It is so difficult to be raising money for a cause in Nepal when hundreds of thousands of people need help in Haiti. But despite the difficulties Americans faced over the last year, we all still have it pretty good compared to either country... I think we are generous enough to help wherever we can. So, a big thank you to the latest donors to our scholarship fund - Lisa, Jory and Sam Gessow- and here are some ways you can help Haiti as well. I've already texted my donation to the American Red Cross, but I would encourage donations by check due to concerns about credit card fees.
Partners in Health
Doctors without Borders
Yele
And, no matter how much money you have, it's important to stay informed about the rebuilding efforts in Haiti and draw as much attention to developing countries as possible- without the limelight, the world tends to ignore what we can't see.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Friday, December 11, 2009
Good news!
We've already raised $350 for student scholarships! But we still need more to help other students ... the next semester starts in April.
I am sending out a fundraising letter now- please give if you can!
Thank you to these recent donors:
~ Campbell Harvey
~ Lilyan Haigh
Also, here is an interesting read from the New York Times on how difficult it is for Nepalese immigrants to adjust to life in America .... The people of Nepal rarely gets such in-depth coverage- most news stories cover protests or Everest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/nyregion/13sherpa.html?hp
I am sending out a fundraising letter now- please give if you can!
Thank you to these recent donors:
~ Campbell Harvey
~ Lilyan Haigh
Also, here is an interesting read from the New York Times on how difficult it is for Nepalese immigrants to adjust to life in America .... The people of Nepal rarely gets such in-depth coverage- most news stories cover protests or Everest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/nyregion/13sherpa.html?hp
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Our students
Kuldip sent photos of the students were are sponsoring with scholarships!
Here they are:
Sushma Shapkota, grade 10
Samir K.C., grade LkG &
Josef Das, Nursery
Here they are:
Sushma Shapkota, grade 10
Samir K.C., grade LkG &
Josef Das, Nursery
Sunday, January 18, 2009
News from Nepal
Hi all,
It's been awhile but here is a recent email from Kuldip, the assistant principal at the school. He read the biography of the founder of Room to Read, John Wood. It's a great organization that helps build schools and libaries in developing countries.
Here's what Kuldip said:
"I read the biography of John Wood, the founder of ROOM TO READ. If you got please read. I am influenced with his biography. It evoked me to do something for the needy children. If I go on thinking for myself as others do then who will think for for these children? You too have seen the reality of these shildren. So, please let's do something for these children."
He also mentioned that two students are having trouble paying for school ...
"Since two students, one of grade 9 and another of grade 7, are getting difficulat to pay for their education I have been paying for them for this session hoping you will manage for the next and onward."
So my next fundraising efforts will go toward helping those students. Look for a newsletter coming soon! He also gave a quick update about the library"
"The library is working well. Students are enjoying with knowledge."
That's the latest! More soon ....
~ a.
It's been awhile but here is a recent email from Kuldip, the assistant principal at the school. He read the biography of the founder of Room to Read, John Wood. It's a great organization that helps build schools and libaries in developing countries.
Here's what Kuldip said:
"I read the biography of John Wood, the founder of ROOM TO READ. If you got please read. I am influenced with his biography. It evoked me to do something for the needy children. If I go on thinking for myself as others do then who will think for for these children? You too have seen the reality of these shildren. So, please let's do something for these children."
He also mentioned that two students are having trouble paying for school ...
"Since two students, one of grade 9 and another of grade 7, are getting difficulat to pay for their education I have been paying for them for this session hoping you will manage for the next and onward."
So my next fundraising efforts will go toward helping those students. Look for a newsletter coming soon! He also gave a quick update about the library"
"The library is working well. Students are enjoying with knowledge."
That's the latest! More soon ....
~ a.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Update
Hello again,
Sorry for my recent absence.
I’ve been busy juggling a new job, moving into a new apartment, and everything else that comes with moving to a new place … not to mention a few weeks without internet access! Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that the project is still going and I’m working on setting up a partnership between Santaneshwor and a local school. Let me know if you have any other ideas about fundraising, as no more donations have been coming in ...
This is an uphill battle but I'm going to stay with it- as should you.
Sorry for my recent absence.
