The COS baby is coming.
So my final count down continues…..so February was the start
of my 9 month countdown to Close Of Service (COS) aka getting out of Nepal!
This 9-month point is my metaphor for a pregnancy. Now that it’s April I think
this marks my transition from 1st trimester into 2nd
trimester of the pregnancy. I will be honest about mid February was a very
rough week, it was just a lot of drama and was full of major lows in Nepal. I
refer to this, as the week someone finds out they are pregnant when they didn’t
plan to get pregnant: a lot of low moments and you believing your life is over
and you just cant move on. Well I made it through that week and then as in an
unexpected pregnancy, I started looking at all the optimistic parts of my
situation. Aka I have freedom to do or not do work. I don’t have a set schedule
where if I don’t have a productive/late/no show day, I don’t have to fear of
getting fired. I don’t have real deadlines or bills that I have to monthly pay
(although I really miss having an actual income). If someone is really saying
some things that I don’t like or is asking something that I don’t want to talk
about I can just respond with “I don’t understand.” Boom what are they going to
do? Speak English to me….nope haha, easy out.
So….. here is a Peace Corps reality.
Farmers market is a failure. Peace Corps is full of
failures, you learn to accept failure and pick yourself back up and move on.
Peace Corps volunteers are probably the most resilient people ever; you have to
be to make it through 27 months of this life. So farmers came up with all sorts
of excuses why is wouldn’t work and how they need a huge grant to do it. They
need a budget for tea. They need to pay someone to clean up. They need to do
repairs. They need scales. They can’t carry their produce to sell it. Its too
far for everyone. Long story short I could address every single comment on how
to do this without any external funding. Example. Drink tea at home or have a
stall selling tea-income for someone. Maybe people could just learn to clean up
after themselves, and there is no waste management trash is all burned or
thrown on the ground. There is a building already available and public toilets
are already there. Every single farmer I know almost everyone owns a scale
because they all sell their produce from time to time from their house, just
bring your own. People own tractors around here, maybe for a small fee per
farmer they could make income as well.
This concept of spending a little to make money is foreign
to them. I could definitely get into how foreign aide has really messed up
Nepal but it’s a topic that I have accepted I won’t be sharing my opinion on
probably ever unless its with other Peace Corps volunteers because honestly you
really just cant understand unless you go through something like this. And if I shared what I think I’m pretty sure
everyone would just think I’m an asshole. One needs to experience grassroots
development, speaking the local language, living in a village, trying to do
projects with no external funds, and 2 years of your life going through this.
I’m happy I am here but honestly if anyone wants to do development work Peace
Corps is a must! Shows you reality of how these big foreign aid money projects
gets spent, what works long term, ect. Its not the data excel spread sheets of
‘this many houses holds and number of people ages blah blah blah benefited from
this training’ no you see past projects that now no one takes care of the local
people saying ‘oh yea so and so came and built that but the pump broke, someone
else will come and build another one.’ No one willing to even come listen to
what you have to teach unless there is money given to them for showing up, tea,
and snacks. Ummm we are providing education for free to you isn’t that good
enough. Teaching you ways to improve you health, income, and educate you; nope
they just want the snacks and free money just for showing up.
I made my first kill….
So I killed my first rabbit for my rabbit-farming project.
It was traumatic. It was not as easy as YouTube/wiki how said it was suppose to
be. I can’t share the full experience on how it went; I don’t want you all to
cry haha. Anyways luckily I was alone! No one around me to see the show…..this
NEVER happens in Nepal, I am NEVER alone or not watched when I am doing
something outside. It was such a miracle that no one witnessed this. Well I
killed the rabbit, skinned it properly, and then my host father cooked it. They
were pretty surprised at the fact that you can skin a rabbit. With everything
they kill they burn off the hair after and then chop up the animal to pieces
eating everything thing: the bones, the skin, and most of the organs. Oh he was
also super upset that I cut off the head and threw it away, he wanted to eat
that as well and then I threw away the intestines and stomach and lungs which
they thought I was very wasteful at that. Ummm since I killed it we are cooking
it my way. Haha. Anyways the family was happy with how it tasted. After the
traumatic experience of killing it I told my host father he is killing the next
one and he was just like nope, no way! He doesn’t kill animals; he will only
eat them and cook them. They initially got the rabbits for fun, they are cute,
it was my idea to use them for meat. Ooops. Meat is hard to come by in this
country. Rabbit farming is perfect for people here!.
Changing girls lives through GLOW camp….
So Surkhet (my district capital) had Girls Leading Our World
camp. 5 of us volunteers chose 5 girls from each of our government schools and
a counterpart to come and participate in this 5 day camp involving interactive
trainings on leadership, empowerment, self-esteem, reproduction, gender,
violence, and volunteerism. Our camp was lead by Aawaaj an NGO who works on
issues of violence on women, we also had brought a professional in to coverall
all the reproduction and health subjects. We had a career panel and speakers
from Blue Diamond Society talk about gay/lesbian/bisexual topics. Throughout
the camp the girls got to play sports, decorate and write in journals, work in
teams on creating short presentations, and create various artworks. Learning in
Nepal is generally just memorizing and shouting out from books, may students
cant critically think or problem solve do to this method of teaching/learning.
This camp allowed for creativity and interaction working together as a team.
The girls really enjoyed making new friends and oh they were introduced to
glitter pens, their lives will never be the same haha and markers for coloring
and drawing on poster board they had an amazing time. We also taught them
ultimate Frisbee and they couldn’t wait every evening for free time/sports
hour. I honestly think these girls just had one of the best weeks of their
lives!
Now we are all going back to our villages and planning to do
a mini GLOW camp with the 5 girls and the counterpart giving all the trainings.
We are going to do it on a much small budget/scale. The girls are really excited
to share what they learning and they very much enjoy presenting and have
learned a lot in the 5-day camp.
My future…..
Now I want to do a sanitation project. Nepali people seem to
all be very aware of how dirty they are making their country by just through
trash on the floor all the time and into the river but yet no one does anything
about it. There are recycling plants for plastic and glass bottles that
actually pay you to recycle but people are just too lazy. So my plan is to
educate people on what can be recycled, composted, and then work with the VDC
to put together a trash collecting system. Earth Day is April 22nd
so I want to work with the school and get the kids to do a huge trash clean up
day and that will be the big jump-start on the project. What some towns do is
have big cement bins to collect waste and then it is either burned monthly or
collected and taken to an area to dump it. I have to meet with my VDC people to
see what their sanitation budget is and what ideas they have first before I go
ahead and make a huge plan in my head and then it just fails. Starting from the
beginning with Nepali people I would be working with before moving ahead,
lessons learned haha.
Fun….
Going to Tibet April 29th and my sister and
friend Amanda are coming with on the trip. We are going to have 4 days to hang
out in Nepal before we depart for Tibet. I am very excited to have visitors
again and to go to Tibet. We will get to see Lhasa, a lake, and we get to camp
over night and Mount Everest Base Camp with I CANNOT wait but if its cloudy and
we cant see anything I will weep like a baby so I really hope we have amazing
weather.
