The Beginnings of Fusion

The past month has been busy. On February 16, I left my village to attend Peace Corps In-Service Training, an opportunity for my group to enhance our language and technical skills, which, on paper, sounded somewhat interesting. In reality, however, it meant nine days of 8-5 that mostly took place in a classroom. Our technical training topics contained a large amount of jargon which may mean nothing to you: multi-use water systems, micro-irrigation, plastic house construction for off-seasonal vegetable production, integrated pest management, collection center development, goat farming, preserving nutrition in food preparation, and solar dryer construction. Some of the health volunteers were chagrined that so much of the focus was on agriculture, but I learned a good deal that I hope to apply back in my village. Nevertheless, it was a pretty grueling week.

Construction of a plastic tunnel to allow vegetable production in the off-season 

 Drip irrigation, which minimizes water use

Combining plants that repel pests with manure, urine, and ashes as a part of integrated pest management 

Using locally-available materials to construct solar dryers for fruit and vegetable preservation

Thankfully, the training was held in Tansen, a small city in the middle hills of central Nepal. The change of scenery was a breath of fresh air; I saw mountains for the first time in three months, and the terrace farms and winding roads brought me back to my time in the hills where I spent pre-service training.



After finishing a training one afternoon, I hiked with two volunteers up to Srinagar Hill, which purportedly is the only place in Nepal from which the Himalaya (largest mountain range in the world) and Terai (one of the lowest plains in the world) can be seen. Unfortunately, the weather was cloudy and the lookout tower was closed, but the forty-minute hike was still well worth it.

 

In addition, the city of Tansen has great character. It’s considerably less touristy, trafficked, and developed than Kathmandu or Pokhara. Its steep, meandering streets coalesce at roundabouts with statues and temples at their center. Shops line the roads selling handmade metalwork and traditional dhaka fabric, for which the region is famed. Many of us came to view the city as a hilly hideaway to which we hope to return over the course of our service.

Pictures of Dhaka, metalworks

And finally, it was simply nice to see everyone again. We spent our free time in small groups wandering the city, chatting in hotel rooms, and even working out together.

Conversations almost always turned to our more unique stories from site. One of the more interesting was a volunteer’s host mother who, one night in the heat of maternal passion, affectionately bit her on the lip. Another friend’s host family had refused to accept his rent money, viewing him as their own son. One volunteer had been mixing up the words for “body” and “vagina,” which made her family giggle every time she thought she was saying “I’m going to wash my body!” But there were dark sides, too. Some volunteers had encountered sexual harassment, racism, host family drama, financial difficulty, chronic illness, and other stressors. Discussing our troubles together was a healthy way to let off some steam. We also had some fun. Some of us went to watch a Nepali film in a grungy movie theater. With a day off on Saturday, our Friday night festivities got a little out of hand. The Hindu festival Maha Shiva Ratri, which resembles 4/20, was also celebrated during our stay in Tansen. Returning back to our sites—to once-a-week bucket showers, twice-a-day daal bhaat, and 24/7 Nepali—was a major adjustment for many of us.

I, however, did not go straight back to my village. One of the older group’s volunteers had invited interested volunteers to her site for a mushroom training, and I eagerly asked to go along. It was fun to spend time with the senior group of volunteers, whose experience working and living in Nepal has been invaluable.

After two full days of travel, I arrived back in Shreegaun two weeks after I had left, feeling informed with my new knowledge from the trainings and motivated from hearing about the work of my fellow volunteers. I was simultaneously amazed, humbled, and inspired by how much some people have accomplished in just three months—some of us have started coffee farming, planted fruit orchards, begun beekeeping, delivered maternal health trainings, and built cookstoves. And we’ve accomplished little things that don’t show up in official reports: made friends, tutored family members, overcome personal and social challenges. I felt revitalized, and ready to take on everything.

To my extreme grief, my garden had been left in shambles in my absence. A storm had destroyed part of the fence, providing access for the chickens and goats to eat all the leaves off of all my radishes. My nursery had collapsed, although my family had been able to transplant the cauliflower saplings. Blight had attacked and decimated my potato plants. My bed of beans had been trampled, leaving a lot of wilted sprouts with little life in them.



After a night of wallowing, I set to reviving it, reconstructing and strengthening the fence, planting flowers along the perimeter, pulling out the stunted radishes, harvesting the blighted potatoes (which actually gave a pretty good yield), and planting some more potatoes. In the near future, I plan to plant some small herbs, bell peppers, and okra, expand the garden’s size.

Then I set to doing a house-to-house survey to assess my village’s desire and need for improved cookstoves, which reduce smoke, cooking time, and wood consumption. With the help of my friend Risi, a 22-year-old guy who lives just down the road from me, I visited 78 homes over the course of five days. In an incredible stroke of luck, I also met a nearby man with nine years of experienced constructing stoves. With my village’s data and his expertise, we will begin building stoves in interested families’ homes in the upcoming week.

Friday and Saturday (my supposed day off) were two of the most “Peace Corps” days I’ve had yet. After conducting my cookstove survey in the morning, I headed to my health center to attend a meeting (which never happened) and to deliver my weekly nutrition training to pregnant mothers (which was cancelled due to lack of audience). My plans spoiled, I biked to my local bazaar, where an NGO happened to be delivering an HIV/AIDS training for a group of pregnant mothers. I decided to sit in and was immediately asked to share my knowledge and experienced with HIV/AIDS, which I was actually able to do in Nepali. As I was leaving the training, some of the women from the community’s women’s group called me over. They were making clothes, weaving sweaters on a loom, sewing pants at a machine, and knitting socks and hats. They offered to teach me, helping me make my own burgundy-colored sweater vest.

 

Next I was to meet the cookstove maker, but was sidetracked when a number of villagers called me over to an election for new chairperson of the school. I sat with the men for a while, trying to make out the content of the candidates’ speech. As it grew late, I took my leave and biked ten minutes to meet the cookstove man. He enthusiastically agreed to begin working the next week and to reduce his price for those who couldn’t afford the going rate. I returned to the bazaar to in time for volleyball practice, which made for an excellent conclusion to the day.

The following day, I delivered a compost training to a local farmers’ group. Very gratefully, my friend, an agricultural veterinarian, attended and helped a great deal with clarifying things beyond my language ability. Even though the owner of the home failed to collect to materials to actually make the compost, the training went very well. I’m looking forward to working with the group more in the future, giving monthly or bimonthly trainings to help them boost their agricultural production.



After the training, my friend Risi’s father asked if I would help him to make a garden behind their house. We spent the afternoon clearing the land, loosening the soil, and beginning to make the beds, all the while chatting about America and Nepal. That evening, I thought that exhaustion from such a busy week would catch up with me, but somehow it didn’t. If anything, I feel just as full of vigor as when I returned to site a week earlier. I feel like things are starting to come together, that all the energy I’ve put into my work is starting to generate something with a momentum, energy, and power of its own.

I’ll have to end this post now, because my host mother has just entered my room to cover my face with red powder. Today is Holi, a very colorful festival in honor of the Hindu god Krishna. I’ll share more about it in my next post.