I’ve been busy juggling a new job, moving into a new apartment, and everything else that comes with moving to a new place … not to mention a few weeks without internet access! Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that the project is still going and I’m working on setting up a partnership between Santaneshwor and a local school. Let me know if you have any other ideas about fundraising, as no more donations have been coming in ...
This is an uphill battle but I'm going to stay with it- as should you.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Ambika
This is the photo that accompanied my story in The Keene Sentinel. Ambika, my host aunt, was cutting grass for the cows in the fields near Jharuwarasi.
In the news
Hello!
I finally finished writing about my experience in Nepal and the article was published today in The Keene Sentinel, where I used to be a reporter.
You can read the entire article below ... I'm donating the proceeds of my freelancing fees to the school. Let me know what you think!
Here's the link if you want to see it online with some photos:
http://www.keenesentinel.com/articles/2008/07/20/news/local/free/id_314192.txt
=====================================================================================
Top of the world
In the highest land on earth, a first-time teacher gets back far more than she gives
By Anna Haigh
Contributing Writer
Published: Sunday, July 20, 2008
EDITOR’S NOTE: Anna Haigh is a former Sentinel reporter who recently volunteered for three months in Nepal with a Kathmandu-based nonprofit organization. She was placed as an English teacher at Santaneshwor Vidya Mandir School in a small village in the Kathmandu Valley called Jharuwarasi. She taught grades 6, 7 and 8, and lived with a local family in the village.
In the streets of Kathmandu, the air is warm and smoky. My ears ring from the sound of honking horns and my taxi nearly grazes every bicycle as we head into the city. These are my first few minutes in Nepal: seeing women wearing saris on the back of motorcycles; a body covered in rags face-down on the sidewalk; cows and dogs eating from the same pile of trash; large baskets carried on bent backs and families bathing on front stoops.
And I feel like crying. This is why I came. For the sight of it all — chaotic, beautiful and sad. This is why I spent months planning and saving money; why I gave up my job and my apartment and all of the people I loved and everything that made me feel comfortable. I needed to see this place and these people. I wanted to experience life in a place that was different from anything I had ever known. And most importantly, I wanted to give something back as a volunteer — knowing all the time that I would be gaining more than I could ever give.
And Nepal, a small sliver of a developing country between China and India with more than 25 million people, needs help. Less than half the population is literate, and a third of the country qualifies as impoverished. Newspapers are still filled with stories of torture, kidnapping and murder, even more than a year after fighting between Maoist rebels in favor of communism and the government’s army ended, and trafficking of women and children into sexual slavery is rampant. I chose the country, in part, because of those dark statistics.
As we drive through the crowded streets of Kathmandu, among the smiling faces, tikkas on their forehead — red paint with religious significance — and swaying rickshaws, I knew I had found what I was looking for.
But now comes the hard part: learning the language, living the life and trying not to get hit by the traffic.
Far away from Nepal’s scenic Himalayan trekking and the tourist-filled restaurants of Kathmandu, there is a small village not on any map. It was there, in Jharuwarasi, that I found Nepal.
I found it on the dusty roads lined with fields of wheat and corn and in simple brick houses with cows out front. From my bedroom window in my host family’s home, I could see a yard full of mustard flowers and two tiny goats, and the neighbors washing dishes on the ground outside at dusk. Across the road, there was a water pump where the women took makeshift showers and a small concrete temple where local people stopped with yellow marigolds and other offerings for the gods. In the mornings, I could hear the thunk of wooden hoes hitting the dry earth, bells ringing to announce an offering at the temple and my host grandfather humming his daily Hindu prayers.
On my second day in the village, I walked a mile to the private school where I would be teaching, called Santaneshwor Vidya Mandir. The first thing I noticed was everything that was missing.
The school, which covers preschool through 10th-grade education (the highest level), was nothing but a large, four-story brick building with only classrooms, windows and benches. There were no doors, lights, carpet or posters. There was no gymnasium, library, science lab or playground, and therefore no classes such as music, art or physical education. The recess area was unpaved land where the kids played games with string or waited for a single metal slide. When the electric bell wasn’t working, one of the assistants banged the end of a metal spoon on a plate to call the 250 students back to class. There weren’t enough plastic lawn chairs for the 18 teachers to sit in, so many sat beside their students on the narrow green benches during lessons.
At first, it all seemed so bleak. But I forgot it all on my seventh day of teaching when I headed up the dirt road to find one of the students waiting for me.
