Saga Nepal Volunteering - pros & cons.

Firstly, having had seven very different volunteering jobs since I got medical retirement, I have to say that I think anyone who volunteers gets more out of volunteering than they put in. The contact with different people in different circumstances, often worse than your own, is always stimulating & challenging. Your perspective & experience is broadened & you learn so much.

But, I have real doubts about what I have just done in Nepal. There are too many organisations with different agendas & levels of competence involved. I travelled with Saga Volunteer Travel, the land agents in Nepal were Social Tours in Kathmandu, the founder of Samata Bamboo Schools is Uttam Sanjel, the organisation which ran the Naxal Orphanage is OCCED, and finally the accommodation & transport was provided by Malla Hotel & Tours. Too many fingers in the pie resulting in a somewhat frustrating & less than satisfying experience for volunteers. Communication & demarcation lines of responsibility was poor throughout. We wasted a lot of time getting to understand how the set up worked, both in terms of the school or orphanage & in terms of the wider areas of responsibility between the various agencies. Someone really needs to get to grips with this & make very clear to volunteers who does what.

However that isn't the only problem. There seems to be little in the way of selection criteria for volunteers. Is it really reasonable, from anyone's point of view, to send middle aged people with no experience whatsoever of teaching primary & secondary children English as a second language, to teach anywhere without any preparation or training whatsoever? I wasn't expecting to have to mentor the other teaching volunteers & do all the lesson planning for them. What would have happened if they were on their own with no one who was experienced? Is it reasonable to send a volunteer to the orphanage, a very challenging environment, on their own with almost no back up?

I was also frustrated & infuriated not to be able to get  a proper professional briefing before I went out, so I knew what materials & equipment to take to maximise what I could achieve for the children. In fact we weren't even teaching in the school we had been given a lesson schedule for, so it bore no resemblance to the timetable in Samata 2! I was experienced enough to organise children who spoke good English as monitors for each volunteer & determine which periods we taught & what we taught, so the initial time wasting waiting for children to arrive was cut to a minimum. The one really good thing was Laxmi, the young woman in charge of Samata 2. She was a delight to work with, helped in every way she could & was always open to suggestions.

The initial grandiose ideas outlined by Saga of me training teachers, teaching music & art or computing were utterly ridiculous. There were no art materials, instruments or computers, (not to mention electricity in the classrooms!) & the teachers were teaching their classes of 50 plus!

Finally there is the question of the cash. I was left feeling that it was far too easy for it to go adrift. There was little evidence of the money from previous volunteers being spent directly for the benefit of the children, as opposed to paying salaries for instance. In theory each volunteer brings a paltry £150 from the £3.200 cost. There is no apparent accountability or transparency for this money though & I was aware of differences of opinion between the various bodies involved in Nepal. Often volunteers are sponsored by friends & also take out large sums of money as well. That money has to be given on trust. Given the huge & endemic corruption in Nepal, I didn't feel inclined to do that.

This was undoubtedly a great experience. Living and working in a country is not the same as having a holiday. I would love to go back & really use my skills & expertise to help these wonderful children & teachers.The children are a delight - very underprivileged & hard working. Full of drive & personality & a will to succeed. They deserve better & I could have done so much more. I know other volunteers have felt the same from their emails & blogs. So why haven't the issues been tackled? Is it all just a box ticking exercise?

Back Home

Home to the "season of mists & mellow fruitfulness" having been away for a month in the heat, dust & pollution of Kathmandu. It's really odd, in one way it's as if I've never been away, and in another I feel that things have changed completely.

I am now beginning to be able to talk properly after two and a half weeks of barely being able to speak. We do all take for granted the ability to communicate. It is deeply frustrating not to be able to participate in conversation & it was a bit worrying not knowing whether I was right, that it was simply a combination of external stresses on the voice - teaching, dust, pollution etc. Interestingly if you have to make a huge effort to communicate you tend to stop trying & listen more. Really listening to other peoples conversation without thinking of what you want to respond is fascinating. We can't have deep & philosophical conversations all the time, but it is amazing how the trivia of life plays a very repetitive part in general conversation.

Physically I have paid a price I didn't expect to pay. I thought I would be more or less bound to have a dreadful tummy bug - luckily it didn't happen. (I could have done with losing some weight!) But I wasn't expecting the daily hour & a half horrendous journey to and from school in a 4WD or taxi on the most unbelievably bad roads I have ever been on in my life. (That includes India, rural China & developing countries in the Middle East). Getting in & out of the vehicles, holding on for dear life in the absence of seat belts sometimes, & bracing my legs against the seat in front has all  left me limping with a much worse left knee & right hip. Not bad enough to be bionic yet according to the GP, so just have to adjust to more difficulties with hills & stairs & getting in & out of chairs & beds.

I certainly appreciate everything I have even more than I did before I went, if that's possible. Seeing how the orphans live in the orphanage we visited - spending a month in the delightful company of the children I taught in Samata school - seeing the street children living round the corner from my hotel, sleeping on the pavement curled up together like puppies on a rug on a main road, it is impossible not to be moved to real anger & despair at the unfairness of the world we live in.

We all actually know what the problems are - the solutions are the problem. Especially in a country as corrupt as Nepal. "Better to have a monarchy than anarchy" as one Nepali said to me about the current shambles of a government. More on this subject when I have had chance to reflect & assimilate the experience. But I loved it.