How it all began: Nepal-A Love Story

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Nepal. Why?



Graduate College

I guess I should do work saving people but where? If I stay in America I guess I have to go to the inner city.

Join a year volunteer program and find myself on the one team in the most diverse square mile of the world. Refugees

Refugees from all over the world. People from the saddest situations of life who smile anyway. That was the year, basically the exact same time that Nepalis started arriving in America. Correction: Bhutanese Refugees who are ethnically Nepali, they got run out of Bhutan (violentely) after 100 years of working and developing the land there which they were asked to come and do...all because they didn't give up their culture, religion, and language and just blend in with the Bhutanese. So they fled back to Nepal where they also can't live permanently so they stayed in Refugee camps for at least 17 years before they were permitted to go to a third country where they can actually have lives, jobs, a future, a life. Please understand, this is my understanding of a very complicated and political thing. What I do know is somehow, by no action of my own, I happened to not have to live a situation like that. There's no difference, we are people, just the same.

So my first refugee friends...Nepalis. There was something different. I immediatly saw wisdom or cleverness or some sort of entrepreneurial genious in them. In these friends. They offered us tea...heavenly sugar milk with tea in it, flaming hot. Every week I visited them and we would talk and drink tea and it was wonderful. And every Nepali after, they are all different of course but in general there was a feeling with them, I just loved them, I loved how they made their homes colorful-stuffed animals everywhere, birthday napkins and plastic flowers all over the walls. Real conversations and always being impressed by their opinions and ideas. I loved so many of the cultures I was around but Nepalis were a favorite. Nepali food-yum. Nepali people-most beautiful. Nepali language-happy and high like talking to babies. I just need it, this wonderfulness in these people. I needed to get there, to find the place from which they got these things and absorb it. I just wanted to get there.

So I made a plan. Teach in China another year and go to Nepal for a few months before restarting life back in America...but I couldn't wait. So I threw in a trip this summer because I couldn't bear the thought of going to Nepal once, starting a real job and never getting to return. So I found short volunteer trips online. In May I got my plans all set. 2 weeks in Nepal volunteering at an orphanage and visiting Chitwan National Park. I figured that was a safe way to do it since I was going alone. Done, plans set...joy and relief felt, excitement, disbelief mostly. Something big is coming.

I wish the words came to explain this weird love I have for Nepal, but they don't come. I have weird cheesy images to explain it sometimes but I like Nepal, a lot.

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