Tiny Punika, maybe 5 years old, had a bright smile and big eyes. She wore a Spiderman backpack, the straps fraying and the zipper broken, and a brown uniform with holes in the sleeves. And as we walked along together, neither of us understanding what the other was saying, more children gathered around in their stiff black shoes and drab brown and yellow uniforms, following me to school. I felt like the Pied Piper. Even the little children, too young for school, shouted at me from their houses.
“Hello. I’m fine, thank you,” one little girl said, before I had a chance to ask.
The feeling continued for awhile, as the students peppered me with questions about my favorite movies, my parents’ names, and asked me to sign autographs in class. I discovered that despite the lack of facilities, the students had no shortage of enthusiasm or curiosity. They eagerly volunteered to stand up and read passages from poems in their course books and were quick to pass me their completed work with a bright, proud, “Done, Miss!”
It was a few weeks into my work, however — when I had gone from being a semi-celebrity in their eyes to an actual disciplinarian — that I found out how smart my students really were.
Many of the students had used English books, which meant page after page had already-filled-in answers, some in pen. So, I told them to erase answers if they had a used book, and asked them to work on the first two exercises. The exercises focused on comprehension of a Robert Louis Stevenson poem. But one boy, Sudeep, defiantly refused to erase the answers in his book, saying he had filled the exercise in himself, even when I pressed him to “be honest.”
What could I do? I let him keep the answers and told him to sit quietly while I watched the rest of the students do their work. Yet somehow the exact answers in Sudeep’s book were passed to the boy sitting next to him, and then to the next row back. And within minutes, the entire class had the same answers written down – answers I was sure they hadn’t thought up themselves.
The last question had such a particularly difficult answer – “an innocent child” — that I brought their attention to the question.
“What answer did you write for number 10?” I said.
Sudeep, of course, was the first to answer.
“Innocent child.”
And the rest of the class repeated the same answer.
“Okay,” I said. “What does that mean?”
They yelled out a host of interesting answers:
“Good.”
“Smart.”
I smiled.
“So all of you have this answer written in your books and none of you know what it means? That’s very strange.”
The students smiled sheepishly. We discussed the definition together until I was sure at least a few of them understood what “innocent child” meant and why Stevenson’s narrator could be described that way in the poem.
And then I ended the class with an admonishment, a bit disappointed in my 6th-graders.
“Next time, fill in the answers yourself and don’t copy. Otherwise, you’re not learning anything.”
I waved goodbye and a few of the students shouted back the usual phrase that ends each class.
“Thank you miss!”
Smiling. As innocent as apple pie.
Ambika squatted in the field, deftly cutting handfuls of grass and throwing them into the basket on her back with one quick movement. She spoke no English and a few weeks into my trip, I had only picked up a dozen words in Nepali.
But we spent the afternoon together in the field anyway. I tied one of the baskets around my forehead and she laughed and laughed as I tried to tell her how heavy it was. Later, she would carry the basket, filled with grass for the cows, on her back for more than a mile.
Ambika was the mother of three now-adult children and had spent a lifetime farming and cooking. On Saturdays, she met with other women to talk about “freedom,” but she could barely write her own name.
Later that day, she led me to her house and we sat with her daughter Arju inside Ambika’s small bedroom. Ambika pulled out boxes of makeup and nail polish and took out an old red lipstick, which she applied slowly to my lips. She couldn’t stop smiling at me and trying to give me the lipstick and everything else she owned.
Arju wanted everything her mother never had: She freely wore jeans and T-shirts, had already taken college classes, and was eager to study abroad in the United States. She told me she hated wearing the cloth skirts her mother wore every day, even in the fields, and never wanted to be married. In Nepal, arranged marriages are still the status quo, and afterward, the woman is obligated to move into her new husband’s home and begin taking care of his parents.
Arju and I became good friends, trading languages. I taught her English pronunciation and she quizzed me on my Nepali, along with translating what Ambika said to me.
After my trip to their home, I thought sadly to myself that if a Nepali visitor came into my house, I would never be as generous or as unabashedly kind. And out of my whole experience in Nepal, I found that the feeling I was left with the most was surprise — at how generous everyone was to me, when they all had so little.
