Homecoming

Last week, the MIT class of 2012 graduated. The graduation speaker advised the new grads to imagine they had reached the end of their lives and had been given the opportunity to go back and do it over. It got me thinking about how different my life is now from how I thought it would be sitting in Killan Court on June 5, 2009 and how lucky I am that those changes have come without much regret.

My first post-college year had some good moments (first job, first apartment, getting out of Boston, etc) but was dominated by near-devastating losses. First came my knee injury/surgery, which permanently altered my faith in my own body. Shortly after came the end of a three-and-a-half-year-long relationship around which I had built my sense of self, and in one fell swoop, I lost my partner, my dog, my house, an extended family, a handful of friends, and any sense of certainty about the future.

By the time I hit twenty-three, I had recovered enough to consciously embrace that ambiguity by vowing to act my age. I gave myself a “Hall Pass” for the year to do exactly what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it and generally try to better embody the cultural stereotypes of twenty-three-year-olds.

About seven months into my Hall Pass year, once the novelty of acting my age wore off, I started thinking about what it would look like to just act like me. I realized two things, nearly simultaneously: (1) I wanted to go back to school; (2) I wanted to travel first, since I might never again find myself so without ties and responsibilities. Within three weeks, I had a plane ticket and the Gap Year was born.

Before leaving for Nepal, I had lunch with a colleague who told me she thought I would never come back. Quite the opposite has happened. After 10 months of Gap Year, including 202 days abroad, all I want to do is be in Colorado. I spent the last two years intentionally trying to avoid roots, but they have snuck up on me. My childhood best friend moved in across the street (again) and reclaimed her title. My high school best friend started a life in Golden. I grew closer to both my parents. I began to develop adult relationships with my extended family, (nearly) all of whom live in Colorado. I rediscovered my love for the city of Denver and the mountains around it. And somewhere along the line, I fell for a cute Colorado transplant with a bike and a frisbee.

I am moving to Claremont to start school in the fall, that hasn’t changed. But I am also done trying to deny that my heart strings are firmly planted in the Rockies. And so it seems most appropriate that starting June 21^st, I spend the final two months of my Gap Year with the people and places I love, back home in Colorado.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

March 29, 2012

If you had asked me a month ago what my worst nightmare was, I probably would have said being surrounded by small children. I have friends who love kids and who are amazing with three-year-olds and it completely boggles my mind.  I’ve never been particularly fond of children, nor have I ever known what to do with them, and I actively avoid interaction with anyone under the age of 14. It occurred to me in Nepal that this is not an acceptable long-term personality trait because even if I never have children, someone in my immediate family/friend group will. I am bound to have to interact with miniature irrational humans at some point. So when I was thinking about what to do this spring, I thought forcing myself to interact with children fit nicely within the scope of my gap year: it’s certainly out of my comfort zone, it’s an area I would never give up time/brain space in my everyday life to improve, and there are lots of volunteer opportunities with kids.

Today marks the end of my fourth week in Peru—and my eleventh day working at a preschool! I now have thirty plus hours of child herding under my belt! This may not sound like much to anyone else, but for me, it is huge. I am proud to say I have not injured anyone (a claim Cole cannot make), mistakenly called a girl a boy (as I did my in my last child-interacting role) or done long-term damage to anyone’s psyche (I think).  And what’s more, some of the kids even seem to like and listen to me!

Photographic proof: me with a small child

The preschool we’ve been helping at is in a part of San Bartolo very different from the area in which we are living. There are no sidewalks or paved roads or landscaping. The houses all have electricity but are just four basic walls and a flat roof of shoddy-looking materials. Instead of ocean views, the houses back up to the Pan-American highway with no barrier between the cars and the kids. Apparently the neighborhood developed illegally on public land and the residents pay little or nothing to reside there, but now it is so developed that it would be hard to get them all to leave. Regardless of the zoning legitimacy of the area, I like our time at the preschool because it feels much more like an area that needs help than the sufficiently church-funded Centro Pastoral. The preschool was built with public dollars but the money was used up before the grounds were completely finished. The result: a basic cement classroom and bathroom next to two other incomplete classrooms; a playground with huge piles of sharp rocks; and two unidentified “death holes” in front of the buildings.

Where the sidewalk ends

School grounds

The majority of the kids are three, with a few four- and five year-olds mixed in. If everyone shows up, there are eighteen kids in the class (on most days there are about thirteen). It turns out that playing with small children is pretty easy. Teaching them and disciplining them seems crazy hard, so luckily the class seems to have a pretty good teacher.

Start of school party

In the first hour of school, we just play. The kids love to build things, so legos, tanagrams, foam blocks, etc. are quite popular. The second hour is for work, which in preschool means coloring something or gluing yarn to paper. And the third hour is snack time and recess. I spend the majority of playtime playing a game I like to call “Where does it go?” which looks a little like this:

            Elena picks up a lego or tanagram.

            Elena: Donde va? (Where does it go?)

            Small child, after a long thinking pause: Aqui! (Here!)

            Elena picks up another toy and puts it somewhere silly, like the kid’s head.

            Elena: Va aqui? (Does it go here?)

            Small child bursts out laughing.

            Small child: No! Grabs object. Va aqui!! (No! It goes here!)

I love this game because it is within my Spanish capacities and because the kids never seem to tire of doing the same thing over and over again. During work time, Cole and I each man a table and make sure the kids stay on track. During snack time, we open packaging, try to keep kids from stealing other kids food, and wait for the inevitable beverage spill (who sends a three-year-old to school with a wide-mouth soda/juice bottle?). And during recess, we play games, chase kids, and spin the broken merry-go-round the best we can.

