At House at 10:22 AM
There are so many things I could talk about today – like how I have set up my trekking trip to Everest Base Camp, and how I am having to face some selfishness on my part for doing so; like how things are so different here culturally and how I don't have anyone – no friend or schoolmate – from my context back home to go through this experience with and how I am the lone American here in this community; how I miss my family, friends and girlfriend back home, and how no amount of explaining could make them understand my “assignment” for Agape while I am here, and how I don't even fully understand my purpose yet; how I am absolutely sick of having to keep up with my school assignments each week (hope I don't get in trouble for that one), how they are more of an annoyance to me and how difficult it is now to get internet – and that's me griping about the negative side of things.
Honestly speaking, I don't fully understand what I am doing here. That's going to sound great for all of you people back home, I know. I could say something about how it is more about the means than the end, about the journey rather than the destination, but today that doesn't seem like it's enough. I am frustrated and discouraged today. It's not all bad news, and I don't mean to sound all gloomy. I will make it fine here and things will work out for the next two months, I just wish I had more understanding of why I am here. It's not like it was easy to stall my job, buy a plane ticket and then fly all the way to the other side of the world and live in community with people I don't know for 3 months. I wish sometimes like I knew how the things I am doing here relate to some of what I learned in class about development. After my week-long trek to EBC, I will be working with Agape to record stories of their “clients” to help come up with better documents for their record keeping. This will be helpful, but in all honesty I am not sure how exactly to do this and I am not sure what this has to do with the things I learned about in class. It is always a different story when you're in the field, especially when you are facing difficult situations for the first time.
I find myself dividing my experience into three categories, on top of adjusting to life in a new world:
#1. Living in Intentional Christian Community
This provides an interestingly distinct context as there are far more Hindu people in Nepal than there are Christians. At this point for me living in community means that I need to get up at 5:30 AM on weekdays to do prayer and worship with my community members, eat most meals with them, and attend different events and seminars with them, all while building relationships with each person. There are 17 of us counting myself and Brian's family, and the community ranges in age from 1 to 41.
#2. Starting My “Development” Work
Though I have just been adjusting the past two weeks, and I will be trekking to Everest soon, this has been on my mind, and I have done a lot of thinking about what this will look like. I will be interviewing some of the trafficked children and women that Agape reaches out to as well as doing some organizing and document streamlining for Agape, but I hope this fieldwork can expand to other organizations that work with trafficked persons too.
#3. Keeping Up with School Work
This is by far the last thing on my mind the last two weeks. I don't want to write papers, I want to meet people, and learn the culture. Of course, my school work is intended to help me with this process, and I understand that, it's just been so darn annoying recently.
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