The female teachers at Santaneshwor were constantly inviting me over for tea after school, which turned into a full-fledged meal when they also gave me a plate piled high with fried bread and sweets. When I was invited to a wedding party, the teachers were eager to help me put on my first sari. One of the teachers, Rupa, gave me shoes and a necklace to wear — and wouldn’t let me give them back again afterward — while another painted my nails and applied my eyeliner. I felt like some kind of royalty having them dress me, and when I walked out into the school yard wearing the sari, the entire school stopped eating lunch to point and stare at me.
You can’t be in Nepal — or any developing country, for that matter — very long without wanting to do something to help. But it was frustrating to feel that even with help, the country seems stuck in poverty and had been troubled by years of political unrest.
And though while I was there, the elections showed the Nepali people’s resounding support of the Maoists and the end of the monarchy, it could still take a long time for a stable government to emerge that can deal with all of the country’s troubles, I thought. In the villages, the people still seemed like they were living in a previous century. The children played with hoops and sticks, laundry was washed by hand, and most lived off the crops they grew. “Is it true,” my students asked me incredulously one day, voices in a whisper, “you have a machine that washes dishes?”
Many of them had never eaten pizza, never been as far as Kathmandu. After three months of living in Nepal, I decided that I would like to see the country keep its simple way of life forever, except for what I believed its children — my students — were missing.
I ache for them in their brick-and-concrete schools without playgrounds or art supplies. For them, I want more. I want them to have more than simple course books, and school only until 10th-grade. I want them to sing and dance and dream of everything beyond their small village that’s out there to behold. But how? How to give women more freedom, children a better education, lift the country out of poverty, without money and a stable government? And worse, how to do it without crushing their customs and traditions, without destroying the simplicity and purity of their lives that I find so beautiful?
“Ke garne?” Meaning, “What to do?”
I decided to start small. I wanted to give them a library, because I can’t imagine what my life would be without books. It felt like a trivial goal when there are large nonprofit organizations building entire schools and solar-powered orphanages with 10-year plans. It was only a few more books in one school in a small village not on any map. But it was a start.
In the end, I left them a library. A new bookcase full of dozens of reading books with bright, colorful drawings and words in big print.
I taught them how to read a newspaper and how to conduct an interview. I gave them three daily newspapers and monthly magazines for the whole school to use.
Those sad-looking nursery rooms — once void of color — each had a poster with numbers or letters. Doe-eyed Archana, my favorite teacher who had become a friend, helped me pin up the posters with a hammer and some nails as the toddlers looked on, already reciting the new words and letters aloud.
It wasn’t just me — my friends and family had contributed more than $1,000 to help create the library. And though it didn’t seem like much when the school still needed so much more, they were all so grateful.
On the last day of school, the students and teachers held a goodbye assembly for me on the playground as dark clouds loomed overhead. Both the principal and one of the students talked about how much they would miss me and the teachers pooled their money to buy me a blue sari. The children put garland after garland of fresh flowers around my neck and three classes were scheduled to perform dances in traditional costumes. Two classes had finished when the raindrops began falling from the sky, kicking up the dust around us. But the children danced on, smiling, even through the rain. And they waited afterward to walk me home and tell me again, “Remember us!” and “How soon can you come back?”
In the end, I discovered that it was all so much easier, and so much harder, than I had expected. I felt like I could go anywhere in the world — my next stop was India — and be okay, even traveling by myself. I had learned how to use a squat toilet, was capable of hiking six hours a day to 11,000 feet, and I could eat unidentifiable food cooked by strangers on the floor. But it was difficult to realize how easily I could leave it all behind and go back to my regular life.
And I also found that journeys don’t always spark life-changing epiphanies. Traveling abroad doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll turn into the next big-name do-gooder, founding dozens of schools and fostering peace. Sometimes it’s smaller than that. And that’s enough.
My heart broke as I stepped carefully inside the taxi in my sari and everyone waved goodbye. As we drove away, the children ran behind the car, waving through the dust until I couldn’t see them anymore. Then, there was only the dirt road and field after field in front of me.
I cried because I felt I didn’t deserve any of it — it was too much from people who had so little. Even with the addition of the library, they had given me so much more than I had given them — it was so unfair.
And I cried because I was leaving behind a piece of myself, too.