On a more serious note, even without any background in educational policy, the small amount of time I’ve been hanging out in the classroom has been enough to see some of the “duh” structural improvements needed in the educational system (here or in the US). It makes me really wish our policymakers were forced to spend one day a month in a school or health clinic or community center, not as a photo shoot but as a chance to observe the real-life fallout of policy decisions. Here are a few of the things I’ll be keeping a closer eye on moving forward:

1. Class Size. This one’s always seemed logical to me, but now I understand better which kids it matters most for. Bright, self-motivated kids are going to well no matter what. Trouble makers are going to get attention no matter how many other kids are there. But the kids in the middle—especially the quiet kids in the middle—are the ones truly at risk of falling through the cracks in a high student-teacher ratio classroom. The teacher in our preschool doesn’t even consistently call the quiet kids the right name. Granted we are only a few weeks into the year, but still, how sad for them.
2. Importance of Preschool. At the health foundation, I learned that Head Start and other preschool programs can have an unbelievable impact on a child’s future educational success. Now I can see why: preschool teaches kids how to learn, how to exist in a structured environment, and how to listen to and follow directions. It’s amazing the difference between the kids brand new to preschool and those who are on their second year. Less crying when the parents leave, better listening, and an understanding of the cause and effect between doing work and getting to eat a snack. I can only imagine how difficult kindergarten must be for kids who don’t go to preschool—especially when they are in classrooms with those who have.
3. Safe School Grounds. If I could endow a foundation, I would spend all my money just to go around the world completing half-completed school construction projects. So often I see foundation or government funded projects that begin construction and then run out of money and never finish. The ironic thing is that I’m pretty sure an old building is safer than a new building surrounded by death holes. And what’s more, San Bartolo regularly has large groups of volunteers (missionaries) from a church in Boston—this June, they will planting trees at the already immaculate Centro Pastoral. Seems quite superfluous after a morning at the preschool.

Small children playing near death hole #1

All in all, I've found the preschool experience fun and educational, though exhausting: First, working with such an impressionable age group makes me feel like we're actually helping. Second, I've learned a ton about the education and development of small children. Third, I have confirmed my career decision to leave the education of and responsibility for small children to others (not that this was ever in doubt). And fourth, most importantly, if a close friend were to have a baby tomorrow, I would no longer treat it like a pariah.

Small children!

Personality Boundaries

December 6, 2011

One of the last nights of my Tibet tour, I had a great conversation with my roommate, Marieke, about our plans after the end of this trip. I don’t remember the exact wording, but paraphrased it went something like this:

Marieke: I really hope I’m able to do some more traveling by myself someday. I feel like you experience so much more solo. Like on buses, if you were with someone, you would just talk to your friend, but solo you talk to all the people sitting around you and learn so much more.

Me: I think the opposite might actually be true for me. I’m not naturally a very good traveler; I don’t pick up language easily, I have no sense of direction, and when I’m lost, I look lost, which tends to get me into trouble. I think there are a lot of things I don’t do solo that I would do if I had a good travel buddy.

Marieke: That is so cool that you recognize that about yourself and say it with such comfort.

Me: What do you mean?

Marieke: Our society values certain personality traits, and sometimes people who don’t have them feel badly about that. Which is silly, because there is nothing wrong with the way they are. I think it’s cool that you know yourself well enough to say you’re not a natural traveler and that you’re happy with that.

A bit later, I realized that Marieke had just put eloquent (and flattering!) words to what made this trip so amazing for me. Spending three months 7,700 miles from my friends and family gave me the space to sit with and manipulate the boundaries of my personality. I discovered many varieties of boundaries, but the two I was most interested in were (1) rigid boundaries that I am much happier if I just accept and (2) malleable boundaries that I always thought were rigid but are not!

(1)  Rigid boundaries are those that are fundamental to my personality and are unlikely to change within my lifetime. Fighting against these boundaries makes me miserable, and I have officially given up the fight. The two best examples in my life are:

·       Food and sunshine have a huge impact on my mood. 90% of the times I am grumpy, if I just eat something it goes away. Why do I fight this so hard? I guess I used to think “Ugh, how sad that my mood is not strong enough to handle being hungry;” but now I think “How awesome that something as cheap and accessible as a granola bar and a spectrum light can keep me smiling!” So, in the spirit of putting this acceptance into practice, I withdrew my grad school application to Illinois and always always always carry a snack with me.

·       I have absolutely no sense of direction. Lonely Planet maps give me just enough information to be dangerous. Sometimes I can keep on the right path if I know where I am on the map to begin with, but I lose my way as soon as I get in a vehicle or stop for a meal. It seems then I always head off in the wrong direction. Or think I went the wrong direction, only to turn around and discover that it was the original direction was correct. So why the heck do I not carry a compass with me?! This is just foolishness. Not having a compass is not going to make me better with maps, it is just going to continue to frustrate me.

(2)  I had to push against those boundaries to conclude they are indeed fixed. But sometimes, happily, if you push against a rigid boundary, it turns out to me malleable! These were the most fun finds for me, when I thought something was true about myself and then it turned out I could change it. I think we just get such a firm self-view sometimes, frequently influenced by the reflection of ourselves we get from loved ones, and some space from that is necessary to investigate whether certain traits are fundamental or not. My favorite new discoveries are:

·       I am not, in fact, a rigid, control freak type. Somehow in the last few months the “ke garne” attitude has entered my bloodstream and I have discovered a flexible, easy-going part of myself I didn’t know existed. This has been made very clear by the two group tours I did recently (Tibet and the Great Wall), where members of my group got incredibly irritated when the plans changed and I was baffled. To me, it was like, “Eh, not the way I thought it would be, but this is still awesome! Why would I let a little change spoil my fun?!” I think getting upset about a change in plans is more likely to spoil a trip than the change in plans itself.

·       My approach of eating whatever was put in front of me this trip has been very beneficial. I can put aside my picky eating when I need to! I’m likely to stick with my favorite foods at home still, but I know for sure that eating weird things will not kill me.

·       My place on the introvert/extrovert scale I think is more flexible than Meyers-Briggs would have me believe. After this trip, I genuinely believe that I can be energized by being alone OR being with people. The trick, I think, is adopting the right attitude about it and seeing the benefit of having both in your life.

