[ A Love of Kathmandu ]

Good evening ladies, gentlemen, and everything in between. This is it, the last post. I'll be sharing some of my thoughts and reflections on my time in Kathmandu -- it is pretty personal. You've been warned.

While trying to calculate how I might structure this blog post, it became very important to me that I had to keep my audience in mind. Specifically, an audience that only scrolls through pictures: I advise you to leave now. There won't be any pictures, only words and thoughts. It also occurred to me that anyone can read this, strangers and close friends alike. Anyone new to the blog will be starting with this post -- the last one -- and I beg you to please start at the beginning before you indulge yourself in the end. Most importantly, I needed to keep in mind why I was doing this blog. Yes, it was to let my family at home know what I was doing, to let the intern next year have a glimpse at what they might experience, but, and I think this is the most important part, I did this blog for myself.

“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.” - Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

When it comes to remembering my own life, I've usually been too busy to keep stock of what has happened. Even going back through the blog while I was in Nepal, I was shocked at how much a few weeks can make you forget. It was also important to me to see how I changed throughout my time there. I can't say that this experience was earth-shattering. I can't say that I came back a completely different person. But this internship did have an effect, and, in this post, I want to explore that.

Going into this internship, I was ready. I was ready for the adventure. I was ready for a life-changing experience. I was ready for a new paradigm. But once I got there, I experienced heaps of doubt. It was crippling, at times. For awhile, I didn't believe in myself or my abilities. I had been thrown into a world of working adults -- all of whom had their Master's or Doctoral degrees -- and I whole-heartedly believed that I would not succeed by their standards. I felt my own education had seriously unprepared me. Not knowing what a literature review was, and with little help, I had to figure out what I was doing and how I was going to do it. It was a scary time, as at that point, I had not made many friends either. When the power was off at night, I had a lot of alone time to mull over my situation. Even more discouraging was the outlook of my two months, as no interviews were set up or mentioned in my first weeks there. I thought I would be stuck behind a desk for the duration of my time in Nepal, and that was wholly frustrating as well. To sum it up, there were a lot of intense emotions left out of the blog (up to this point haha). It was not all rainbows and sparkles...it was pretty bleak for awhile.

The internship was nothing like what I had expected. But that is not entirely bad. You see, because I was out there alone, because I was feeling completely inadequate, I had a chance to grow. It is not in my nature to give up easily, and so I resolved to prove myself and my imagined-doubts-of-others wrong. This is one of the biggest lessons that I will take away from the internship -- it wasn't something I had logically concluded as much as something I felt -- and that was confidence. After the painstaking attention to detail, the hours reading decades old literature, and the late night cramming at the end, I had produced a report that made my adviser and myself proud. I had given a presentation that met the standards of my significantly more intelligent peers.

When I came home, I repeatedly heard the fears about being freshmen in college from my friends. Yet I found it hard to empathize. It was this self-doubt that had plagued us for so many years, but that I had to directly face while I was in Kathmandu. Even as I type this, I have a sense of almost fearlessness in me about beginning my next big adventure, because I know I have what it takes to do well. It is a sentiment that so many adults have expressed over the years...that I would be successful, that I will do great things. Whatever their definition was, they thought I could do it. It wasn't until this summer that I began to see myself through their eyes. Even when I didn't know what I was doing, I taught myself what to do. Even when I was in a completely new environment, without any social relations, I found meaningful friendships. I learned to believe in myself, and that was an entirely empowering experience.

My view of myself had changed, but so had my view of the people around me. Through my whole internship, I did not see much poverty -- at least, I thought I hadn't. I realized towards the end that the only criteria I had for poverty was whether or not you owned a home, and the amount of homeless people I had seen was no different than what I would see in Des Moines. Based on that observation alone, I scoffed at the idea that Nepal was so poor. But this perception was entirely inadequate. As I reflected on that, I realized how incredibly ridiculous it was to use a building as the way to judge whether or not a person could provide for themselves and their families. I had gone to Kathmandu expecting to see homeless people on every corner, but this wasn't the case. I once heard that Kathmandu is much more open compared to America, because you can see into everyone's houses. You can see their furniture, their families, their livelihoods. But in America, everyone is closed off and fenced in. In Kathmandu, I could see that people had things, had each other, and had a career (whether it be fruit stands, wood carving, or tiny shops), so I thought that they didn't classify as poor. And perhaps they wouldn't have classified themselves as poor either. When I discussed poverty with others, they frequently brought up that subsistence farming has been a way of life for centuries in Nepal. Why should we consider it poverty? It's still something that I am conflicted on. In the U.S., poverty is defined by making a certain amount of money per year, but in a system where services are exchanged for other goods or services, the monetary exchange isn't counted. How, then, does one define poverty in Nepal? Is it when all of your basic needs are met? Yours and your family's? And how do you define basic needs?