Anna Haigh plans to continue raising money to help the school through an organization she plans to create called “OneSchool.” For more information, see her blog at www.oneschoolnepal.blogspot.com, or the school’s Web site at www.santanesworschool.page.tl. Contact her at annahaigh@yahoo.com.
I finally finished writing about my experience in Nepal and the article was published today in The Keene Sentinel, where I used to be a reporter.
You can read the entire article below ... I'm donating the proceeds of my freelancing fees to the school. Let me know what you think!
Here's the link if you want to see it online with some photos:
http://www.keenesentinel.com/articles/2008/07/20/news/local/free/id_314192.txt
=====================================================================================
Top of the world
In the highest land on earth, a first-time teacher gets back far more than she gives
By Anna Haigh
Contributing Writer
Published: Sunday, July 20, 2008
EDITOR’S NOTE: Anna Haigh is a former Sentinel reporter who recently volunteered for three months in Nepal with a Kathmandu-based nonprofit organization. She was placed as an English teacher at Santaneshwor Vidya Mandir School in a small village in the Kathmandu Valley called Jharuwarasi. She taught grades 6, 7 and 8, and lived with a local family in the village.
In the streets of Kathmandu, the air is warm and smoky. My ears ring from the sound of honking horns and my taxi nearly grazes every bicycle as we head into the city. These are my first few minutes in Nepal: seeing women wearing saris on the back of motorcycles; a body covered in rags face-down on the sidewalk; cows and dogs eating from the same pile of trash; large baskets carried on bent backs and families bathing on front stoops.
And I feel like crying. This is why I came. For the sight of it all — chaotic, beautiful and sad. This is why I spent months planning and saving money; why I gave up my job and my apartment and all of the people I loved and everything that made me feel comfortable. I needed to see this place and these people. I wanted to experience life in a place that was different from anything I had ever known. And most importantly, I wanted to give something back as a volunteer — knowing all the time that I would be gaining more than I could ever give.
And Nepal, a small sliver of a developing country between China and India with more than 25 million people, needs help. Less than half the population is literate, and a third of the country qualifies as impoverished. Newspapers are still filled with stories of torture, kidnapping and murder, even more than a year after fighting between Maoist rebels in favor of communism and the government’s army ended, and trafficking of women and children into sexual slavery is rampant. I chose the country, in part, because of those dark statistics.
As we drive through the crowded streets of Kathmandu, among the smiling faces, tikkas on their forehead — red paint with religious significance — and swaying rickshaws, I knew I had found what I was looking for.
But now comes the hard part: learning the language, living the life and trying not to get hit by the traffic.
Far away from Nepal’s scenic Himalayan trekking and the tourist-filled restaurants of Kathmandu, there is a small village not on any map. It was there, in Jharuwarasi, that I found Nepal.
I found it on the dusty roads lined with fields of wheat and corn and in simple brick houses with cows out front. From my bedroom window in my host family’s home, I could see a yard full of mustard flowers and two tiny goats, and the neighbors washing dishes on the ground outside at dusk. Across the road, there was a water pump where the women took makeshift showers and a small concrete temple where local people stopped with yellow marigolds and other offerings for the gods. In the mornings, I could hear the thunk of wooden hoes hitting the dry earth, bells ringing to announce an offering at the temple and my host grandfather humming his daily Hindu prayers.
On my second day in the village, I walked a mile to the private school where I would be teaching, called Santaneshwor Vidya Mandir. The first thing I noticed was everything that was missing.
The school, which covers preschool through 10th-grade education (the highest level), was nothing but a large, four-story brick building with only classrooms, windows and benches. There were no doors, lights, carpet or posters. There was no gymnasium, library, science lab or playground, and therefore no classes such as music, art or physical education. The recess area was unpaved land where the kids played games with string or waited for a single metal slide. When the electric bell wasn’t working, one of the assistants banged the end of a metal spoon on a plate to call the 250 students back to class. There weren’t enough plastic lawn chairs for the 18 teachers to sit in, so many sat beside their students on the narrow green benches during lessons.
At first, it all seemed so bleak. But I forgot it all on my seventh day of teaching when I headed up the dirt road to find one of the students waiting for me.
