Charity: Going gets tough @ Dhadhing
Why it’s difficult to aid rural areas of Nepal
Loughborough University rewarded me with £500 for my previous work in Nepal which was not expected or received (physically as I was in China at that time). With new expenditure money and my already pre-planned mission to go to Nepal during the height of the monsoon season, I got together some donation for the kids. Taobao (the Chinese eBay, Amazon… etc.) was very cheap in getting these new gifts to the children.
The monsoon season
Since the time that I have been in Nepal it has rained, non-stop. Not a day has gone by where a flash flood in the capital has altered my plans. My mind did not think that the situation would be worse in rural areas of Nepal. Especially areas that I would be visiting. If you have ever been trekking in Nepal or anywhere you might have got a starter course in what my following “adventure trip” was like.
The plan
The planned trip was going to go as simple as this:
Get to Dhadhing > Get to Ratmate (by bus) > Give the donation to the kids then repeat the process in reverse. However, mother nature and the underdeveloped roads to the village made improvisation one of the biggest strengths in our persistent journey to make the kids of the villages happy.
The village
The village of Ratmate is located on the hills regions of Nepal around 6 hours’ drive from Kathmandu and a further 8 hours by walking with varying altitude crossing sub-tropical and alpine climates. The school that we visited two years prior and one that I had recorded extensively on my blog. Here was one of the final sentences that ended that blog post:
“The children are eager to learn, they are comfortable but if they cannot feel secure in their own school. A place where they will learn not only an institution but also a wisdom centre. If the area itself is not safe how can you reassure your children that it will be? People need to stop lying to themselves and start waking up to the fact that there needs to be a change. However small it may be.”
I now believe and adamant that it’s better to teach than to passively give to areas of villages that 1) do not know what to do with their new donated fortune 2) aren’t given enough training on how aid can materialise to make their lives easier.
The trip
As I mentioned earlier, exploring these areas in the monsoon is not ideal. This is due to the frequent landslides, the leeches, the potential of falling from unsecured land areas, flooding and persistence. I recorded some of these moments in my notebook which I am going to share with you. This is in hopes that you can see how little can go a long way for the kids of Nepal.
Day 1
We headed from Kathmandu on a dark but a hopeful day towards the district of Dhadhing where we were initially going to plan to walk to the village of Ratmate on foot. Since I came here two years prior on a jeep I thought walking would be easy and also since I have raked in miles on foot through the Nepalese Himalayas. How wrong I was.
Upon arrival at Dhadhing Besi, although at first things, people, area and space can take time in the human memory to configure the feeling of belonging and integration slowly starts to take a hold. I am directed towards an unfamiliar bus park where time is of the essence. Only two vehicle goes up to this village, and that’s on a good day. For this moment in time, we had made it only by a couple of minutes. It then occurs to me that retrospectively that if we were late or took a detour in any parts of our journey leading to this moment, we would have missed our bus and our only opportunity to get a head start on reaching the village before sundown.
The bus route was intending to take the route from:
Dhadhing besi > Sankos Gau > Daamgadi Chautaro, Aal Dada> Pachagara> Syauli Dada, Jumre Dada, Charunge then finally to Ratmate.
While trying to find a seat on the congested bus towards the village it occurred to me that many of the areas in the village are named because of their physical features. However, this moment of insight did not last long as the seat that was purchased was not intended for me. Well, they were but it did not fit me. It might sound strange but there are two things that need to be taken into consideration. 1) Villagers are usually smaller in size 2) Travel buses are usually revamped from old school buses and purchased seconded hand. I am a man with long legs, unusually longer than my torso meaning nearly no local buses in Nepal can accommodate them. Leaving one side of my leg in the aisle while the other leg is trying to find a place against an old man and the metal separator. My leg was already paralysed and any further sign of movement was not even thinkable at this moment in time. Little did I know that this moment of time was going to be prolonged. I tried to keep myself distracted from the offline YouTube video that I had downloaded, reading books on my kindle and listening to the music. However, the movement of the bus which could resemble the force of a water park full of smiling faces in the midst of frustration kept me distracted.
A couple of hours and the only sounds that could be heard were the sound of the radio blasting local folk song, the revving of the engine from the uphill struggle of unmaintained rural roads and the locals shouting out “aiiya” which could be translated as a sound of frustration in Nepalese to signal pain.
However, this part of the journey was just starting to unfold. The revving of the engine was no match for the roads. We had to constantly get out the bus so that there was less of a load to carry. Many people were complaining that we paid the ticket for our seat to accommodate our baggage rather than people. As an observer, this was comedic however for the local people this is normal daily life and many would choose to walk the whole route because of such reasons.
The wheels of our bus were finally stuck on the red soil. It was starting to rain. The nearest village was a couple of hours in distance both ways and the decision on whether to walk or wait inside the bus became immediate. This decision-making process was intensified because we only had three hours before sunset. In the monsoon, where it is pouring with rain, slippery downhill slopes and an unpredictable occurrence of landslides at any moment. We decided it was time to walk. Long story short, our intended route came to a halt when the bus, no matter how much one tried, stopped at Charunge. We then proceeded to walk in total darkness in the shimmering rain where all we could hear were the exhausted birds trying to catch a tune and the never-ending stream of rivers. Thoughts that could reflect a moment of relaxation became the frustration. Everyone was frustrated but you quickly learn to persevere. In the mountains, you learn to keep going.
We arrived at Ratmate after 3 hours of intensive uphill and downhill walking. Never had coming to a destination felt so welcomed by the darkness and a distant sound from goats, water buffalo and chickens. Upon arrival at 10 in the evening, I came to a standstill glancing up at some familiar children of the villages every so often and realizing how familiar the unfamiliar face was coming after our two years apart, as familiar as the earth in which we just walked across.
Later, lying alone above a mosquito coil, I listened to eat crickets chirp under the dense rainfall cloud in the nearby village and remembered the last twitch of life that I’d witnessed a few hours before. I could barely believe my good fortune. The flow of water kept me grounded in my thoughts about what the day was to become the next day. There wasn’t much natural light left, but we took a short walk down the muddy path further into the village. At the night there wasn’t much to see or feel except the humility of your own breath that is kept in constant with the nearby sound of water being forced down the hill by gravity. By sunrise, groups of giggling schoolgirls would wave from their village compound, and a few barefooted old means would come to shake my hand.
The school
I went there with two intention, the first was to observe what had been done since my last visit. The second was to give them a projector that the school could use to enhance the learning of the kids. This was received well and we gave them advice and training on how to use it. And if there was any problem we made sure that diagnosis was clear and also easy to fix.
The kids sat on the floor while an old solar panel backup generator was used to power the electricity supplied. The kids kept shouting out "I've seen this" and "Move out the way, you are blocking my view".
At the same time, we visited one of our other school that we had donated a vast amount of money to rebuild a strucure that later came to be the computer room.
Lastly, it was great seeing the eager kids smile and be fascinated by the projector. However, we did walk to return to Dhadhing Besi from Ratmate in 8 hours. Soggy feet, humiliated by rain and prolounged walking defined this trip.
