The Roads Here Are Bumpy

I am a different person than I was five and a half months ago.  This morning, I saw that clearly.  I had a good long look in the mirror and realized I was looking at a face I wouldn’t have recognized a few months ago.  Surely, it is still my face, but there is something different behind my eyes.  A new kind of awareness, and self-assuredness.  There is a change happening inside me, I can feel it, yet the feeling is almost ineffable. 

The change has manifested in all sorts of ways, from my attitude surrounding poop, to my routines and habits, to the ways I carry myself while teaching a class, or giving a speech to the entire student body.  I feel prepared for just about any eventuality.  Save a worldwide hostile takeover from aliens, it’s hard to think of anything that would truly catch me off guard. 

In my last blog, I said that this next chapter was going to be so different from what I had experienced before, that I may as well be going through the air-bridge at the Detroit Airport.  I wasn’t far off.  Being the only Peace Corps Volunteer in my town was a different animal from before.  While I miss my friends, I am also enjoying isolation.  When I first came here, I immediately tested positive for COVID.  No passing Go, no $200, just 5 days of quarantine in my room.  It was just what the doctor ordered, literally, but surprisingly, figuratively too.  I spent five days guiltlessly vegging out, watching all the shows and movies I had fallen behind on since arriving in Nepal.  The bummer was that I had to spend yet another birthday in quarantine.  Thankfully, I celebrated with PCVs in Kathmandu 10 days before, so it didn’t feel like a total loss.  I think I am also starting to reach the age where Birthdays don’t mean as much to me.  Although, maybe that is just the ramblings of someone who is rationalizing having spent 3 of his last 5 birthdays in quarantine. 

If this month has taught me anything, it’s resilience. My Peace Corps service thus far has been many things, but it certainly hasn’t been easy.  If you put it all on paper, like I am about to, it’s been a tragic and terrible six weeks. Much like the roads here, my path through service has been bumpy, even violently so at times. One minute you’re are relaxing, and enjoying the beautiful scenery, and the next you are being thrown six inches into the air, making your head smack into the bus ceiling. This isn’t a problem for most Nepali people, but I am the tallest person in my town of 30,000, so it has happened more than once. In fact, I may be the tallest person in a 30 mile radius, something that almost no Nepali person I meet fails to comment on.

So, in recollecting my service so far, I’ll start with the bad news, as I always like to take the bad news first when given that age old question. As you already know, right out of the gate I got COVID, and missed my birthday and the Nepali New Year. On the first day of school, I met many students who were doing their entrance testing, and one of them died the next day.  He ate the wrong berries, and he passed on around noon the next day.  By 5 pm, I was watching his body get burned in a funeral pyre. A few days later, I saw a puppy get its hind legs run over by a car. I haven’t seen it since, so I can only assume someone put it out of its misery. My Amaa almost died of diabetes and the household vibes became atrocious for the scary few days when her health was uncertain.

That all sounds bad, but unfortunately, I am just getting started. After a few weeks of living at site, I found out that someone was stealing from my room, to the tune of 11,000 rupias.  This is my entire living allowance for a month.  The Peace Corps was kind enough to reimburse me, but still, its not a great feeling knowing that someone had been coming into my room and rooting through my things. After taking necessary precautions (lots of locks), I found out that another 2,000 rupias had been stolen.  This time though, my Daai and I were able to find the culprit.  A fifteen year old kid that goes to the private school in town who came over the day before to do homework with my host brother.

That same day, in Kathmandu, my Peace Corps phone got pickpocketed at a festival, and later that same day, I got held against my will in a club, and to make a long story very short, the police got involved and at one point I was horizontal, 4 feet in the air, with my friend pulling on my hands to get me out of the club, and three bouncers pulling me back into the bar (I didn’t end up escaping that time). During that same trip to Kathmandu, I bought a mountain bike to more easily get around town, and a few days later, one of the teachers rode it for literally about 100 feet and managed to break it so bad that I have to go to the next town over to fix it.

This all goes to show that despite what you see on social media, Peace Corps service hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows.  Even with all the horrible things that have happened to me though, I remain in good spirits.  Bad circumstances have been ineffective in dampening my attitude for more than a day or two at a time.

A quick note on that.  For me, it is never the case that a bad day is truly a bad day.  It’s more like there are bad moments, and the situation gets me down for a little bit, but something good happens that gets my spirit up, like playing cricket with the neighborhood kids, a conversation with a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer, or a short conversation with one of my students.  In such a welcoming and kindhearted culture, it’s hard to remain down on your luck.

So much good has happened.  The biggest win is a nearly seamless integration into my community.  Even though area I live in is massive population-wise for PCV standards (around 30,000 people), I get recognized everywhere I go.  Its always, Hello Steven Sir, or Good afternoon Raju Sir, even when I am far away from the campus.   Building relationships with my students has been so incredibly rewarding, and they are some of the sweetest, most thoughtful students I could hope to teach.

My students come from all over the area, it is commendable the lengths they will go for an education.  Some walk two hours each way to get to the school, and some live so far away that they stay in the hostel at school, taking care of the school cows, goats, chickens, and crops to earn their room and board.

