My experience as a volunteer.
I have been in Nepal for over a month now, although it feels like so much longer. People are always saying that something feels longer, or that it feels like shorter. Never will you hear it said that it feels exactly as long as it appears to be. Why longer? Because each day is stuffed full of new exciting experiences. Our new house is next to an army barracks. I assume it’s an army barracks, because of the razor wire, and gun turrets. Those lonely men in their gun turrets, gazing out onto a suburban street. Army uniform, khaki, and it occurs to me that khaki is a very Nepali-sounding word, I wonder where its origin lies? Last night as I rode my bicycle home, one of the men had night0vision goggles on. I’d never seen night-vision goggles in real life, here in the poorest country I’ve ever seen I was not expecting something so futuristic. I smile and wave to those men in the gun turrets. Usually they smile and wave back, grateful for something to break the tedium. One day I will have a conversation with them, tell them about my life back in Australia. Sometimes when I smile and wave, they look back at me with a look of foreboding, uncertainty with a gun. This is the worst kind of uncertainty. I don’t blame them though, things are different here.
I sing to myself on the bicycle. Mostly I sing ‘Stormy Weather’, the Peggy Lee version inspires my rendition. It is not my song, but then again, it is not my bicycle either. I am borrowing it from my housemate Noah, while he is away ‘in the field’.. Before that, I had another friend’s bicycle, my other friend was away in ‘the field’ too, a different field. Her field was a village, the poorest village she has ever seen, one of the poorest places in Nepal, and therefore, almost perfectly wealthless. Apparently there are 7 aid organizations acting to help that village in some way, but their help is not apparent. Not slightly. Meanwhile, in London, people take to the streets, burning things, smashing windows and going midnight-shopping. Everyone is eager to attach meaning to this, condemning it as mindless or comparing it to historical revolutions. Political unrest? Why not? Opportunistic looting? Certainly. Flecks of meaning swimming through a soup of chaos, a feedback loop fed by alienation, disempowerment and innumerable personal stories that should not be hidden under blankets. No-one who has lived in London, who has been poor in London, should be surprised. Here, it is a different poverty. In some ways better, in some ways worse. Better in the way that people know how to make things out of junk, how to fix things rather than throw them away, how to grow their own food, distill their own alcohol and most importantly how to come together as a community, how to look out for each other. Worse in that they have no hope for the future, they are stuck where they are, and sometimes food just doesn’t grow. They leave in the thousands, once again I cannot remember the figures because I cannot fathom them, let’s just be conservative and say that thousands of Nepalis try to cross the border every month. In many cases, cowboy-NGOs and celebrity-endorsed charities catch them, stop them, send them back to starve in their own village. Tick, job done, the NGO-workers catch a group of women at the border, take them to the police for a severe beating, vision obscured, dollar signs in the eyes. The women are sent back to their village, and of course they leave again, are again caught, this time by the charity I work for, and so this story comes to me. We don’t do border rescues, as far as I can tell we are way less dodgy than the big players. We are a small charity, and very transparent about what we do, how we do it.
In Brisbane, I used to steal things from supermarkets, just little things. And the more the supermarket experience annoyed and nauseated me, the more I would steal in kind. In kind support from Safeworth. In this way, instituting my own pay-as-you-feel system, I found the supermarket shopping experience bearable. My housemates found it hilarious, which only encouraged me to steal more, and to steal weirder things. A particular favourite of my housies was a large bunch of bananas (my own obscure protest, for at that time bananas cost $12/kilo), which I just held in my hand throughout the whole shopping experience, so that when my time came to check out, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to continue holding it, no-one in the world would dare question it, least of all disillusioned supermarket staff. Aren’t we all just monkeys anyway?
Here in Nepal, I would never steal from a shop. Authorities predict that violent conflict is just around the corner, and I would not be surprised. It was certainly not what I expected, this place. The lovely people at the charity I work for asked me to write a couple of paragraphs about my time in Nepal so far. Something personal, entertaining, something they could quote. I accidentally wrote this. I should start again.
I left a very nice life in Brisbane to be here. I worked a little every day, teaching circus and sometimes performing. The rest of the time I would do my own training, or go to the beach, or visit my friends, or listen to live music, or drink delicious coffee. Life is very different here. Every day I work in the office. EBT-N is a small team that does big things, and so there is always a lot to do. I came here to be a circus trainer, and for 6 hours a week, this is what I do. The rest of the time, I do things I never expected to do, not in my wildest dreams. Things like working in an office. On the street corner nearby, a man sits and mends umbrellas and shoes. People ride around the neighborhood, calling out in a special guttural voice, perfectly tuned to reach through the farthest window. Sometimes they call out “Aap!” which means they are selling mangoes, other times they call out what sounds like “Talagag gag Talagag gag”. I don’t know what it means, but I think they’re collecting junk to recycle.
I ride my bike through streets where staying on the left side of the road is not so much a rule as a guideline. As far as I can tell, there are only two road rules: Look everywhere all the time, and don’t hit anyone. Once you get used to it, and so long as you’re not in a hurry, it actually works really well. When you cross the street, just keep walking and the cars, motorbikes and miscellaneous vehicles will dodge around you like a school of fish.
I was only supposed to be here for three months, but now I want to stay for longer, at least a year. I don’t know why exactly. There is something beautiful about this project. People in Nepal need hope. If we can rescue a small group of kids, give them hope, and then let them share their hope through the medium of circus, then perhaps we can spread this hope. Who knows? As my friend would say, it’s worth a red-hot go
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