"How lucky I am to have something that makes me say goodbye so hard." - A.A. Milne

Well, here we are. The very last trip home of my very last adventure with CGA is finally here. It still hasn’t quite registered that next summer I will not be preparing lesson plans, studying a new language, or brainstorming fundraising ideas. At least, not with CGA. It seems like the end of an era, and though I feel a sense of accomplishment wrapping around my heart, this goodbye was the most difficult.

As with all of my CGA trips, I felt myself grow immensely during my time in Nepal. I became not only a better teacher, but someone who is more able to listen to feedback, adapt to unexpected difficulties, and think on my toes. Our last few days at the school were grueling, rewarding, and more challenging than ever before. I have said it more times than I can count and will say it over and over again: teaching is one of the hardest professions on this planet. Standing in front of a classroom made my palms feel like oceans and my heartrate increase to a million beats per minute, but the stress, preparation, and occasional moments of ridiculousness were worth even the hope that I filled a child’s brain with something useful. By our final day at Deeya Shree, I was more confident in my ability as a teacher than I have ever been before, and I got into the van stumbling with exhaustion, but feeling so incredibly successful. There is a special type of satisfaction that comes with pouring your heart and soul into something and seeing results, and I’ve felt this sensation washing over me every moment since my last day in Nepal.

Leaving our friends in Durbar Square was heartbreaking. Even after such a short time, my heart is filled with love for the incredible people who went out of their way to show us kindness. On our last night, they spent hours cooking us dinner and presented us with gifts and notes that said “WE WILL REMEMBER YOU!” Our last morning consisted of teary-eyed hugs goodbye, as well as words of gratitude from us to them for all they had taught us. Sentiments like these are what have made every one of my CGA trips truly special – not the food we ate, the temples we saw, or even the cows in the streets, but the extraordinarily warm hearts of the people we meet and their capacity to give, even during the most difficult of times.

When we sat in the guesthouse together after dinner, reflecting on how the last four years of our lives were about to come to a close, Lisa Marie and Jen asked each of us what Children’s Global Alliance has contributed to our lives. For me, CGA has had such a complex role in my life that it is impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t been there to witness it. Without being forced to step outside of the world I had known, I would still be the quiet, insecure, ignorant girl that I was before I left for Cambodia. Because I left my comfort zone, because I was exposed to the poverty and kind souls of people around the world, because I made connections with people whose backgrounds were polar opposites of mine, I became an entirely new person. I have learned to stick up for what I believe in, to be grateful for all the luxuries I have, and never to miss an opportunity to help another person. I am certain that I would not have the confidence to do half the things that I am doing now, from applying for a job to earning a varsity position on my soccer team, without the experiences I have had with CGA. This organization holds such a special place in my heart, and if I would have told myself in 2012 that I would travel four times with Lisa Marie and Jen, that I would see things I never could have dreamed of, and that I would learn more from people I met across the world than I ever had in school, I would have stayed up all night trying to paint a picture of all this in my head and still would have fallen short. And though my heart is heavy with the thought that I will never travel with this team again, I know that the rest of my life will be richer because of the incredible journeys that I have made.

I can’t express enough gratitude to CGA for all of the ways they have added meaning to my life, but I can go forward and live gratefully, intentionally, and with drive. At the age of sixteen, I have done more valuable work than many people will in their entire lives, and I have become a better person because of it. With this in mind, I’m moving into the next years of adolescence with love in my heart and passion in my soul. So, my final words on this blog will be these: Goodbye for now, CGA, and hello to the next chapter of my life.

Sore Muscles and Full Hearts

It is conventional wisdom that difficult tasks are the most rewarding, but this message has been truly ingrained in my mind during my time in Nepal.

I can't put into words how challenging it is to stand in front of a full room, eyes watching your every move, and try to keep all of them engaged during each lesson of the day. I initially felt this pressure at LOAMO, and I feel it once again at Deeya Shree. Although many lessons have been a struggle, I am seeing more breakthroughs, more laughter, and more excitement about learning with every day that passes. What I can say from this experience is this: the feeling of contributing to the spark of understanding in a child's eyes is indescribable, and my appreciation for all the hard work that my teachers do once a day, every year, grows by the minute.

Our first few days at the school were tough. We faced behavioral issues and the feeling that we had not yet earned the respect of the students, which is enough to make any teacher's job frustrating. On those days, though sometimes I felt my anxieties about teaching taking over, each failure was a lesson about what works and what doesn't work in the classroom. Because of what I learned from failing, the number of successes gradually began to increase until I felt my fear lessen and my confidence go up dramatically. The students in every class love games, and when we play things like Pictionary or Around-the-World, I can feel their energy and see much more understanding than if I had just talked "at" them. The other day, Ava and I were teaching Class Six, an older class where the curriculum is much more difficult to teach and their English comprehension is much lower than I expected. We struggled at first trying to teach things like the responsibilities of a municipality, and saw their eyes glaze over more than once. However, by the end of the day, we realized that relating the lessons to their own lives and coming up with ways that they could get out of their seats made something click. Ava came up with a fantastic game in which they pretended to be rockets flying to the moon. While the kids learned about Apollo 11 and had plenty of laughs doing it, we learned that over-complicating a lesson works against you, but finding a way to get students moving and teaching a single concept makes a much bigger impact.