This is a cool aspect of my school, their learning-by-earning programs.  Every year, the school gives out fifteen goats to students whose families are struggling to pay some of the extra fees.  Public schools aren’t supposed to collect money from students, but our school is so big, and the government so severely underfunds the schools, that they don’t have much choice.  If the school didn’t collect money from the students, more than half of the teachers would be out of a job.  So, while 200 – 1000 rupia a month per student is a lot cheaper than private school, some families just can’t afford it.  For these families, the school gives the student a goat, the student takes care of it, feeds it, and gets it pregnant, by finding it a strapping young male goat of course.  The school receives the first-born kid of the student’s goat, and the student keeps the kids to follow.  When the goat is eventually butchered, its meat is valued at around 15,000 rupia, which is enough to pay for a student’s tuition, books, and uniform for one full year. the school receiving back a new goat kid ensures the sustainability of the program.

The school has other programs like this, where the students work on a project and get to keep the profits from the enterprise.  One really successful and lucrative program is a food stall run by students that goes up during holidays and during the school anniversary.  Another program that made national press was a program where the students planted 1000 Merigolds around the campus, took care and grew them up for the next few months, and then sold them for a nice profit to a florist in Kathmandu in preparation for the Tihar celebrations in October, The entire school campus was bathed in gold from the flower plantations.

I am planning on helping to set up more earning-by-learning programs with my clubs, the first being a vermicompost project (worm farm), and depending on the quality of the soil, a fish farm to be run by the soon-to-be-created business club. Very recently, the forestry department donated 500 trees to my school, and the first 50 arrived recently. The Eco-club planted guava, orange, lychee, and floral trees all across campus. I am jealous of the student who will go to school here in ten years and be able to eat a guava on the way to class by simply picking it off a tree. I am determined to plant more fruit trees back in the states, because it just makes all the sense in the world to have your trees sustaining you, in addition to merely shading. Why in the hell are there almost no fruit trees in public areas in the US? I have a bone to pick with Big Ag.

Anyway, to get back on topic, there is a concept amongst Peace Corps volunteers called “Posh Corps”, its usually reserved for those volunteers serving in Eastern Europe, living by themselves in fully furnished apartments.  I wont go so far as to say I am living in a Posh Corps kind of environment, but I am certainly in the Posh Corps of Nepal.  The biggest luxury is that my family has a washing machine.  The only challenge with my living arrangement is that water only comes once every two days, and sometimes, they forget to send the water, so it’s every four days.  I learned recently that the food security volunteers in Lamjung have to walk about a mile to collect their water every day, so I should really consider myself fortunate that the water comes at all! 

Regardless, the water situation brings our family into conservation mode, which means no showers, and no laundry, usually on all the days where I most need to take a shower or wash my clothes.  One of these weeks, this led me to doing my laundry by hand for the first time since beginning service.  It is no easy task, it takes about an hour and a half and your arms and back get sore doing it.  Hand washing clothing gives me a profound appreciation for the time and effort that is saved when we toss our clothes into a washing machine.  As educational as the experience was, I hope not to do it again anytime soon.

Another really nice thing about my town is its proximity to Kathmandu, only about two hours away by bus.  Whenever I leave my village to go to the neighboring town, or Kathmandu, I never have to wait more than five minutes to get on a bus.  Some of the other volunteers have a few buses every day that can get them out of town, and then it’s a 3 to 4 hour to their district center.  Other volunteers have to spend two full days traveling to Kathmandu. 

My town is also not lacking in restaurants, and has all the amenities of a medium sized city.  There are very few things that I would have to leave my site to get, most basic things are available at the bazaar, if I cant find it here though, the much bigger cities of Dhulikhil and Banepa are just 45 minutes and an hour away respectively.

Probably the craziest thing that has happened in my time here was witnessing my Daai get possessed by his ancestor.  My family’s last name is Kafle, and I live in Kafletok.  Basically, I am in Kafle central.  Every six years, the Kafle family gathers for a ritual that has been passed from generation to generation.  Over a thousand people, coming from all over Nepal gather in Kafletok, and begin a large procession up the mountain early in the morning.  Once everyone arrived, the elders started chanting from a prayer book, the harmonium and drums came out and all the villagers began singing and clapping.   In the center of the room there was a shrine with an abundance of offerings, and images of deceased family members. 

The centerpiece of the ceremony is the middle-aged heads of the Kafle family, including my Daai.  They are dressed all in white, and wear a long wooden necklace around their necks.  They also shave their heads in preparation for the ceremony, save a tiny spot in the back of their head.  They are sitting crossed-legged amongst all the various people in the ceremony, and when the chanting and music reach a critical height, something comes inside of them.  Their hands move up and down, and in the case of my Daai, I watched him move across the floor like a wind-up toy, bouncing up and down all the while.  It was an absolutely surreal experience, I still don’t know quite what to think of it to this day, but it was clear to me that regardless I had witnessed a special moment in my community.  Nobody who was possessed has any memory of what they experienced that day.

Now, I am not the sole Peace Corps volunteer in Bhakunde.  Another volunteer recently arrived to help with computer and technological literacy.  He’s a super cool dude, and has a wealth of worldly experience, including a Peace Corps service in Morocco.  Together, I think that we will have a huge impact on the school, and I am very excited for our collaboration.  One project that I am especially excited about doing the World Map Project with him.  Basically, we need to find a wall and with the students, paint a world map on it.   He has done two during his service in Morocco and one while being a teacher in the US. 

Its hard to comprehend how much has happened since I have been here in Nepal.  The truth of the matter is that I am leaving out a lot.  Although I certainly have a routine down these days, there is seemingly always something new happening everyday.  Its funny to remember back to the times where I felt bummed to be living in Kavre, whereas now I couldn’t be more happy with the way things worked out.  Its crazy to me that everything that has happened at site, seemingly a years worth of adventure and new experiences, has happened in the last 6 weeks or so.  It makes me wonder what madness the next 22 months will bring.