he is seeking a visa in the UK. He could leave next month, and it seems unlikely that he will be here the entire length of my service. Of course, I can’t blame him, he is extraordinarily smart, and has strong leadership qualities. His parents expect him to do better things, and so he is feeling the pressure to leave. This is a serious problem in Nepal. All of the most talented people end up leaving the country, and some never come back. You’ll be hard pressed to find a Nepali person who dreams of spending the rest of their life in Nepal. Many Nepalis leave for many years at a time. The result is a massive brain drain, and there is no sign that this is changing. There simply aren’t enough opportunities in Nepal
Looking to the future, I have another training in Kathmandu at the end of September on the topic of writing larger grants over $500. Seeing how much mischief happened in Kathmandu a few weeks ago for our IST, I am scared and excited to see how this one will go. At the end of October, I am lucky enough to have four friends from the US visit me. We are going to explore Kathmandu, and then go on a four-day trek in the Himalayas. I have no doubt we will have many adventures together and I can’t wait for them to experience Nepal in all its glory. The only bummer is that they wont be able to see what life is like at my school. If anyone reading this wants to visit my school, we would love to have you. The kids would go absolutely berserk.
A volunteer from the previous cohort and I are planning an “AllVol Haunted Ball” on Halloween. The All Volunteer’s Ball was an event that the Peace Corps used to host themselves, but apparently, too much trouble was caused from it, and so they stopped doing it, imagine that! Anyway, now it is up to us to keep the tradition going and combine the two cohorts of volunteers and the new group of response volunteers as best we can on short notice.
So that seems to sum it all up for the most part! I left out a lot, but hopefully you have a better insight into what life is like here, and the things that I am thinking about for the future.
Speaking of which, I spoke with a cool dude who has been working for the humanitarian sector of USAID, and the conversation was honestly a little bit life-altering. When he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon, a USAID employee took him and his friends out for a proper American meal in the capital city. He paid that forward by taking out two of my friends and I for burgers and beer. We got the condensed version of his life’s story of the past ten years, starting from a position much like our own, broke in the Peace Corps to where he is now, living the life as a diplomat in Kathmandu soon to be transferred to Ethiopia. He climbed the ladder and now lives what I view to be the ideal life, with plenty of travel, fulfilling and dynamic work, opportunities to live abroad for an extended period, a very healthy government salary with lots of benefits, and a career trajectory to make a huge impact at higher levels of government. When I work for USAID at some point in the future (knock on wood), I will be sure to pay it forward with the next generation of Peace Corps Volunteers.
And that leaves me to my final point…consider joining the Peace Corps! For all of its challenges, it really is an incredible experience. I would be happy to have a conversation with you if you are even slightly considering it an option. I have already gotten one friend to apply, and I hope he won’t be the last.