So many of the people, from my point of view, were living at the same level. The only class system that was apparent to me went like this: politicians, then all of my coworkers and expats, then everyone else. It was only upon arrival back in the U.S. that I realized how many social cues I had been missing. Once in the airport in Chicago, I was overloaded by the amount of information I was perceiving. I could read all of the posters and all of the signs. I could walk by a conversation and understand what it was they were talking about. Everything was loaded with stigma once again -- what it meant if a person dressed a certain way, what it meant if a person walked a certain way, what it meant if a person spoke a certain way. In a sense, I was suffocating from how much I knew about class in America. The caste system of Nepal is intensely complicated and it seemed that, when I asked, people had a difficult time explaining its details as well. So, during my time there, I had lived in an ignorant bliss of the social constructs and social divides that may have been evident to other people. To me, the divide did not seem so great.

A third view of mine that had changed was on religion.  I wasn't in a culture where the phrase "going to church" was used or where there were debates on the fundamentals of Christianity. Seeing a Christian there, or anything referencing the Bible, seemed so out of place. Instead, religion was treated much differently. It was simply part of everyone's life. Buddhism and Hinduism blurred together, to the point where religious idols and shrines occupied the same places, and where people considered themselves both. Instead of being asked whether or not I was Christian, I was asked whether or not I was spiritual. This experience helped me understand that there are different ways of seeing religion, and there are different ways of seeing spirituality without religion as well.

Finally, and this is in stark contrast to the first lesson, but I also learned to value support. In a culture where family is valued so highly, I learned that it is okay to miss my own family. There were so many times that I relied on interactions with other friends. (I'm just going to take a moment here to hail the AAA. Ali and Allie, you two are beautiful people and your own experiences and friendship have greatly enhanced my life. Another moment shall be taken in honor of Sean Finn. You've believed in me more than anyone else, and I seriously can't thank you enough for calming my nerves countless times throughout the years and Skyping with me almost nonstop during the last week. :)). It is not a sign of weakness to ask for help; it is a means of accomplishing things, of learning, and of doing things much better the first time around! Support from friends and coworkers was crucial during my time there, and (this is for you next intern) I strongly encourage you to befriend as many people as you can. Even though I met people who I might not be friends with in the states (or perhaps because I befriended these people), I was able to learn so much more from the different ways that they viewed the world and the different values that guided their lives. While I did do a lot on my own in Kathmandu, it would be hugely misguided to say that I did it completely alone. So many things had fallen into place to even get me there, and once there, I was so lucky to have the support and guidance that I did. Thank you so much to the World Food Prize for taking youth and exposing them to other parts of the world; thank you for giving me a way to fight against food insecurity.

Aside from these lessons that were learned, there were also some cultural differences that I hadn't noticed until I was back in the U.S. First, everyone was significantly louder. They also talked a lot more. After going through the Doha airport, and being around conversations that were in a different language most of the time, it was startling to hear so much English at once. Everyone around me was unafraid to speak, or to speak to me. Even small things that I would have previously done with only hand gestures or conveyed in body language were now spoken and (what seemed at the time) absurdly casual. As I said before, it was overwhelming, understanding the nuances of everything that was being done and said, and simply understanding side conversations again.

Holding conversations with my friends is a little more difficult. At every sentence, I think of how it would be different in Kathmandu. I am constantly reminding myself that I need to talk about something other than the internship, but I become jarred when that is the only thing I can think of. As I've discussed with Allie, my time in Kathmandu just feels like a dream now. I came home to an environment where practically nothing had changed, and it felt as if I hadn't been away for two months. It alarmed me how easily I slipped back into the routine. When my hand naturally knew the height of the door knob to my room I was freaked out. When I operated the shower without even thinking about it (and then the hot onslaught of pressure), it sank in even more that I was actually home. Seeing everyone again (and then saying good-bye for college) has been so surreal. At times, it feels as if absolutely nothing has changed at all, and that scares me. Thanks to this blog, I will always have a reminder of what the city was like and what I was like.

While this post was more disconnected, I think it is necessary to record these emotions. Maybe next year, the intern will benefit from reading them, but I want to make sure that my future self can look back and remember who I used to be; that maybe in a few weeks, if or when things have returned to normal, I can look back and understand how I was experiencing life. Decades from now, I will still have this record, a legitimate story to point to of one of the (hopefully many) adventures in my life.

With that, I am laying this blog to rest. Thank you to everyone who followed me on this journey -- I am immensely grateful for your support.

Until we meet again, may peace and love guide your hearts.
Abby