Part of me wishes I had been more deliberate about this boundary testing. It definitely happened without prompting, but could I learn more if I intentionally pushed some of them? What would happen if I did something involving children in the spring? Would this be just bad for the kids and bad for me, or might I learn I have some semblance of a nurturing side deep down? Hmmm…

Simple Joys of a Bell Pepper

November 29, 2011

I had a wonderful moment today: I was sitting on my bed in a hotel room in Tibet eating a raw bell pepper for lunch and smiling to myself. It may not sound all that exciting, but it was exactly what I wanted to be doing that instant. Later, I was reflecting on the day and I realized that many of my favorite days in Nepal were those filled with simple joys and the immense pleasure of feeling completely content with my life.

This is the skill I am most proud to have cultivated over the past 18 months: the ability to identify and acquire exactly what would me happy. Interestingly, I got the hang of the acquire bit before the identify bit. I guess self-efficacy comes more naturally to me than self-awareness. And learning the self-awareness came hand in hand with ceasing to apologize for wanting what I want and accepting that “because it makes me happy” is a good reason. Sometimes it may be little short-term things, like lime green bed sheets or a fresh bell pepper for lunch, and sometimes it may be big long-term things, like leaving my perfectly wonderful job for a year of unknown adventures, but I think that the success of my life will be judged by this standard:

To what extent does the life I am leading at this moment match the life that would make me the happiest.

At the end of my life, I hope to look back and see more moments on the positive end of that Likert scale than the negative end. That, for me, is to have succeeded. 

Mindful Communication

November 21, 2011

The Background Story:

In the last six months at my job, I got really interested in how we communicate. My interest was sparked by observing how staff reacted to different people in leadership roles. And my initial goal was to figure out if there are easily adoptable things that make some leaders able to gain respect and cooperation more easily than others. The short answer (in my opinion) is yes and no. I do think that some people are naturally more suited for leadership roles; but a lot of leadership appears to be teachable. Specifically, it occurred to me that two people could convey the same message with two different speeches and get completely different reactions. I started listening incredibly carefully to the types of words that different folks used, and noting tactics that were particularly effective.

I love this game of listening to how people communicate; it makes every interaction a learning experience. Over the summer, I started trying to implement some tactics that I liked, some of which worked for me and others didn’t fit. The general skill I am trying to develop is speaking more gently with others. The specific skill has initially been focused around how to express a different viewpoint in a way that doesn’t immediately garner a prickly response. I was blessed with a plethora of amazing role models in my time at the Foundation, and some of my favorite “best practices” include:

1. In August I went to a course on evaluation theory taught by Mel Mark, one of the country’s experts on the topic. Yet regularly throughout the day, he would preface his comments with, “Now, from what I understand…” and then he would ask the class if that was how we understood the theory. The genuine modesty this conveyed—that he was positioning himself not as the expert, but rather a student of the field just like the rest of us—made me so much more attentive to his comments. It was incredible. That’s the kind of professor I want to be—deeply knowledgeable but unwaveringly interested in learning from others, regardless of their background and education.
2. My first supervisor at the Foundation was a powerful speaker because she is the most even keeled person I’ve ever met. By maintaining such a calm speaking style, you don’t get distracted by the way someone is speaking and can really pay attention to the content of what they are saying. Though this is not something I am likely to ever achieve (I just get so gosh darn excited sometimes!), I greatly admire the skill.
3. My second supervisor at the Foundation is a pro at explaining really complicated methodology in a simple way. In our department, we did a lot of teaching, and at times I felt like a broken record, saying the same things over and over again. I was always worried that at some point I’d hit my limit of times folks were willing to listen to my guided tour of statistical significance and bar charts. Yet she skillfully avoided this trap by prefacing things with, “I’m sure you know this, but…” kind of making every point a reminder of things we learned previously rather than her always teaching something new. Just fabulous.
4. Two of our program officers had a marvelous way of expressing an opposing viewpoint by starting with a positive about what the other person had just said. So even when they completely disagreed with someone, they would start a point by saying something like, “Wow, I never thought about it like that, thanks! Here’s what I had been thinking…” This one’s hard for me to pull off because I tend to have such strong opinions that the intro feels disingenuous to me. Maybe I need to model these ladies’ open mindsets at a more fundamental level before I have success here.
5. Another coworker was my idol for how she adapted her speaking style for each of the people she assists. She has a knack for understanding what makes people tick and can quickly shift between many different approaches. This to me is like a platinum level skill, which I don’t think I’ve seen someone so good at—it requires both an expert knowledge of effective communication and the prowess to switch between tactics smoothly.

The Recent Experiment:

Despite all my effort in this area, I noticed last week that it is the people I have known the longest that I am slowest to change around. I guess I fall back into old patterns when around people who knew me before the patterns were broken. It seems completely unfair that the people who put up with my flaws for the longest are the last to benefit from my self-improvement. Most recently, this manifested with my tendency to immediately shut my dad down the moment he suggests something contrary to my opinion. So I decided to go cold turkey on the word “no.” For one week, I tried my very best to avoid using the word “no” at all. My thinking was that there is always another way to convey your point, but leading with the word “no” is unnecessarily harsh.

Giving up “no” was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be and I think I did pretty well this week. There were, however, three occasions that I did not succeed at avoiding “no:”

1. There are a lot of phrases that have the word “no” in them! “No problem” and “no idea” are two that I use a lot. At the end of the week, I decided that these phrases were acceptable, because they are not harsh like “no,” so the general policy of speaking more delicately can still be achieved.
2. In one of the Dalai Lama’s famous speeches, he suggests analyzing your behavior at the end of each day, noting how many negative activities and how many positive activities happened. “Because you give this subject special attention, as time goes by your behavior will improve.” What I’ve found is that proper behavior becomes particularly challenging on days when your mind is not in top shape. I am not a nice person when I’m grumpy. I was in a foul mood one day this week and the “no”s came back out in full force. Ugh. In retrospect, I wonder if by focusing more on a concrete task like not saying “no,” my bad mood might dissipate because it would not have mental energy to feed on. An experiment for another day.
3. Direct yes/no questions, particularly when there is a language barrier, sometimes require a firm “no.” When my Nepalese cab driver asked “Do you want to stop to take a picture?,” he did not understand my response of, “That’s ok.”

