Learning Curve Times Ten (My First Week)

         The first week in any new environment is hard to explain - it's exhilarating, eye-opening, and exhausting all at once. It's the feeling of taking in and learning a million new things simultaneously in order to stay afloat in a sea of the unfamiliar. My first week here, with my new Nepali family and at my Nepali government school, has been just that, but to a an even greater extent - a learning curve times ten.

           I've been surrounded by wonderful people, enveloped by shy smiles from passing students, comforted by sweet tea and dahl baht - but that doesn't stop things from being overwhelming. I'm still straining with little success to understand my Ama's Nepali, constantly gauging facial expression to judge whether my actions are acceptable, and am always prepared with a smile and a "Kusi laagyo" (I feel happy) or "dherai mitho cha" (It is very delicious) whether I mean it or not. But I would be quick to say that the exhaustion of the steep learning curve is but little to the complete joy and insight even just this first week has brought me.

Afternoons spent sitting with my little four year old sister, Sochina, playing tickling games and exchanging smiles, nights talking with my Bauju (sister-in-law) about the difference between our customs and about our pasts, learning to eat with my hands, and walking along rice fields and back roads with Sochina and Sumitra (Sochina's friend) holding my hands - all these, and many more, make the struggle of the first week worth while.


I'm learning all at once that things here are similar and yet completely completely different. Seeing the students in school confirms that, as does exchanges with my Bauju and fellow teachers. The way life flows, the expectations, the views, and the opportunities here are so drastically different than they were for me growing up in a small town in Port Townsend, Washington. In all of the places I've traveled, I've never felt that the world was so different.

The other day, we walked to the river and one of my favorite teachers, Dilliram, told me about how when he was younger he had come to school from across the river like many students do now. The long wire bridge that stretched from bank to bank was only built eight years ago. So when he was a student, he had started at one side of the river each morning, he told me, and with a basket on his head to keep his books dry, he had swam from one side to the other, departing from a point upstream and ending downstream a bit on the other side. I gapped as he told the story, unable to believe it. The river was fairly big and fast moving. It's hard to conjure up the image of Dilliram as a young student, drenched by river water each morning as he made his hour long trek to school, only to get what I'm sure wasn't too much of an education at the time.

In America, I told him, a bus comes by your house to pick you up.

How vastly different our lives have been. And how vastly different they continue to be. Every day that I see my students I try to really understand what their lives are like and what their lives will continue to be. Every day I am learning, and every day I become more grateful for the opportunities I've been presented with in my life, that I know 99% of the people living here will never have.

I'm so excited and nervous both to be spending the next 7 months here. There will be many difficulties, I know, but I suppose if Dilliram swam across a river each day to get to school, I can handle this relatively small flood of new culture. You just have to get a little wet to get to the other side.