Volunteering In Nepal – The Base

Ya know those classic pictures you have in your head of third world transportation? The Indian bus, chickens packed to the ceiling, people on the roof and hanging out the windows? Well India doesn’t allow that anymore. It’s unsafe and unbecoming of a modern nuclear nation state.

Unfortunately, Nepal doesn’t feel that way, and definitely ain’t taking too many cues from big brother.

As I approached the mini-bus in Machapuchre terminal, on the filthy outskirts of Kathmandu, I knew what I was in for. The worst of the worst. Like the new airline seat upgrades ‘yes, can I upgrade to the roof? I believe I have enough points.’

The bus was already full. By any sense of the imagination of the word ‘full’, it would be applicable. Our tickets had been paid for and were ready in hand, but anything remotely amounting to two seats could not be seen.

‘Enter the bus sir.’ The impatient loading officer barked.
‘You see I would, but…’
I looked at the pained wad of pressed humanity already squeezed in. Their eyes were all on me, silent, praying the big sweaty foreigner would not simply dogpile on top of them.

For the life of me, there seemed no move, no gap, no opening with which to awkwardly throw myself towards the goal line.

‘Enter the bus, Sir’ he repeated. Possibly his few words of job-related English.

He barked again, this time in Nepali, eliciting grumbling and shuffling in the back row. A small seat was folded out from the wall and two people moved to sit on it. Seeing six inches of fabric seat, I threw myself in full steam. One pivot, where my butt may have slightly grazed the face of an elderly woman, and I was down. Knock-kneed and with one arm bent awkwardly over my bag, I was seated. I was in. Now what about Cassie?

For someone who loves travel more than anyone I’ve met, she doesn’t take to it easily. Her stomach, a constant pain for her in many regards, takes to road trips like a toddler holding an ice cream in the back of a moving car. Might be fine for a minute or two, but sooner or later there’s gonna be a mess to clean up.

When she finally got to the door of the van her face said it all, except now I was one of the sullen bus-wankers staring blankly at her to find a seat, any seat, so the air would begin to flow and flush the curry smell out with it.

The small path that I had deftly negotiated to get to the rear was the only unused space, and so a large empty water jug was called for and put down, graciously covered by a small piece of cloth. To her credit she barely paused before hoisting herself in and taking up her meager seat on her jug and steadying herself with some Indian Dramamine.

There are not many roads out of Kathmandu, and the Trisuli highway is one of the main arteries ferrying people from the capital in the Southeast to the far flung Northwest of the Himalayas. We were headed to Trisuli town, the home base of US-based NGO All Hands International in Nuwakot district.

Nuwakot, a region about the size of a large American county, had been hit bad by the 2015 earthquake. The quake epicenter, it was a simple cluster of stone and mud-brick villages strung up and down the steep, terraced hills Northwest of Kathmandu. The ride, although a few people removed from the windows, still gave a good view of the region still recuperating one year on.

Landslides blocked some pieces of the tiny roadway. Most just simply small tumbles requiring only a slight braking by our hurtling bus. Others showed boulders the size of my childhood house, tossed deep into the ravine, barely missing clusters of huts and family homes. Given the destruction, one would be forgiven for still feeling it was a beautiful place. The sun in the West filled the valley, and outside of the dust whipped up behind us, it was a crystal clear day.

In the far bottom of the valley the Trisuli river snaked it’s way through the mountains. The rocky riverbed stretched out wide on both sides, but children played and women washed in only a few feet of water at it’s center. On the edge of the monsoon season as we were, everything seemed to be drying up. The parched pieces of farmland, dug over centuries into narrow terraced plots, were mostly barren save for those growing corn at the bottom of the valley. The only successful recipients of trickle-down anything.

Soon the rains would come, the rivers would burst, and the farms, the livelihood of all, would spring to life. Or so everyone hoped. The ‘winter monsoon’, the smaller of the two, had not come this year, and worry was spreading. The earthquake had caused so much damage aboveground that few outside of these regions understood that the true danger was below.

The shakeup the district had experienced had rerouted underground aquifers. Village springs and wells, some of them hundreds of years old, had gone dry overnight. The shifting of millions of tons of stone displacing the underground water sources.

A partially destroyed well in Kathmandu

Any visitor to the third world knows that these local wells are the beating heart of the community. A place where all are equal, and everyone meets in the morning to brush their teeth and wet their faces. The disheartening prospect of dry, dusty fountains, at the center of abandoned villages made me hope quietly to see the sky’s darken soon, even if it meant working in the rain.

Our work was as yet unknown. ‘Volunteering’, a relatively new term to me unfortunately (did you know these so called volunteers don’t even get paid?), to do ‘disaster relief’. Such a broad charge sent my head spinning.

Would we be building schools? Teaching kids? Passing out cups of hot-cocoa and blankets? I had no idea. But, like Hunter says, ‘buy the ticket, take the ride’. The ‘ride’ to this point had only consisted of five hours jostling with 27 people on a bus meant for 12, all the while watching Cassie’s face go from ‘eggshell’ to ‘pea-soup’, but surely there would be more to come.