Making the Effort

Aid Work

On Saturday I went to a small rural village in the hills outside of Kathmandu with some students from the college to volunteer at a health clinic. I was basically useless because I couldn’t speak the language, but the students were really great manning the registration table. The guy running the clinic is a Nepali working for an Austrian NGO, and the clinic was in his home village. He found himself with an extra 1000 euros in his budget so he went and bought medicine, corralled his wife and some colleagues (all doctors) and set up this clinic for a day in his home town. About 200 people visited over the course of the day with ailments from burns to emphysema.

I had to put my Western sensibilities on hold as I watched them all crowding into the examining rooms to watch each other’s visits with doctors. At one point there were a half dozen women in the room, a young girl skipping rope and a teenage boy’s head sticking in the window while an older woman described her symptoms of menopause to the doctor. Nobody, the patient included, seemed to mind a bit. Nepalese people are incredibly nosy by nature, so privacy takes on a whole new meaning here.

Virtually everyone left with some “prescription” even if it was just vitamins for the youngsters. They seemed more impressed by the packaging and just having received something for free, than the potential beneficial effects of the medicines.

Sadly, I found out towards the end of the day that many of the patients had complained about the quality and quantity of the medicines at the clinic. I guess they figured it was somebody’s left-overs or something. The guy running the clinic was really disappointed after all the work he had done, especially given this was his home town. I have to wonder if there isn’t too much aid coming into this country: the Nepalese people seem to be expecting handouts all the time.

Street Cleaning

Deborah started a project at the school which has the kids going out for an hour before lunch every Tuesday and cleaning up the streets around the college. We pick up garbage, sweep the streets and have garbage bins hung on lampposts along the streets for use between our forays. We are going farther and farther afield, incorporating the whole community in our project.

The reaction has been mixed with some shop owners ignoring us and others putting out garbage bins of their own. We have solicited the support of the local municipal government (we’re outside the jurisdiction of Kathmandu) and the police. We were disappointed to hear rumours in the neighbourhood that because Deborah and I were out with the students, it was assumed that we were from an NGO and injecting all kinds of money into the school and this project. Another side effect of all the aid coming into the country, I guess. We wrote a letter to the community explaining that this was just a bunch of kids who wanted to make a difference in their community and their country. Before we had a chance to go door-to-door with our letter, Tamang Losar fell on a Tuesday and the college was closed. (I think I’ve mentioned holidays before: every day is somebody’s festival here so we choose our “official” holidays at the school based on importance to the students.) Because we weren’t cleaning the streets that day, the locals all had an impromptu meeting with the local government and police, voicing their fears that we had stopped the project due to lack of support from our neighbours. Despite their misinterpretation of the facts, it was nice validation for our work.

The following week the students went door-to-door with our letter and appealed to all our neighbours to support the project. Again there were mixed responses. Some were really supportive and agreed to help in any way they could. Others complained that they paid taxes to have their streets cleaned by the government, who clearly weren’t doing their job. Because we were keeping the streets so clean, they had no leg to stand on in complaining that their tax dollars weren’t being spent properly. They asked us to cease and desist.

The students really struggle in this environment, but so far they’re still cleaning the streets and taking pride in it.

We had a guest speaker at the college last week. He is half Sherpa and half Belgian, and is 24 years old. He has done an incredible amount of stuff in his short life including climbing Lhotse, Cho Oyo and Everest twice. His last Everest expedition included the introduction of alternate fuels and a large-scale clean-up of base camp. He has all kinds of projects on the go to help fight the environmental effects of global warming here, and to promote sustainable work among the Sherpas in the Khumbu.

The students really took to him and he was wonderful with them. He encouraged them in their street cleaning as well as a dozen other things they could do to improve life here. He also strongly urged them to stay in Nepal, or at least come back if they do their internships abroad. As he says: Nepal needs them and the West doesn’t. Let’s hope that this next generation is filled with people like them.

(Dawa Steven Sherpa www.ideas-action.org)