davethegrinch.net

Sarah says:

Dear Diary, here we are back in Kathmandu, watching a fantastic rain storm from yet another retro-hippie cafe that serves reasonably strong coffee and reasonably pleasing chocolate cake and where, apparently, it’s acceptable to openly smoke marijuana……when we should be on our volunteer placement. I think we are grieving that it didn’t work out and our endless self psychoanalysis isn’t getting us anywhere. If we were to pay ourselves $150 per hour for 5 couch sessions, perhaps our notes would look something like this:

Stage One: Idealism

When the Info Nepal brochure said we’d live with a Nepalese family and teach English to small children in the town library, my mind conjured Sound Of Music images of a village nestled in the magestic Himalayan mountains inhabited by adorable children who would give us their undivided attention and devotion, a family that would introduce us to the Nepalese way of life yet live miraculously in a modern and western style home, and an entire village of potential new friends where we would feel like we belonged. We’d get to know the ways of the town and would while away our free time at the corner cafe, mingling with the locals and having a good laugh over a cup of tea. Some aspects would be hard, perhaps a little uncomfortable at times, but the feeling of fulfillment from doing something good would see us through.

Stage Two: Denial
I began to feel a little hesitant about our commitment to this program after our training village experience, what with the lack of a flushable toilet and a floor-cum-dining table coated in cow dung, but my mind refused to believe that our real placement would possibly be that bad. Isn’t it funny how you can look something square in the face and still not believe it to be true. Still, I knew we were tired, weary and perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to leave this kind of project to the end of our first 1/2 of traveling. I desperately tried to rekindle the excitement for the whole idea that I’d once felt but I must confess that as the taxi drove us to our permanent placement, farther and farther into dust-bowl oblivion, I secretly wished it would just keep driving forever - all the way back to Delhi International Airport where I could board the next flight to London.

Stage Three: Fortitude

As much as I wanted the taxi to keep driving, I also wanted to believe about myself that I have what it takes to exist under grueling and stressful conditions if an important situation calls for it- and I wanted to prove that to myself with this volunteer project more than anything even though I knew it was a mistake as soon as we arrived in our placement town. By this time we were both so emotionally invested in the *idea* of what we were there to do and invested in the organization from the 5 days we’d spent with other Info Nepal people in Kathmandu, not to mention our sense of pride in having made a commitment that we looked upon everything with a, “well….we will live with that. we will make it work” attitude.

Stage Four: Disappointment
You can give me a bedroom with an exposed tin roof in 100 degree heat that has a colony of bats and cockroaches the size of lizards, a matress that is literally a pillow and a piece of plywood, a one road town with absolutely nothing to do, a library in shambles and kids who only want to play the one game they’ve been playing since volunteers began coming to this town 4 years ago. You can give me any of those, just don’t give them to me all at once. To be disappointed in one thing is is easy to overcome; to be disappointed in everything takes more fortitude than I was able to muster, especially considering a bacteria growth to rival Alien was beginning to form somewhere in the lower half of my intestines. When it finally broke forth not even the clean but basic squat toilet could do anything to mask more disappointment. It’s not clear at this point if I’m disappointed in myself, the town, the family or Info Nepal; perhaps a little bit of all.

Stage Five: Hope
Unfortunately, I only had 2 healthy days in this town but, even so, we did have some good times. And you better believe that we clung to those good times with all our might when most of the time we were asking ourselves what the hell we were doing there. They gave us hope, hope that my tummy would get better and these little moments of charm would grow and grow. Each morning we were greeted cheerfully by our host mother with a wonderful cup of tea and we’d stand on our roof-top patio and watch the sun come up (Nepal wakes up very very early). We were audience to a wonderfully spectacular thunderstorm that cleared the air and left it cool enough for us to take a walk through their beautiful surrounds. It was a very rare opportunity for us to walk side-by-side and chat in peace. And then there was David’s brief breakthrough with the town kids where he actually felt he was teaching them something new. He was also approached by a local teacher who asked for extra lessons for some of his students. Teaching them provided the hope that the town kids would also be as attentive and willing to learn as these students were.

Stage Six: Entrapment
To feel trapped by geography, sickness, situation and a touch of home-sickness makes it very hard to maintain those moments of hope. The feeling doesn’t creep on you rather washes over you in one momentous emotion. Lunch time on the 4th day I felt well and truly trapped. Logic and reason lost out. It was time to go. My tummy just wasn’t getting any better, I was facing serious dehydration in that heat and that squat toilet was getting harder and harder to manage.

Stage Seven: Escapism

There was no easy or comfortable way to leave this town. Taxis do not originate there. The only way out was by an over-crowded, hot and bumpy busride 20 kms along a gravel road to the nearest large town where we’d need to find a taxi to take us another 20 kms to the nearest hotel. But the decision had been made so we made the lonely walk to the bus stop, our town of potential friends looking on with curiosity, and boarded the next bus that pulled through. Every person who boarded that bus seemed to be hauling 50 lb bags of potatoes for some reason so we all shared what little space there was, people and potatoes. From what we hear, however, this must have been our lucky day. No goats or chickens climbed on board. To top off this experience perfectly, upon disembarking the bus we were surrounded by the bus boys who tried to quietly but assertively charge us about 5 times the price of a normal fare.

Stage Eight: Grieving
We have talked round and round what went wrong. We’ve talked it to death and we’ve blamed:
everyone but ourselves,
us and no one else,
the kids,
the town,
my stomach bacteria,
the director of Info Nepal,
Info Nepal…

We’ve felt angry, sad, depressed, we’ve felt bitter about the money and then decided we didn’t feel bitter about the money, we have felt so many things and have tried so hard to come up with one definitive and satisfying answer to why. Why is it that other volunteers would see it through and we couldn’t. Why couldn’t or didn’t we make it work. Traveling is all about learning. Sometimes you learn about temples, restaurants, culture, religion but sometimes you learn about yourself. And sometimes it takes time and space to understand what it is you have just learned. Perhaps we will understand ourselves a little better soon or perhaps this will remain an enigma for quite a while.

p.s. Yay Kathmandu International Clinic and their special antibiotics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 6:29 am and is filed under Global Travels, Nepal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.