Organization: Volunteers Initiative Nepal  

    "Rewind back to October 25, 2016 and we were all a bunch of strangers sitting in our introduction meeting on the fifth floor of the SLC. Fast forward to May 2, 2017 and we are a family of 12 Toronto Met students about to begin our journey to Kathmandu, Nepal.

 

     Walking into the Kathmandu airport was a surreal experience. We carried the next month of our lives backpacks out of the airport and were immediately faced with what seemed to be an infinite amount of people asking if we wanted a taxi. We found our in-country representative, Dinesh, who took us to “Hotel Premium,” our temporary accommodation in the Thamel district of Kathmandu. The next morning we were woken up by the crows of a few nearby roosters and the crisp, dusty air seeping through our windows. We quickly dressed and rush to the rooftop to watch the sun rise over the mountains surrounding the city. Mary Anne Radmacher once said, “I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” This became true for us with the sun, and little did we know that our first morning in Nepal would foreshadow a month of magnificent sunrises.

 

After a few days exploring the main city, we hopped into cabs and made our way up through the mountains into our home for the next month: the village of Tinpiple, Jitpurphedi. After about an hour of winding, bumpy dirt roads, we arrived at our accommodations in a farmhouse. It was a dusty pale pink with a large blue tarp over the outdoor living room area. Our host family had cows and yaks as well as their dog Saru. We slept on mattresses on the floor underneath flowing white mosquito nets. 

 

Our typical day would consist of getting up around sunrise, which was around 5:00 to 6:00 am. If we were feeling up to it, we would walk to the junction and watch the sunrise from the roadside. After breakfast we would grab our lunch tiffins and put on some tunes to walk up the mountain to one of two work sites. Most days we would walk about 45 minutes to the school where we would play with the school children and help with the construction of a new school building. During our month there we did a lot of foundational work and ground levelling with the help of the local workers. On other days we would walk over an hour up to a local family’s home, where we helped take down the remnants of their house, which was destroyed by the earthquake. After salvaging as much as we could, we began doing foundational work there as well.

 

     The second weekend we were there we embarked on a weekend excursion to Chitwan National Park. The drive there can best be described with a quote from our coordinator Alana Ferguson, “it was like putting 12 people in a box and shaking it for eight hours straight.” The bumpy dirt roads in Nepal do not make for any smooth rides, but this did not dampen our spirits by any means. We stopped a few times on our way there to grab snacks, and spent our time in the car chatting, listening to music and napping. Once we arrived, we unpacked and were immediately taken on a walking tour of the area and had time to hang out with the elephants near our lodge. The next day we headed out on a full day outing where we had the chance to view many species of birds, elephants and a rhino!

 

By the end of the month we had many new friends, both young and old. We got to know the names of all the school children and enjoyed taking work breaks to play Stella-Ella-Ola with them in their classrooms. On our final day in the school, we were given butterfly shaped paper badges that read, “you are special” as thanks for our month of work there. We thanked them for allowing us to live in their village and spend our month there. Although they thanked us for our work we did there, what we were thanking them for was not any sort of tangible thing. They gave us a month of happiness, an incomparably immersive cultural experience and life lessons and memories to last a lifetime.

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Although we all had three more months of summer adventures ahead of us, Tinpiple stayed in our minds and hearts."