Settling in and getting to work.
This week in Nepal: Monday marks a full month since arriving in Nepal as a Peace Corps Response Volunteer and, while I think many of us feel frustrated by the absence of any tangible “product” from our short time here, we’ve already accomplished much with two weeks of technical, cultural, and language training followed by an initial week of settling in at our respective work site.
This past week, we briefly returned to Kathmandu to troubleshoot any site issues and brainstorm solutions as well as an individualized work plan. I’m truly glad to be back in my house, writing to you from my kitchen table eating my morning biscuits, and drinking my instant coffee.
This week’s cheers: I’ve mentioned before how inspiring I find the nine other volunteers in our cohort. I was delighted to hear about their experiences navigating the road to their work sites, what challenges and opportunities they face in planning their work, and the frustrations they encountered on the way to reaching the one-month mark. They’re a dedicated crew with diverse life and work experiences and I learn so much every time we have the opportunity to think through our time here in Nepal.
This week’s tears: Sometime between last week’s post and this, the reality of this overseas experience solidified as I’ve been settling in. Perhaps I wore blinders during the first few weeks as to what was happening back home, but this week it seems the blinders came off and I had to think about some stateside realities, not the least of which was the week’s news from Manhattan. It’s been a good reminder that, as temporary volunteers, we always have one foot in the US and one foot in Nepal. Often, straddling the ocean between is what strains us the most.
My volunteer experience was very different in Morocco almost 20 years ago. I had a basic “dumb” phone and only got to the Internet once a week, if lucky. Here in Nepal, I’m as connected as I am in Hawaii, with the only difference being the fifteen hours and forty-five minutes I am ahead of Hawaii. I suspect I’ll find a rhythm to this new life as days become weeks and months of settling in here. We’re enduring the pre-monsoon heat, although not as bad as Delhi, and looking forward to the seasonal rains that, I’m told, will bring cooler air to these Himalayan foothills.
The week ahead: We have a mandatory evacuation drill later this week which requires us to practice receiving emergency instructions, moving to the nearby consolidation point, and then practicing an additional consolidation back in Kathmandu. While I’d rather just stay here in the village and continue settling in, the drill is a necessary chore and one that has proved necessary for Peace Corps Nepal, having been fully utilized three times in the last twenty years for political unrest, the 2015 earthquake, and the 2020 COVID evacuation. The drill will represent the last of our “on-boarding” tasks and, thereafter, we will be able to focus on the work we all came here to do. I look forward to sharing those settling in stories with you.
