In The Field

The house we stayed in

A few days ago I woke up in a little house on stilts, in a tiny village at the top of a high hill in the middle of the jungle, and asked myself: "How on earth did I get here?"  Well, here's how.

Early Wednesday morning, I took a flight from Kathmandu to Biratnagar (Nepal's second-largest city, in the southeast) with four colleagues from MCC and one of our Nepali partner agencies.  Our purpose was to visit some projects MCC is supporting in villages in Morang District, in the areas of food security, vocational training, and rural education.  It was my first time going on a field visit, and in the future I'll be going on many more.

Meeting with farmers at a food security project

We spent our three days in the field meeting with partners and visiting their development projects.  We met students in a vocational training program and heard about how their new skills have changed their aspirations for the future; took a tour around a food security project aimed at empowering landless labourers; and visited a remote village school to see firsthand the effects teacher training and parents' education have had on students' learning.  My job was to talk to people, hear their stories, and take lots of pictures.  Now that I'm back, I'll be putting these materials together into an article or two, with the intention of raising public awareness about the remarkable work MCC and our partner agencies are doing here in Nepal.

Meeting with students, teachers, and parents at Sagma School. 

For me, being in the field was almost like being in another country (again) - it was so unlike the neighbourhood where I live in Kathmandu.  The culture, language, and geography of Morang are very different from those of the capital city.  Moreover, the rural villages we visited were, as far as I could tell, largely free of western influence.  People carried on their lives - working, playing, hanging out with friends and relatives - in much the same way that their great-great-grandparents did before them.  And yet, as with all the places I've been so far in Nepal, the ancient and the modern coexist in the villages: while some village residents were doing a traditional dance for us, for example, some others were filming the performance on their cellphones.

I felt very privileged to be given a glimpse into the lives of the people we met.  I was struck by the resilience, dignity, warmth, and good humour that I saw in all of them.  I was especially overwhelmed at being given a gift - a little wooden model of Nepal - by the managers of the school we visited.  I really felt (and still feel) I'd done nothing to deserve such generosity.

We had some delightful misadventures along the way.  After spending our first day on the Terai (plains) in southern Morang, we traveled north to visit the school in the hills.  Once we left the plain, the road got very rough very fast, and after about an hour of bumping, jostling, pushing the jeep, and occasionally rebuilding the road, our driver refused to go any further, and left us by the roadside in the middle of the jungle.  Fortunately, we were able to arrange for a jeep from the school to come pick us up, but we had to wait there for two hours before it reached us.  In the meantime we ate bananas and befriended some lost goats.

Ditched!

When the second jeep came, we thought our difficulties were behind us - but after another hour of even rougher road, now with lots of steep switchbacks, the driver stopped abruptly, got out, and began working on one of the wheels.  Apparently it wasn't turning properly – no biggie!  He messed around with it a little, took it off the axle, put it back on, and then we continued on our way, feeling slightly less confident that we would reach our destination alive.  A bit later the driver stopped again, and - fortunately, from my perspective - decided it wasn’t actually safe to go any further with a malfunctioning wheel, so we had to call the school to send us another jeep, and killed a little more time in the jungle.  Finally we reached the village, all in one piece, and the return journey was smoother (in the sense of being less interrupted - the road was equally as bumpy!).

 So, I’m looking forward to getting a chance to go to the field again next week.  This is a side of Nepal that most foreigners never get a chance to see, and, much as I enjoy the creature comforts available in Kathmandu, I really appreciate the opportunity to visit the people MCC is working with in rural communities.  There are challenges – the ever-present language barrier, the risk of food poisoning, the leech-infested outhouses (!) – but the joys are greater.  Bumping and jostling down the jungle roads in that death-trap of a jeep, looking out over spectacular vistas of steep, misty valleys, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.