This was a fun little experiment for me. I hope I’m able to keep avoiding jumping to the “no” reaction. Speaking more gently may be a lifelong challenge for me; I’m aiming for gradual improvement in my speaking style over many many years. But I like this strategy of taking a speaking tactic to an extreme for one week and I may try to think of some others for the months I’m back in the States. A week of speaking really slowly immediately comes to mind. Yikes, that sounds hard. Maybe I can start with just a day…

Flying Solo

November 4, 2011

The three questions I get asked by everyone I meet in Nepal are:

1. Where are you from?
2. Where are your friends? / Why are you alone?
3. Aren’t you married?

I am definitely acting contrary to social norms here—Nepalese women only started riding local buses alone within the last two years, so the idea that I am in a foreign country alone is absurd to most Nepalis, especially older generations. When I say that I am traveling by myself and I am not married, folks look genuinely saddened. At first it kind of bugged me, because I think I interpreted the sadness as a statement about my capacity to travel alone. (My first reaction was along the lines of, “I can do it myself!”) But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I don’t think that’s at all how it is intended.

In both American and Nepali culture, being single (whether for a short trip or a lifetime) carries a certain stigma. Yet in America, I get the sense that being single is frowned upon because of its implications about that individual, for example, that there is something wrong with them, because otherwise they would have a significant other. In Nepal, the stigma is quite different—here, a woman alone signifies the failure of the community to care for its own. The sad reaction I get when I respond that I am in Nepal on my own is not a reaction to anything about me, but rather a feeling that my community has some how let me down.

One good example of how this plays out in Nepali culture happened to me this week on my way back to Kathmandu from Ilam. I had to change buses in Birtamod, with a three-hour wait before catching the night bus home. About 45 minutes into the layover, a woman comes over with one-year old son and her aging father. She points to her father and says, “He wants to know why you are traveling alone.” I tried to explain that I was just in Janakpur and Ilam exploring and now I was heading back to the family I lived with in Kathmandu. She relayed this to her father and he shook his head and asked to see my bus ticket. I thought that was the end of it, but fast forward 2 hours and when it was within a half hour of when my bus was supposed to arrive, this elderly man got up from his spot on the bench and waddled the 30ish feet over to each arriving bus to see if it was mine, every time returning and telling me, “tapaaiko bus china” (not your bus). The family’s bus came before mine so the man was unable to successfully get me on my bus, but when he left, another older man stepped up to the plate. This second man walked me all the way inside my bus, put my bag in the overhead and showed me my seat before returning to wait for his bus. Then the couple sitting in front of me figured out I was traveling alone, and they decided that I would “travel with them” for the duration of the 16-hour bus ride. Every stop, they would shuffle me off the bus, make sure I found the bathroom (often hard to locate in Nepalese rest stops), got a snack, and got back safely on the bus before the driver started the engine.

That I could have managed all of these things myself is completely besides the point in Nepal. The point here is that doing these things myself should never cross my mind, because my community should obviously do them for me. The social contract is clear, and everyone’s role is set in stone. Interestingly, the Nepali word for alone is the exact same as the word for lonely, “eklai,” which literally translates to “oneself.” The word independent is not in any of my Nepali-English dictionaries. I think this pretty telling about the culture here. To travel alone (or choose not to marry) is unheard of. Every thing a female does, she does accompanied by a male relative. At first I thought this would be pretty limiting; I was interpreting it as women can only do things that a man also wants to do. But that’s not how it works. Women do what they want and men are expected to accompany them. When I realized this, I was still a bit confused by how it works in practice, I mean, I only have four male relatives (dad, brother, uncle, cousin), if one of them had to do everything I wanted to do (and everything the other five women in my family wanted to do), they would never get to do their own thing. But you have to remember that this cultural phenomenon goes hand in hand with Nepal’s broader definition of family. They call almost everyone brother/sister or aunt/uncle. Thus, there is a larger pool of male companions, and the community as a whole comes together to take care of the women. In exchange, the women take care of all the cooking, cleaning, shopping, money management and other household tasks. Rather than gender equality, it strikes me that Nepal has support equality; the type of support you provide and receive just takes very different forms depending on your role in the family/community.

In America, I think that we have out grown traditional gender-based roles but we have not yet figured out what our new roles are. And maybe never again will there be a culture-wide understanding of individuals’ roles. I think there is something to be said for having more flexibility in societal roles; a major barrier to women’s empowerment here is that women cannot enter the workforce in a real way because the home responsibilities do not just disappear. But there is also a level of comfort in knowing what support you can expect from different people in your community. And I love this concept of support equality. Maybe true, literal gender equality is not the end goal, but rather we should strive for equal opportunities in society and equal support in relationships.

This social contracts topic is a big one that I’d like to keep pondering. And when I return home and continue to build my life, I’d like to be more deliberate about the people with staring roles in my life. I’d like to spend some time figuring out what types of support I need and where I expect to get that support. On the flip side, I want to make sure that I am in a solid position to provide support for the people that I love so that I do not end up expecting things I cannot reciprocate. I have no intention of giving up my American-bred fiercely independent self, I’d just like to gain a better understanding of how I fit into the larger community around me and learn to accept support more graciously. 

