Sanjeev Dahal, our fearless leader

On February 11, two weeks after our arrival, our students came bumping back into town from their rural placements. For some, it was an all-day journey back into Kathmandu. The next day, we all boarded our little maroon bus, and headed up to Balthali Village Resort. We left the bus in a village down below and most of us opted to hike about an hour up to the beautiful resort where we were greeted with lunch, great views of the Himalayas to the north, and clean air. 

We had some good discussions together reflecting on our work and our learning so far. With facilitation assistance from Hillary Bernhardt, a staff member for the Chelsea Center, we explored what it means to volunteer; what students can offer and what they receive; how to meet “need” in the midst of different value systems; how students’ positionality and privilege shape their encounters and much more. Our discussions were rich, insightful and broad-ranging, demonstrating learning on many different levels.

We also had a yoga class from Yogi Arya whose ashram is near the Pashupathinath complex in Kathmandu. His form of teaching was very different from what we experience in our yoga classes on campus. 

And mostly, we got to enjoy being together in an incredibly beautiful place. The next day we stopped to visit a Shiva sculpture, and then descended into dusty Kathmandu. Students again went out to either the same or new placements for the second half of our stay.

Most of us live highly mobile lives. But what is the range and purpose of our movement? We go to work and school, we go on vacation. Some of the themes that we have been investigating is this program are broad sweeps of movements and migrations throughout the region of South Asia, and this is what we are investigating in Nepal.

In fall quarter, we explored the rise and spread of Hinduism (roughly 1900-1400 bce) and of Buddhism (5th century bce) from south Asia throughout Southeast Asia and beyond, and the spread of Islam from the Middle East into surrounding regions (arising in the 7th century ce). The intersections of these sweeps of religious tradition have felt effects in people’s lives today. The ethnography Rituals of Ethnicity by Sara Shneiderman explored ways that a highly mobile ethnic group, the Thangmi people, live part time in Nepal, migrate to India for work opportunities, and sometimes migrate into Tibet as part of annual circuits seeking opportunity. The resulting syncretism in terms of their religious practices is a unique combination of Buddhism, Hinduism and shamanism. And how they negotiate their ethnic identity is a multifaceted, political as well as cultural process.

In winter quarter we have been investigating the flows of money and labor throughout these broad regions. Katherine Boo’s book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, offered an intimate and heartbreaking look at life in a Mumbai slum. Contiguous to the Mumbai airport and luxury hotels, Anawadi slum dwellers live in an “under world” and provide essential services such as sorting trash, sweeping streets, and serving food at elaborate events, making the lives of conspicuous consumption in the “over world” possible. Boo’s analysis of “opportunity”—whether in the form of hard work, bribery or manipulation—demonstrates ways that almost no one is exempt from complex networks of leveraging one’s position. This reading has prepared us to recognize ways that systems of opportunity are at play here in Nepal as well. Donations of diapers or washing machines to orphanages disappear, just as Boo described in Mumbai. Good intentions of volunteers—whether local or foreign—are drops in streams that may be moving in different directions. Students grapple with their own abilities to leverage their contributions and their time here.

With an open border to India, it’s common for many people to travel back and forth. David Gellner’s recent address, The Idea of Nepal, offers a great analysis of ways this trans-border mobility affects constantly shifting notions of ethnicity. But more broadly, I’ve been surprised by how many people I have encountered in Nepal who have ties to Dubai and other international cities. Pardis Mahdavi wrote about the migrations of laborers from South and Southeast Asia to the city of Dubai looking for work opportunities. In her ethnography, Gridlock: Labor, Migration and Human Trafficking in Dubai, Mahdavi describes a complex range of laborers, from hotel housekeeping, to nannies; from construction workers for the burgeoning cityscape to sex workers. “Trafficking,” Mahdavi argues, may apply to a vast range of opportunity seekers, not just sex workers. And all of these laborers operate with varying degrees of freedom and agency, in search of their own opportunity.

Up near the tiny hamlet of Tutung, Nepal, families had sons and daughters in far flung places, working and sending remittances back. Such ties were visibly evident in villages with larger, and newer homes for some families popping brightly on the landscape, compared to much more modest vernacular homes for others. The owner of my guest house in Kathmandu, recently retired after decades of his own international journeys working for UNICEF, invested in the hotel to provide a job for his son in order to keep him local. A preemptive act against out-migration that most do not have the means to provide. Even so, one of his daughters lives and works in India.

