Volunteer in Nepal
Evan Morgan is an Australian photographer, who was trekking in Nepal and offered to stay on in Kathmandu after his trek to take pictures of children assisted by the work that The ISIS Foundation does. He’s now taken some beautiful shots of the kids, many of which are on this site; see the Gallery section for a selection of his photos.
Bermuda resident Jeff Manson worked on a fantastic Induction Kit for future ISIS volunteers in Nepal. Once this is finished, we will be able to take the first steps towards developing a serious programme for volunteers in Nepal, to begin in 2007.
Whilst The ISIS Foundation has a comprehensive medical volunteer programme for our Uganda projects, to date we have had very few volunteers working in Nepal. Why is it that we are pausing before accepting volunteers in Nepal? Why are we taking our time to develop this instead of encouraging people to fly over and help out? Here are a few of our reasons for being so careful about whom we send down to our projects:
- We have tried to keep our administration costs to a minimum in Nepal, employing few staff. For a volunteer programme to work effectively, it needs to be well coordinated on the ground, and until now we haven’t been able to support such a programme. We are hopeful that the Kathmandu Kids Club will help us to fund staff who can work on a comprehensive volunteer programme, so that we can design really effective, fun projects for volunteers to do in 2007.
- As a result of the civil war, security in Nepal has not been great over the last couple of years. At times there are strikes, curfews, and skirmishes between the army and the Maoists in Kathmandu. This puts volunteers at potential risk.
- We have a philosophy of only employing ‘westerners’, or non-Nepalis, if we absolutely have to. Why? Because if a country is flooded with qualified volunteers, local people begin to believe less in themselves. As an example, Nepali doctors have to contend with a prejudice against them in their own country. If local people see foreign doctors working at a clinic in Kathmandu, they ask to see them in preference to Nepali doctors! This is terribly damaging to a nation – it prompts a lack of self-belief that is unhealthy.
- It is very, very hard to come to terms with working in a developing world culture. Some volunteers are so culture-shocked – shocked at the dirt and the poverty, at the time it takes to get things done, at the difficulties with living conditions – that they are much less effective than they otherwise would be in their home countries. Unless volunteers are working in Nepal for at least a few months, if not longer, they can be made less effective by the time it takes to get over their culture-shock.
- Volunteering is about giving, not just about getting an ‘experience’. Sometimes volunteers want to work in developing countries to teach themselves something, to ‘get’ rather than to ‘give’. This means that we need to be particularly careful about who we send overseas. We need a very careful recruitment and selection process to sort out who wants to volunteer selflessly, versus who wants to volunteer to learn something for him- or herself. We don’t have the administrative capacity in Bermuda to offer such a selection programme. We hope that we will have such a capacity in the future, as we know that there are people out there who can provide wonderful assistance to Nepalis, if only we could work out who was best for the job.
What does it take to be a fantastic volunteer? Here are some of the criteria that we use when selecting volunteers for our work in Uganda at ISIS:
- Compassion – volunteers must have a real sense of compassion for those less fortunate than themselves. They probably have a history of volunteering in charities over a number of years. The inequity in living conditions between people born in the developing world, and their own living standards, will be a driving force in their wish to volunteer.
- Experience in the developing world – poor countries can be a shock to those of us who live in the developed world: beggars on the streets, starving children, children and adults for whom lice and scabies and poor health is a given, rubbish everywhere as there is no rubbish collection, classrooms of 60 children who learn by listening to their teacher read aloud from a text book, violence against women as a day-to-day norm, soldiers who are 15 years old, carrying machine guns and wearing flip-flops because the government cannot afford to buy them boots… These are tough things to witness, and to be involved in. If you have had experience in poor countries, you will be better able to cope when volunteering in Nepal.
- Specialist expertise in one field or another – we have a policy of providing training for trainers in Uganda, and we will do likewise in Nepal. One month teaching children can be useful, but one month teaching teachers how to teach children has an exponential effect on hundreds of children.
- Capacity to cope with completely bizarre situations – in the developing world, odd things happen. One volunteer at one of the children’s homes we support recently talked to us, laughing, about how he’d never had fleas or lice before, but now he knew better – he shaved his head after realising that head lice were a part of the job when working with impoverished kids. He also sprayed the closet he was sleeping in to get rid of the masses of fleas which had infested his mattress. If this makes you laugh, you’ll be a good volunteer. If it makes you feel slightly nauseous, think again!!!
- Capacity to cope with death and illness as a part of life – we cannot overstate this. In the developing world, death is as much a part of life as the sun rising. People die more often, younger, and often from preventable causes. It can be heartbreaking. You help one person while a neighbour dies of measles because he or she isn’t vaccinated and doesn’t have the money to get treatment. You need to be able to help as many people as possible, with compassion, and not go crazy with the inequity and senselessness of the divide between life and death in these countries, which is so, so thin.
- Being a person who is non-judgemental is critical as a volunteer. Do your friends say that is true of you? Are you critical of those who don’t come up to your standards, whatever those standards are? Then volunteering isn’t for you. Here’s an example – people often criticise the developing world, sometimes with great vitriol, for being corrupt. Maybe a cab driver charged them too much when they were travelling. Maybe someone tried to steal from them. Is charging too much or stealing bad? Yes. But ask yourself this – if your children were starving, maybe several children had already died because you were so poor, what would you do to help them to survive? Would you beg? Steal? And another example – some people find that in the developing world, people show less verve, and less initiative, than in the developed world. Maybe they don’t take on work with as much fervour as a volunteer. Maybe they wait to be asked to do something, without initiating action. Why is that? Maybe it’s because they have been colonised by a former ‘super power’, where expatriate staff came to their country and were the managers for a few decades, and they naturally believe that those expatriates are the bosses, and they should wait to be told what to do. Maybe they believe in fate more than we do, as fatalism is a feature of their religion – they don’t really believe that they have the capacity to effect change on their lives or their environment. Whatever the case, it is vital that volunteers understand that their world-view is very different from that of a local living in Nepal or Uganda, and that there may be forces operating on people in villages that we cannot even imagine or understand.
- Insane optimism – this is crucial! Imagine this – you are a Nurse, working in a rural hospital in a desperately poor region. You have little funding, and you have limited training. Every day, people come to you for help, and you can only help 10% of them. Maybe you don’t have any more syringes, because nobody can pay for them, and so you can’t vaccinate people against tetanus. So babies come in, daily, who are rigid with the disease, and they die in pain while you try to do your best. Now imagine this – a volunteer comes in from overseas. He or she is wealthy, educated. If he or she is astonished at how hard your job is, or depressed by it, it makes your life infinitely more difficult. But if that person is full of enthusiasm, and full of hope, and full of ideas and resources and ready to commit to helping you for years to come – it changes your world. You begin to believe that maybe one day, it will get easier, and you can save those little lives. Think of Winnie the Pooh – if you are Eeyore, don’t volunteer! If you are Tigger – come on down!