Janakpur

November 4, 2011

This week I finally made it down to Janakpur (the trip that got rained out in September). The city itself suffers from the usual Nepal tourism dilemma of being a full day bus ride from Kathmandu but only having about 2 hours worth of things to see. Janakpur is most famous among southern Nepalis and northern Indians (Janakpur was formerly the capital of the Mithila territory, half of which is now in India) for it’s role in the relationship between Rama (the seventh incarnation of Vishnu) and his wife Sita (an incarnation of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth). The Janaki Mandir is a huge temple built to honor Sita and then next door the Ram Sita Bibaha Mandir memorializes the spot where Rama and Sita were married. I’ve pretty much had my fill of the red brick and woodcarvings of the pagoda temples throughout the rest of Nepal and the bright colors were a much appreciated change of pace! 

Janaki Mandir

Janaki Mandir Inner Sanctum 

Ram Sita Bibaha Mandir

Two things made the 10-hour bus ride worthwhile for me. First, the trip was timed with Chhath, a major Hindu festival most intensely celebrated in Janakpur. Tens of thousands of Indian and Terai-Nepalis flood to the city twice a year for a multi-day festival to worship the sun goddess (and also something about good luck in marriage—Hindu festivals are never just for one purpose, as far as I can tell). On November 1, each family prepared offerings along the side of one of the many ponds in Janakpur. Then, when the sun goes down, the women fast and sit vigil with the offerings until sunrise, at which point the offerings are considered blessed. The families take the food home and make a big feast and everyone who eats the blessed food is supposed to receive the benefits of the offering until the next Chhath (the equivalent of receiving tika during most festivals). My favorite part was seeing all the women in colorful saris (day glow is still socially acceptable here!) and sheer volume of people and offerings involved in this festival.

One family's offerings

Pond surrounded by offerings

After dark

Second, my dad arrives on Sunday, so my time solo in Nepal is coming to a close, and in many ways, this Janakpur trip served as a final exam for my first solo travel adventure, specifically regarding embracing life outside my comfort zone. Tests included:

• Relinquishing all control over my life to male “relatives”: Prakash (the doctor who lives next door to me) and Radhakrishna (my host father) decided that Chhath would be the best time for me to go to Janakpur. Radhakrishna decided that it would be better for me to stay in his friend’s house (Mr. Balram) than in a hotel and that 2 nights would be the best amount of time to stay. When I arrived, Mr. Balram announced that his son (Sushant) would show me around Janakpur. Sushant and two of his friends thus became my tour guides for the trip and decided what I would see and when. I doubt I’ll be giving up control of my life again anytime soon, though it definitely was a “true Nepal” experience. I think there were pluses and minuses in this particular case. I read my guidebooks afterwards, and I think there are probably some things I missed by not exploring solo (though, if the locals didn’t take me there, how important/cool could the site be?). But it was nice to have some “male relatives” to shoo away the train of small child beggars and pesky teenage boys I inevitably acquire every time I leave Kathmandu, and it was nice not to have to keep track of where I was going.
• Shifting to Nepal time: When told that something would happen “now,” I automatically understood that in Nepal, that really meant “maybe in the next few hours” and it didn’t irritate me!
• Adventuresome eating: I ate on daal bhaat with my hands while sitting cross legged on the floor and I did not make too much of a mess. Though I think I failed this test because I made the rookie mistake of admitting I was hungry before dinner. Never ever say you are hungry in Nepal, because then when you say you are full, they respond, “but you are hungry, is it not tasty?”
• Not mentally jumping to the worst case scenario, part one: The “what happens if I get separated from Sushant in a sea of Hindu pilgrims” thought did not even phase me during Chhath.
• Not mentally jumping to the worst case scenario, part two: When the bus ticket counter was closed unexpectedly for the festival, and I wasn’t able to get out when planned, it was me who shrugged and said, “ke garne?” first. (“What to do?” the Nepali catch-all when something doesn’t go as anticipated, similar to our “whatcha gonna do?”)

Bloom Where You're Planted

October 26, 2011

Nepal has a couple of common sayings that seem to reflect their self-image as a nation. As I’ve been traveling around, I hear one or both of these from nearly everyone I speak with. The first is “Nepal is rich in resources but poor in development” (or some variation of this). It becomes quickly apparent how accurate this is. Nepal has a tremendous wealth of natural resources, especially water and flora/fauna resources, but no ability to make use of them. There are three major rivers in Nepal, about equally distributed east-west across the country, and countless other rivers that materialize during monsoon season and the annual spring thaw. Nepal has got to be one of the countries best positioned for hydro-electric power—yet Kathmandu is still plagued with load shedding up to 16 hours a day and any hydo-power they do generate is exported to China and India. As for the flora and fauna, Nepal has three distinct ecological zones—the Terai (in the south bordering India), the Hills (e.g., Kathmandu, Pokhara) and the himals (Nepali for mountains, so saying the Himalayan Mountains is a bit like saying the HIV Virus, fun fact, huh J). As a result of this diversity of climates, Nepal is home to over 6,500 types of plants, including many medicinal plants—yet no industry has popped up to harvest them. Locals give the same reason for both of these two phenomena—there is not the infrastructure to make use of the water and flora/fauna in Nepal. And when I ask why they think the infrastructure is not there, I get common self-image number two: “In Nepal, it is very easy to survive but very hard to thrive.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this one lately, at first I didn't really understand, but now I think it is true on a number of levels here:

1. With regards to developing infrastructure, Nepal as a culture suffers from a dearth of drive and aspirations. The social structures here are so strong that you will be taken care of no mater whether you get a low-level job, excel in your career, or never enter the workplace. There will always be a parent, or a child, or a sibling, or an uncle to make sure you are fed, sheltered and dressed. A family with few workers may not thrive, but they will survive. Yes, there is rampant poverty in Nepal and there absolutely is a need for poverty reduction work. However, it does seem that most Nepalis get by, even right along that poverty line, because of application #2 and #3:

2. Nepalis are remarkably self-sufficient. Outside of Kathmandu, most families grow whatever they need to eat, then sell the excesses to buy clothing and other material goods. Overwhelming people I talk to say that children do not migrate to the city (or abroad) because they are starving, but rather because they have an idealized fantasy of “making it big in the big city” (without trying very hard), that is very very far from reality.