Tiny Punika, maybe 5 years old, had a bright smile and big eyes. She wore a Spiderman backpack, the straps fraying and the zipper broken, and a brown uniform with holes in the sleeves. And as we walked along together, neither of us understanding what the other was saying, more children gathered around in their stiff black shoes and drab brown and yellow uniforms, following me to school. I felt like the Pied Piper. Even the little children, too young for school, shouted at me from their houses.
“Hello. I’m fine, thank you,” one little girl said, before I had a chance to ask.
The feeling continued for awhile, as the students peppered me with questions about my favorite movies, my parents’ names, and asked me to sign autographs in class. I discovered that despite the lack of facilities, the students had no shortage of enthusiasm or curiosity. They eagerly volunteered to stand up and read passages from poems in their course books and were quick to pass me their completed work with a bright, proud, “Done, Miss!”
It was a few weeks into my work, however — when I had gone from being a semi-celebrity in their eyes to an actual disciplinarian — that I found out how smart my students really were.
Many of the students had used English books, which meant page after page had already-filled-in answers, some in pen. So, I told them to erase answers if they had a used book, and asked them to work on the first two exercises. The exercises focused on comprehension of a Robert Louis Stevenson poem. But one boy, Sudeep, defiantly refused to erase the answers in his book, saying he had filled the exercise in himself, even when I pressed him to “be honest.”
What could I do? I let him keep the answers and told him to sit quietly while I watched the rest of the students do their work. Yet somehow the exact answers in Sudeep’s book were passed to the boy sitting next to him, and then to the next row back. And within minutes, the entire class had the same answers written down – answers I was sure they hadn’t thought up themselves.
The last question had such a particularly difficult answer – “an innocent child” — that I brought their attention to the question.
“What answer did you write for number 10?” I said.
Sudeep, of course, was the first to answer.
“Innocent child.”
And the rest of the class repeated the same answer.
“Okay,” I said. “What does that mean?”
They yelled out a host of interesting answers:
“Good.”
“Smart.”
I smiled.
“So all of you have this answer written in your books and none of you know what it means? That’s very strange.”
The students smiled sheepishly. We discussed the definition together until I was sure at least a few of them understood what “innocent child” meant and why Stevenson’s narrator could be described that way in the poem.
And then I ended the class with an admonishment, a bit disappointed in my 6th-graders.
“Next time, fill in the answers yourself and don’t copy. Otherwise, you’re not learning anything.”
I waved goodbye and a few of the students shouted back the usual phrase that ends each class.
“Thank you miss!”
Smiling. As innocent as apple pie.
Ambika squatted in the field, deftly cutting handfuls of grass and throwing them into the basket on her back with one quick movement. She spoke no English and a few weeks into my trip, I had only picked up a dozen words in Nepali.
But we spent the afternoon together in the field anyway. I tied one of the baskets around my forehead and she laughed and laughed as I tried to tell her how heavy it was. Later, she would carry the basket, filled with grass for the cows, on her back for more than a mile.
Ambika was the mother of three now-adult children and had spent a lifetime farming and cooking. On Saturdays, she met with other women to talk about “freedom,” but she could barely write her own name.
Later that day, she led me to her house and we sat with her daughter Arju inside Ambika’s small bedroom. Ambika pulled out boxes of makeup and nail polish and took out an old red lipstick, which she applied slowly to my lips. She couldn’t stop smiling at me and trying to give me the lipstick and everything else she owned.
Arju wanted everything her mother never had: She freely wore jeans and T-shirts, had already taken college classes, and was eager to study abroad in the United States. She told me she hated wearing the cloth skirts her mother wore every day, even in the fields, and never wanted to be married. In Nepal, arranged marriages are still the status quo, and afterward, the woman is obligated to move into her new husband’s home and begin taking care of his parents.
Arju and I became good friends, trading languages. I taught her English pronunciation and she quizzed me on my Nepali, along with translating what Ambika said to me.
After my trip to their home, I thought sadly to myself that if a Nepali visitor came into my house, I would never be as generous or as unabashedly kind. And out of my whole experience in Nepal, I found that the feeling I was left with the most was surprise — at how generous everyone was to me, when they all had so little.
