My last day in Nepal! It’s a strange feeling... The final week of volunteering was full of goodbyes to the communities we worked with. Sunday was the farewell at the school. The theatre kids put on a show which although I couldn’t understand it was really impressive. The play dealt with the not-so-light issue of human trafficking. I wasn’t involved in theatre at all but from what I’ve heard it’s really an amazing tool for dealing with social issues. The youth raise issues through theatre that are important to them but that are difficult to discuss in “real life”. Even in my Hami Yuova meetings, one day we played a game where the kids had to mime a scene from the community that they would like to change. They acted out a scene of 2 young girls who were domestic workers and had to work all day in someone else’s house while other children went to school, heavy stuff....
On Monday we organised a funday on our newly built sports field in the stone quarry. This really was a highlight for our group and me in particular since I really pushed for this project. About a month into our volunteering we came up with the idea to build the sports field in the stone quarry to be used by both the Rai and Stone Quarry communities, as the first joint project between these two often adversarial communities (see by blog on “fight club”). We managed to organise a meeting between the Rai farmers who own the land, the broker who rents it out (and until now was thought to be an unapproachable exploiter of the stone quarry workers but which it turned out was not at all the case) and the stone quarry women. At the meeting we explained our idea and had them sign a 5 year contract for the land. One of the literate Rai farmers wrote out the contract and the rest signed it (or made thumb prints for those who couldn’t write). The broker also volunteered to donate some time with his bulldozer to level the land. The meeting was an amazing success although it then took over a month until the promised bulldozer finally arrived.
We then set to work on the field, there was still levelling to do, roots to be pulled out and stones to be removed (a Sisyphean task given that we were working in a stone quarry!) We worked on this with our various groups; women from both the Rai and stone quarry, youth and kids and the Rai farmers. We built goal posts from bamboo and within a week and a half we had a sports field, just in time for our fun day. The funday was amazing. We decorated the goals with balloons, hired a sound speaker (which was no easy task getting it down to the river bank of the stone quarry) and had a full day of fun activities planned. The day began with an inaugural soccer match; we then had carnival activities including pin the tail on the donkey, ring toss, bowling and more. Next was relay races/colour wars which were near chaos given that there were over 100 kids. But they had a lot of fun screaming war cries and then taking part in egg and spoon, sacks, three legged and blindfolded races. The final activity was for the women, we played a Nepali game where the women were blindfolded and then had to hit a bucket with a stick, which proved highly entertaining for the massive audiences that had accumulated by this stage. The day ended with performances, songs by the child clubs and young girls groups and the presentation of two balls to the two communities. It was a deeply moving experience, we had all attended fun days and carnivals before but none in a stone quarry with such simple activities but so many participants, where the whole community came out to be a part of the fun. (See facebook for tons of pics of all this)
We also had a very small income generation component to the day. Two women from our stone quarry women’s group sold snacks which we had organised to purchase at wholesale prices from our landlord, Ram who owns a small pasal (mekolet) in the bazaar. Income generation is a major issue for these women and a direction TBT is thinking about going in the future. So we decided to do a small experiment to see how the women would manage running a stall on the day. The two volunteers who took responsibility did a very impressive job, making use of their recently acquired skills from literacy classes to keep record of their stock. It was a small but significant achievement and they ended the day with a little bit of profit to supplement their meagre stone quarry earnings.
The rest of the week was a blur of goodbyes, many many tikkas (red marks on our foreheads) and bunches of flowers bestowed upon us. Our goodbye parties consisted of much singing and dancing and speeches given by the people we worked with. It was a very strange feeling packing up our things and making the long walk along the river and across the bridge to the Bazaar for the last time.
We then had a week of documentation and more goodbyes that concluded our work at TBT. The last week I spent in Pokhara, a lakeside tourist area relaxing. Ok maybe not entirely relaxing- it included bicycling, row boats, yoga on the lawns in front of the lake (and being photographed by Japanese tourists in the process), early morning runs around the lake, shopping and a two day trek (where we landed up trekking to the wrong place but finding a place to sleep all the same where 2 Nepali men cooked us dalbad for dinner and we had the opportunity to watch both sunset and sunrise over the Himalayas- not a bad back up plan). Pokhara itself is beautiful, its also filled with restaurant and coffee shops and every night I made sure to be positioned in one overlooking the lake drinking chiah or cocktails as the sunset. On Shabbat we travelled to a nearby lake and possibly my favourite place in Nepal. Unlike Pokhara this lake has not been invaded by tourists yet and is pristine, quiet and just breathtakingly beautiful. We took a rowboat 45 minutes across the lake to an isolated guest house and had a perfect Shabbat reading books on the lake side, drinking beer and reflecting on our last week in Nepal.
I’m sitting now at the Delhi airport waiting for my flight to Mumbai after what’s already been a 3 hour delay, starting to think about my next step. I’ll be in Mumbai for the weekend, where I have some friends from the Indian Jewish community, before flying on to South Africa. But it’s not goodbye to Tevel B’Tzedek for me just yet, TBT is looking into the possibility of setting up a project in Cape Town and I’m going down there for a few months where I’ll be joined by 2 others from the TBT staff to research the potential for such a project. The idea would be to have Israelis as well as South African Jews volunteering in one of the townships. On one hand I’m a little apprehensive since I really have no idea what we going to be doing or what the project will look like, not to mention that I’ve never lived in Cape Town and I miss Israel a lot! But at the same time it’s also really exciting, the fact that it’s in such early stages means there is so much we could do. TBT comes with its experience and cumulative knowledge from its work in Nepal and Haiti, if we can adapt our activities to the South African context as well as make use of the potential the South African Jewish community brings to the table it could be really incredible. I have to admit that I definitely spent a good portion of my time in Nepal thinking that I should be doing this in South Africa, a country I am still deeply connected to and that also has a long way to go in terms of development. There is a certainly an element of guilt that I think has lead me to be so interested in development to begin with. I feel like I inadvertently benefitted from the fact that my parents and grandparents had a white skin that placed them into the privileged minority of South African Society. I’ve always felt a little bad about leavings SA for Israel at a time when the country is trying to overcome the legacy of its past and where I could perhaps have something to offer. I always explain to people I was pulled to Israel not pushed from SA. Although this move back to SA is only temporary, for a few months and I have no idea how the project will materialise (or even whether it will materialise at all) I couldn’t turn down an opportunity to be involved. A project that combines Israelis, my recent experience in Nepal and the SA Jewish community in South Africa seems to be made for me so I guess resuming my “real life” in Israel is getting put on hold for a while, but then again what is real life? It will be interesting to see where this will take me...
P.S. I’ll try keep this blog updated post Nepal but I’ll also be blogging now for the American Jewish Committee’s Global Voices blog, for those interested see my first article: http://ajc-access.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=342%3Aa-jewish-response-to-poverty-thoughts-of-an-ngo-worker-in-nepal&catid=85%3Aglobal&Itemid=118
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