3. (Closely related to #2) Nepalis’ have a tremendous ability to make due with what they have. I’ve been here two months and I am still in awe of the places in Nepal where things grow. Growing up on the edge of the Great Plains, I think of farmland as gigantic flat areas. But here, they put rice absolutely everywhere. All around the hills, there are stairs created to make small flat areas for rice plants. 

Rice paddies between Nagarkot and Sankhu

And now I am learning that rice is only one half of this land’s life cycle—now that the rice is harvested, winter vegetables are being planted on the same land. Property rights are complicated and hard land is hard to transfer. The land that your family has is the land it has always had and (unless the new constitution magically fixes property law) always will have, so the motivation to make the best of it is high. In the city, I see this same characteristic in home construction. Homes are built in chunks as people get the money for it. (Esther Duflo describes this phenomenon in her book, Poor Economics, but it was very cool to see it in person.) All over the city (and country) you see one-story houses with I-beams sticking out the roof. It took me a while to figure out that this was because they build on additional stories as they save enough for it, while the family is living in the house. Since I arrived, a house on the corner of my street has added a new level. 

Occupied in-progress house in my neighborhood

Another example is the umbrella/shoe repair guys on every street corner. Once you make a purchase here, it is a long time before you get a replacement so things have many lives. (And they have fewer material goods overall than we do—my family has exactly enough dishes for one meal and clothes for one week.) If my umbrella broke in the US, I would most certainly donate it to Goodwill and then buy a new one. But here, I was walking down the street and one of the umbrella repair guys started gesturing wildly at my decrepit umbrella (it was barely still in one piece). For one-third of the price of a new umbrella, he took five minutes, repaired three different sections of my umbrella (including one part I didn’t recognize was broken), and now it works better than it did when I bought it.

I think there is a lot to be learned from these two elements of Nepali life. Sure, it’s not as necessary for me to be self-sufficient (you can pay someone to do almost anything) or to maximize my use of everything I have (often easier to just buy a new one), but I think it would be good if I tried to do more of both of these things. Two concrete examples come to mind. First, I want to learn how to do basic clothing repair. Nothing fancy, I’m not going to be making my own dresses anytime soon, just learning to do things like sew buttons back on, patch smalls holes and re-sew seams that rip. I guess I already am kind of moving this direction with the basic car maintenance class I took in the spring, it’s just time to expand to more areas! Second, I want to try to be less concerned with having the right clothing for different occasions. This is going to be a really hard one for me. I think buying new outfits is sometimes a way I try to make myself more comfortable in unfamiliar territory because it is one thing that I can control in a short time frame. (And is closely related to my Barbie doll approach to life, incidentally.) The circumstances I’ve relied on clothing the most was when I was trying to be a debutant, pledging a sorority, and reentering the dating world. In all of these cases, some basic attire changes were probably necessary (I probably did indeed need a party dress to be a debutant), but the lengths I took it to may have been extreme and just a way to avoid dealing with the base issues. And let’s face it, no boy is every going to notice whether I wear the same shirt to work as I do on a date.    

Integration

October 7, 2011

One of the cultural differences between Nepal and the US that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is about the level of integration in our lives. I notice a difference primarily in two areas, first, the extent to which different aspects of our personalities and life are integrated, and second, the extent to which individual lives are integrated with others around them.

First, some observations on integration within an individual: In the US, I feel like we take pride in the ability to compartmentalize our lives. We have the self we bring to work, the self we take out with friends, the self we bring home to mom, etc. While these are all obviously facets of the same person, it is striking what a different experience you can have with a person depending on the situation in which you interact with them and what personality characteristics they (consciously or subconsciously) present. On top of this, our days are intentionally segregated into work time or family time or relaxing time. Even if you try to mix them by brining work home or kids to work, in my experience this is difficult because each expects your full attention.

In Nepal, this kind of compartmentalization within a life just doesn’t seem as prevalent. I think the lack of personality segregation is largely related to the way social structures are set up. It’s hard to present a different person to friends and family when you live with your parents (or your husband’s parents) until they die and they pick who you’ll marry. And socializing in Nepal is not segregated the way we make a children’s table at family celebrations. In every village I’ve visited, everyone comes to the same place to socialize, regardless of age. Teenagers fly kites and chase cows right along with the little kids in front of the adults tending to their shops or cooking or washing. There seems to be less of a bubble around an individual and more of a bubble around a community. In addition, there is not such a defined split between work time/family time/relaxing time. You work when there is work to be done (in the case of tourism and agriculture) or when there is electricity (in the case of office jobs). Work comes home regularly and people leave the office randomly in the middle of the day (or unapologetically answer the phone in the middle of a meeting). It just seems to be accepted that things come up, work schedules are across the board very flexible, and it is understood that you are never 100% dedicated to a single task, because family is the clear priority and part of your mind is always on them. For Nepalis, the point of working is to provide for your family, so there is really no distinction between work time and family time. Going to the office is providing for your family just like spending time with your kids is providing for your family.

There are parts of this approach that are very appealing to me and parts that drive me absolutely nuts. I like the integrated personality bit. As I’ve grown up, I’ve been proud of my ability to cultivate different aspects of my personality. Yet they mostly still feel like distinct personalities within one body, and I think this may have been by design. It’s kind of like changing Barbie’s outfit—I can be ski bunny Elena, adventure Elena, academic Elena, domestic Elena, etc. I’ve had a number of people comment on the way my personalities kind of snap into place, most obviously when I’m trying to solve something and I go into business Elena mode. I think I would like to figure out how to better integrate all the different sides of me into one uniquely and honestly Elena Elena. I’m not quite sure how to go about this, but I’ll be working on it.