The female teachers at Santaneshwor were constantly inviting me over for tea after school, which turned into a full-fledged meal when they also gave me a plate piled high with fried bread and sweets. When I was invited to a wedding party, the teachers were eager to help me put on my first sari. One of the teachers, Rupa, gave me shoes and a necklace to wear — and wouldn’t let me give them back again afterward — while another painted my nails and applied my eyeliner. I felt like some kind of royalty having them dress me, and when I walked out into the school yard wearing the sari, the entire school stopped eating lunch to point and stare at me.
You can’t be in Nepal — or any developing country, for that matter — very long without wanting to do something to help. But it was frustrating to feel that even with help, the country seems stuck in poverty and had been troubled by years of political unrest.
And though while I was there, the elections showed the Nepali people’s resounding support of the Maoists and the end of the monarchy, it could still take a long time for a stable government to emerge that can deal with all of the country’s troubles, I thought. In the villages, the people still seemed like they were living in a previous century. The children played with hoops and sticks, laundry was washed by hand, and most lived off the crops they grew. “Is it true,” my students asked me incredulously one day, voices in a whisper, “you have a machine that washes dishes?”
Many of them had never eaten pizza, never been as far as Kathmandu. After three months of living in Nepal, I decided that I would like to see the country keep its simple way of life forever, except for what I believed its children — my students — were missing.
I ache for them in their brick-and-concrete schools without playgrounds or art supplies. For them, I want more. I want them to have more than simple course books, and school only until 10th-grade. I want them to sing and dance and dream of everything beyond their small village that’s out there to behold. But how? How to give women more freedom, children a better education, lift the country out of poverty, without money and a stable government? And worse, how to do it without crushing their customs and traditions, without destroying the simplicity and purity of their lives that I find so beautiful?
“Ke garne?” Meaning, “What to do?”
I decided to start small. I wanted to give them a library, because I can’t imagine what my life would be without books. It felt like a trivial goal when there are large nonprofit organizations building entire schools and solar-powered orphanages with 10-year plans. It was only a few more books in one school in a small village not on any map. But it was a start.
In the end, I left them a library. A new bookcase full of dozens of reading books with bright, colorful drawings and words in big print.
I taught them how to read a newspaper and how to conduct an interview. I gave them three daily newspapers and monthly magazines for the whole school to use.
Those sad-looking nursery rooms — once void of color — each had a poster with numbers or letters. Doe-eyed Archana, my favorite teacher who had become a friend, helped me pin up the posters with a hammer and some nails as the toddlers looked on, already reciting the new words and letters aloud.
It wasn’t just me — my friends and family had contributed more than $1,000 to help create the library. And though it didn’t seem like much when the school still needed so much more, they were all so grateful.
On the last day of school, the students and teachers held a goodbye assembly for me on the playground as dark clouds loomed overhead. Both the principal and one of the students talked about how much they would miss me and the teachers pooled their money to buy me a blue sari. The children put garland after garland of fresh flowers around my neck and three classes were scheduled to perform dances in traditional costumes. Two classes had finished when the raindrops began falling from the sky, kicking up the dust around us. But the children danced on, smiling, even through the rain. And they waited afterward to walk me home and tell me again, “Remember us!” and “How soon can you come back?”
In the end, I discovered that it was all so much easier, and so much harder, than I had expected. I felt like I could go anywhere in the world — my next stop was India — and be okay, even traveling by myself. I had learned how to use a squat toilet, was capable of hiking six hours a day to 11,000 feet, and I could eat unidentifiable food cooked by strangers on the floor. But it was difficult to realize how easily I could leave it all behind and go back to my regular life.
And I also found that journeys don’t always spark life-changing epiphanies. Traveling abroad doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll turn into the next big-name do-gooder, founding dozens of schools and fostering peace. Sometimes it’s smaller than that. And that’s enough.
My heart broke as I stepped carefully inside the taxi in my sari and everyone waved goodbye. As we drove away, the children ran behind the car, waving through the dust until I couldn’t see them anymore. Then, there was only the dirt road and field after field in front of me.
I cried because I felt I didn’t deserve any of it — it was too much from people who had so little. Even with the addition of the library, they had given me so much more than I had given them — it was so unfair.
And I cried because I was leaving behind a piece of myself, too.
Anna Haigh plans to continue raising money to help the school through an organization she plans to create called “OneSchool.” For more information, see her blog at www.oneschoolnepal.blogspot.com, or the school’s Web site at www.santanesworschool.page.tl. Contact her at annahaigh@yahoo.com.
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