On Wednesday, we drove over an hour to visit a public school in Kathmandu. Deeya Shree is a private school, and the students' parents pay between four and eleven dollars per month for their children to attend, while also purchasing the uniforms. While an average of seven to eight dollars per month does not sound like much, 800 rupees is a lot of money here. Those who cannot afford this send their children to government-run schools, at no extra cost to them. Unlike Deeya Shree, the English comprehension here was very low, even though they are supposed to be learning the language. Therefore, Ava and I had to be especially creative in the way we were teaching, to avoid the blank stares we received whenever we spoke more than a sentence or two of English. We had them draw pictures, use styrofoam balls to represent prepositions, and act out a plane crash. The effect was unbelievable, and we knew that they were actually learning what we were teaching. When it was time for us to leave, Ava and I looked at each other, grinning from ear to ear, immensely proud of the job we had done despite great challenges.

For the past few days, the team has been helping Puni Ram, the man who drives us to and from the school every day, with demolishing his house. Puni Ram and his family have suffered incredible loss because of the earthquake here. Not only has much of their house collapsed, but most of their chickens were killed, which severely affects their livelihood. Though there is not much we can do for the chickens right now, we've lessened a huge burden for his family by helping demolish the upper two levels of his home. Our work, I believe, has helped the family accomplish a job in a matter of days that would otherwise take at least a week. Though I am proud of all the work we have done, it is incredibly sad to watch a family have to destroy their home like this. As we sorted through the debris, I found artifacts of the lives they have lived for decades in this house - broken cooking pots, math notebooks, empty jars of food. To have to suddenly uproot your life and throw all of this away is a feeling I can't understand and hopefully will never have to. Still, my sore legs and dirty hands at the end of each day remind me of how hard we have worked to ease the burden on someone we all care about.

I have completed some of the hardest work of my entire life in the past two weeks. And though every night my head slams into my pillow and my eyelids are heavy with exhaustion, I know that I have made an impact, and I can't wait to wake up the next morning and do it all over again.

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." - Robert Frost

Among everything else I have learned during my four years with CGA, I have been taught not to go into a country with too many expectations; it’s better to let the culture, scenery, and experience wash over you upon arrival. However, with all of the sensationalized media and fear surrounding Nepal, it was difficult to completely block out images of devastation – rubble everywhere, hungry children, even bodies in streets. I prepared myself for a country in mourning of all they had lost.

But what makes Nepal great is its depth. People here have lost their homes, their livelihoods, and their families, yet beauty is still everywhere. We are greeted with Namastes and smiles, and when we explain that we are here for service, we receive expressions of gratitude in return. Yes, buildings have fallen, people have died, and homes have been destroyed, but there is still love, there is still laughter, there is still hope.

That said, I was unsure of how many children would be at Deeya Shree, the school we are teaching in, since it re-opened only five days ago and many people are afraid to sleep inside, let alone send their kids into buildings for hours at a time, six days a week. But out of 150 kids, only 25 were absent. Though this is still quite a few, it’s less than I initially would’ve guessed. The kids are all excited and ready to learn, which I witnessed during the entire class period that I taught about US history, answering questions about everything from the Civil War to the space race to Barack Obama. But in a school where the kids are so thirsty for knowledge, it is frustrating to be met with consistent monotony in the way the kids are being taught. We have only been there for one day, but all I have seen so far is students copying from whiteboards and teachers briefly explaining topics without checking for understanding from each student. I have seen a few students looking lost, simply writing what is on the board and drawing a blank when asked to do their homework on their own. While this is a challenge, it is also means that there is a lot of work we can do and a lot of growth we can inspire, and that excites me.

Today, the one day the children have off from school, we performed more manual labor than I have in a long time. Scattered around Durbar Square and the surrounding streets are buildings, hundreds of years old, which are crumbling. Once towering structures are now falling apart, with cracks down their middle and walls that have completely separated from the beams that are meant to hold them together. These are peoples’ homes, and they will have to be destroyed and then rebuilt from the ground up after monsoon season. For hours, we helped one family take down a story of their house.

“This is our kitchen,” one man said to me as he shoveled crumbling stone off of the exposed room and onto the ground below, where it will be picked up by trucks and transported away.

The fear that comes with experiencing two earthquakes is traumatizing enough, but these people also have to pull apart their homes, brick by brick. Generations of families have lived in these buildings, leading up to the lives that this generation has lived, the years that they have spent growing up in these houses, and now they have to dismantle them. I can’t imagine what that’s like, to be so shaken by a natural disaster and have to take down the place where you grew up while still trying to recover from it. There are so many families like the one that we helped today, and with no outside assistance, who knows how long it could take to bring down every building that is unsalvageable?

Before we left, I was afraid that our efforts would be lost among thousands of volunteers flooding in with good intentions but no plan. But during my time here, I have not seen a single other foreign volunteer in Bhaktapur who is helping with relief. We lessened the workload of one family today, but there are many others just like them who need support. So many people are donating and sending supplies, but they all are left on the tarmac of the airport because they are being heavily taxed. Peoples’ hearts are in the right places, but I would like to see organized relief crews, both employing those whose places of business have been ruined as well as encouraging volunteers to fly in and lend a hand.

There has been devastation, but Nepal has not been destroyed. There is a lot to recover from, but pride in their country resonates within every Nepali citizen, and I know they can restore this beautiful nation. They will need more manpower, but they have hope and strength like I have never seen before. Every day I am more convinced that we are doing something great here, and I can’t wait for tomorrow.