The part that drives me absolutely insane is the fluidity between work time, family time and relaxing time. On any given day, I have no idea if I will be working or not. Even if my boss had planned for us to work on a project on a given day, that may or may not happen depending on a variety of factors including but not limited to: the weather, the traffic, his family, the electricity, random Hindu holidays, the contracting process for new projects (no fax/bike courier here, you have to meet in person to sign and stamp contracts, and since the education buildings can take about 2 hours to reach from our office, this kills the day), etc, etc, etc. It’s difficult for me because I can’t really ever plan anything. I kind of just have to wait and see what happens that day, and then if by about 11 it looks as if work will not happen I can go do something. The consequence is that I am running out of cool places to go in the 6-hour window I typically have. I would much prefer to have hard working weeks/days and then predictable time off. A good thing for me to keep in mind as I continue to think about my long-term career plans.

The second big difference in the way Nepali and American lives are integrated is the extent to which we are dependent on others. I’ve commented before on how big an adjustment it has been for my host family to have an independent 23 year-old living with them. In fact just yesterday Radhakrisna was briefly talking to my mom on Skype and she was thanking him for looking after me and he told her, “Oh no no, I have learned she can take care of herself. She is like the whole of the family all by herself.” I don’t think this was intended as a complement, since lately he’s been trying to teach me what the role of the different family members is and why I cannot continue without a husband. But anyways, the difference is not just in family life but in work too.

The Nepalese economy functions through a system of intermediaries. There are lots of things here that you just cannot do for yourself, rather you hire someone who hires someone who does what you need do. At my office, instead of mailing a survey to a school to fill out, we hire someone to take a plane to the district with the surveys, then we hire another group of people to take the surveys to the school to fill them out, then the first person flies the surveys back where another set of employees transcribes the results. And all of this travel has to be arranged by a travel agent because the airlines do not take reservations directly. To some extent, subcontracting like this happens in the US, but here you could not do it all yourself. If you tried to book a hotel directly, they would charge you probably double what you would pay through a travel agent, even including the agent’s fees. And when the doorhandle came off my door, and I asked where I could by a screw to fix it, my host family looked at me like I was crazy. The next day they hired two people to come over with a screwdriver and this little bag of assorted screws and fix the door. Insane. I guess this a good full employment plan. If it takes five people to do a task I would do myself in the US, that’s five more employed Nepalis, but it strikes me as horribly inefficient.

There are a lot of consequences of this system, and the one I’ve found most interesting is how much you have to rely on other people. For a girl who prefers to do everything myself, this has been quite an adjustment. In the US, I certainly have people I can rely on in a pinch. I have an autoshop I trust and family to swoop in when I get in over my head, but on a day-to-day level I’m pretty autonomous. The primary take away I got from all the group projects teachers assigned throughout the years was that it’s faster to do things myself. And I don’t think is an uncommon approach. In the US, we’re pretty focused on either independence or on finding that one special person to support you. In Nepal, it just doesn’t work like that. You are not supposed to get everything from one person/place or do everything yourself. There is no Target, I have to go to four different corner shops to get all my cleaning supplies. Each member of the family plays some role in its support; it is not a one or two person island. And the same goes for businesses.

Here, I have to take a leap of faith and trust in random strangers to accomplish whatever it is I am trying to do. I’ve had to accept that things may not be done my way or exactly and they were planned… and that this is not the end of the world. While I am looking forward to the return of some level of consistency and quality assurance when I return to the US, I think this change has been good for me. And maybe, just maybe, I can maintain a chunk of my newfound faith in other people when I get home.
 

Financial Guiding Principles

October 1, 2011

You know those days that are otherwise unremarkable but are great thinking days? The bus ride to Chitwan was possibly the greatest thinking time I’ve ever had. I share just a bit of it here, since this is a topic I have discussed regularly with friends and family over the years.

Since graduating from college, I’ve developed a strained relationship with my finances. I fluctuate wildly and irrationally between feeling financially secure and feeling like I’m about to go broke. This issue has been aggravated in Nepal by how openly people talk about money. I get asked frequently how much I make and how much my parents support me and how much things cost me. And particularly this splurge trip of jungle safaris has stirred up some internal conflict. I figured since I am all the way around the world and have the chance to ride the elephants, I should do it right. And even after paying for my trip in full, I was still way under budget for the first five weeks of this trip. Yet for some reason, the day before I left, I panicked about this “extravagant” expenditure. I was still freaked out when I got on the bus, but eventually I realized that the trip was already paid for, so it was a moot point and perhaps I should channel my thinking to figuring out why money freaks me out so easily. And so followed a tremendously productive few hours of thinking.

I think that finances freak me out because it is an area in which I feel very susceptible to judgment. And I think this susceptibility stems from me wanting to feel like I spend and save appropriately/normally and not having any concept of what that looks like. So when I graduated, I bought all these young adult finance books and found the “spend x% of your income on this category” stuff completely useless because it had no grounding in my financial context. In retrospect, I think it must be really hard to write a book about budgeting because how we mange our money and what we spend money on are such immensely personal decisions. At the base, expenditures are kind of the external manifestations of our values—we spend money on things we care about and not on things we don’t. So maybe, when I feel judged about my expenditures, it is actually a part of me feeling like my values are being questioned (even though that is never how it is intended). And then I get all worked up because maybe I do spend too much on things that don’t matter. But wait, my finances are my finances and why do I care what others think and how it compares to the “norm”? AH-HA! Unlike many areas in my life, to this point I have not had a firm understanding of my approach to finances, so I am easily swayed by the opinions of others. I’ve made budgets, of course, but I have never stepped back and examined the assumptions behind those budgets.

This was such an epiphany for me and I spent the next bit of time writing myself a set of financial guiding principles. The goal was to explicitly decide on a set of criteria for me to judge my financial decisions. Theoretically, then I would be able to distinguish overly extravagant purchases from ones that are just fine and panic only when appropriate. I found the exercise so incredibly worthwhile that I thought I would share the process here. The questions I focused on contemplating were:

(1)  What are my financial “golden rules” that should never be broken?

