Nepal Empowerment Project 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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NEP is for sure one of the most memorable service trips I have ever had. NEP is a one-month service trip to Future Village in Nepal aim at empowering children and women living in underprivileged conditions through school-teaching and vocational skill workshops.

 

WHAT WE GIVE

 

We tried to bring inspiration to the school and village. Teachers at school appreciated we trying to introduce flashcards, games, music and drama in classes. While workshops helped to clarify some of the health concepts of villagers, introduce new handicraft ideas which they can make with materials found locally. Moreover, the cloth sanitary pad workshop provided another way out of their menstrual wastes. They used to use clothes or disposable ones brought from the market yet they can only burn or dispose the wastes in river, which caused pollution.

 

WHAT WE GET

 

Having driven through an exceptionally bumpy road that put bruises all over our limbs, we arrived a brick house with tin roof. There were days when we had to hike 30 minutes to get drinking water or shower under a public tap, when we had to sleep on the wooden floor with bugs falling onto our facies.

 

Despite staying in such a tough and inadequate living condition, I learnt from the villagers the simplicity of lives. Their pure and true smiles could easily light up my days. Without much entertainment and technology, Nepalese children were still laughing, still studying, and still showing off with their little inventions with stones and wood. They invented their own toys, built their playgrounds in the jungle and riverside. One can easily notice that, at that moment, with no clean clothes, no internet, no good food – simply playing paper planes with children, watching kids balancing a twig over the stone towers the had just built, walking them to school, catching the pears they shook down from the treetop, crazily waving goodbye till they disappear from sight – I was as blissful and contented as they were, as I had ever been in my life. Then I realize happiness can be as simple as this, not because everything is good, but because you can see the good in everything.