And in everyday ways, people pile into buses, shared vans, taxis and onto motorcycles to traverse the city and the mountains in sweeping, endless, dusty flows. Bricks, concrete, and ri-bar are transported all throughout the hills for reconstruction after the 2015 earthquake. Human laborers break rocks, mix concrete, stack and align to re-inscribe road edges, property, homes and businesses. Cauliflower, potatoes, greens and onions bounce their way from bright field into dusty city markets. And criss- crossing all of this, our students are going out to placements daily, working with kids in orphanages, individuals who have been caught up in the worst sort of trafficking, schools, elder care facilities and more. They are connecting with others, editing grant proposals, writing reports and articles for local publications, reading, cooking, and reflecting. They are finding their way, geographically, intellectually, emotionally, and as a community.

My goal is to visit students in their various field placements, and yesterday we set off for Tutung. After a gruelling jeep ride from Kathmandu through winding, bumpy, steep roads into Newakot District, we finally got stuck and abandoned the jeep because it could go no further. My partner in adventure, Shreya, and our poor driver Hira, headed on foot in the general direction of “up.” We walked along the edges of people’s terraced fields, up their footpaths through a winter landscape of green potato cultivation, onions, winter wheat, bright yellow mustard, and many fallow fields. We asked various school kids and people we encountered directions to Tutung, as we had done dozens of times from the jeep on the drive up. Tutung isn’t a town, or really even a village, but a tiny cluster of a few homes and a school on a bend of the hillside.  A very sweet family welcomed us, and went to fetch Nick and Shiloh from the local school where they were wrapping up teaching English to grades 4 and 5. We visited and toured around their place while the family cooked us a very welcome lunch of rice, dal, a sauerkraut-like pickle, and spicy potato and cauliflower, over which they drizzled warm ghee. This plus the welcoming cup of chai helped to restore us. We deliberated about staying overnight or heading back down. Since our driver was worried about the jeep we’d abandoned, we toured the school, said good-bye and headed down–a trip that went remarkably much faster than the walk up. Our drive back to Kathmandu took another four hours of tight, steep turns, honks, dust, bumps and motion sickness. Urgh.  

Nick and Shiloh seem to be thriving. The grandfather in their host home is a shaman, and people come by daily for healing and care. The students have been able to observe his different approaches, from herbal treatments to divination. Shiloh received a treatment from him. It was heartwarming to meet the kind, generous and good-humored family they are staying with. These two will stay at this placement for another week, and then come down to join us for a mid-session retreat. 

Some of our students stayed at the Volunteer House at Volunteer Nepal, others stayed at Nirvana Home, a fifteen minute walk through neighborhoods that are under construction. Navigating these construction sites–which change daily–was especially fun at night!

We all arrived in Kathmandu on January 29 and 30th. Our hosts from Volunteer Nepal took us through a full two days of orientation including visiting the Swayambhunath temple; Buddha’s Park, where our group is pictured above; and the Pashupahinath Temple complex.  Students had numerous workshops on safety, cultural appropriateness, and how to navigate Nepali culture in general. This included language lessons to kick start their efforts in Nepali.

On February 1st, all students began their field placements. They are working in a variety of places both local to the Kathmandu Valley, and farther out into rural and mountainous areas. Each of them will be reporting here on their field placement experiences.

In late January, 2017, a group of nineteen Evergreen students in the academic program Movements and Migrations: Sustainability and Change in Religion and Culture, are setting off for a month of Study Abroad in Nepal. In the fall quarter of our program, students chose areas of interest in which they conducted research. Through consulting scholarly sources, media sources and by conducting ethnographic interviews, students learned about many aspects of Nepalese culture, including agriculture, sustainability, Buddhism, education, reproductive rights, women’s health, environmental and cultural effects of trekking industry, trafficking in women and children. and much more.

We then worked with the organization Volunteer Nepal to help place students in volunteer field positions linked to their areas of interest. In the weeks ahead, students will post updates about their field situations on this site.