(2)  What amount is a comfortable safety net to always have in the bank?

(3)  Under what circumstances am I willing to take on dept?

(4)  What kind of ongoing financial support would I accept/do I expect from my parents? (I guess the flip of this for parents would be, “What do I expect to provide to my adult children?” And maybe as we get older it shifts into, “What do I need to provide for my aging parents?”)

(5)  What are my priority spending areas? What things are important to me and worth financial expenditures (at whatever level is appropriate for my current financial situation)?

(6)  What are low priority spending areas?

(7)  For “rainy days” (literally or figuratively, whenever you have a really bad day), how much would I be willing to spend on a short-term fix? (Almost definitely depends on how regularly you have bad days.)

After I thought thoroughly about these items, I felt so much better about my splurge trip. Given my financial situation and my financial priorities, it was absolutely appropriate. I’m going to go back and revise my guiding principles periodically, and certainly whenever I have a change of financial situation. And of course there will always be times when an exception needs to be made. But in the end, I made this agreement with myself:

My financial life is mine alone. I will gauge my financial decisions on these guiding principles and not on the opinions of others. I shall work hard to never judge the financial decisions of others because their guiding principles differ from mine.

A few days later, I was reading the Dhammapada (the scripture for Hinayana Buddhists, I'll do some more writing on this later) and my favorite section of that is actually very similar to the agreement I wrote for myself, though it's about morals rather than finances. An excerpt:

First once must establish one's own high moral principles... Let one mold himself in accordance with the precepts he teaches... One should not neglect one's one moral good for the sake of another's... Let each one embrace his own truth and devote himself to its fulfillment.  

 

Gap Year Strategic Plan

(I've been having some internet issues, so this is a few days overdue. It's also now going to be out of chronological order, but the pictures for the other two forthcoming posts have been slow to upload.)

September 19, 2011

When I decided to take a year off, I didn’t really have any goals or plans in mind, it just felt like the right thing to do now. Over the summer, as I finalized plans and person after person asked me why I was going to Nepal, I thought maybe I should figure out exactly what I was hoping to get out of the trip. Fast forward to a few days before I left the US, I still had not quite settled on anything, mostly because I was too busy enjoying the Colorado summer to give it much time and energy. But thanks to some gentle prodding from Cole and a lot of thought in my first few weeks here, I have arrived at some goals for this year. I share them here because in addition to the typical travel blog reports on my trip experiences, I’m likely to do some writing about how my experiences contribute to changes in my outlook on life.

1. I want to embrace life outside my comfort zone.

For the last 24 years, I’ve lived a very comfortable, consistent and relatively insular life. It’s time to shake up my exterior surroundings. My goal is not only to be uncomfortable and out of my bubble, but to revel in being out of my bubble. My hope is two-fold: First, that if I become comfortable with a major shift of environment, I will be more resilient when more minor environmental shifts occur in my ongoing life. Second, that if I really open up to different lifestyles, cultures and attitudes, I may find some that fit me better than those I was brought up with (or perhaps it will reaffirm those that I was brought up with) and I may come home with a more solidified idea of the kind of life I want to build for myself. A good example of this that is already starting to percolate is how different cultures define community and family and what commitments family/community members have to one another.

2. I want to do some good in the world.

Over the years, I’ve struggled with balancing a desire for a public sector/nonprofit career with a desire to have a job that I love. I’ve had some experiences volunteering for my favorite nonprofits that I have just been miserable, despite my allegiance with their mission. I hope to sort out how I can be most effective in my contributions to the greater good, both this year and in perpetuity. Maybe some folks are best cut out to donate money, some to advocate, some to teach, some to build and innovate, some to heal, etc. Maybe if we all dedicated some fraction of our special skill sets to making the world a better place, instead of going down the most accessible volunteering path, we’d actually jointly get somewhere. (Not an easy task I suppose, since this requires both identifying your skill sets and seeking out ways to apply them to the public good.)

I am hoping that I can use evaluation (and more broadly, organization capacity building and empowerment) as a platform to make the world a better place. Regardless of your personal viewpoint on dedicating resources to evaluation versus direct services, the powers that be worldwide, from governments to funders to individual donors, have decided that assessing the impact of nonprofit work is important. So maybe I can help equip nonprofits with the necessary skills and considerations to function in this new world.

3. I want to dedicate bandwidth to historically neglected pursuits.

I have had a highly intellectual and physically active upbringing and my greatest passions in life have been academic or athletic. I’m grateful for the intellectual curiosity and physical health this life has bestowed upon me; however, I’ve had a sense these last few years that I’ve left portions of myself under developed. I think up to this point, I’ve only tackled things outside my passions when there’s been a pressing need to. For example, in the last year, it’s become clear that I never learned how to treat my body with kindness and my injury year of 2010 has forced me to focus on this area. This year, I want to dedicate some time and energy to portions of myself that I’ve always thought could use some work but which I never actually had the motivation to work on.

I will start with perhaps the biggest gap area of all: religion and spirituality. I’ve had a curiosity about religion for as long as I can remember and I frequently toy with the idea of trying to educate myself. This is the year to actually get it done. I’ve bought all the religious scriptures for the major world religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) and I plan to read the uninterpreted texts and then so some reading on how people apply these religious principles. Though I doubt I’ll come away a devoutly religious person, I have two hopes: First, that some bits and pieces of the faiths will resonate with me and I can develop a kind of “Elena faith” to help me grow and develop as a person. Growing some strong ethical roots now, while in a very stable mental state, will hopefully position me to better weather physiological challenges in the future. Second, I hope that I’ll come away more educated about world religions. There is no avoiding that we live in a faith-based society, and I think I suffer from a major lack of understanding of religion and how it influences behavior. This may be an area that I can only partially develop through reading, but maybe after I’m a little more educated, I can have better conversations with others and learn from my peers.

A little terrifying that my goals are now well-documented and online for friends and family to hold me accountable to… but I guess I should practice what I preach...