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.
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