Artsy shot of the work area for Bachchhala Devi
The main project at the Sindhupalchowk All Hands base is a school build named Bachchhala Devi, which is broken down into three smaller projects. The main school building we are making will be three classrooms built on one floor. It will supplement an already-standing permanent structure and a temporary structure currently supporting about 300 students. We are using a building design from an organization called Room to Read, as the design has already been approved by the Nepali government. The building will have a concrete foundation and brick walls, which will be reinforced by a layer of concrete all the way around the building every few layers of bricks. The second subproject is to build a bathroom with the WASH initiative, which is trying to install separate bathrooms in schools for boys and girls in different countries. Lastly, we are rebuilding a retaining wall for a structure built by JICA, a Japanese organization that built a temporary building for the school after the earthquake. The current retaining wall has been damaged, so we will need to repair it. This project as a whole is sponsored by two organizations – The Lincoln Schools and Happy Hearts, who are funding part of the project.
Main school build – will be one structure with one floor an three classrooms
(Left) Existing permanent school structure (Right) Temporary structure built by JICA (Straight) WASH bathroom location
Just by this old building is the old retaining wall for the JICA structure that we need to repair
Rebuilding the retaining wall means digging a new trench, which means breaking some rocks buried in the ground!
The project site is a mere ten minute walk from our lovely base, and all supplies and tools are kept on site so we don’t have to bring supplies with us in the morning. About every day, building materials are brought directly to site on a truck, and volunteers work to unload them. While I was on base, we received deliveries of sand, gravel, concrete, and bricks on different days.
The project site is in an area near the town of Bharabise called Sano Sakhuwa, and it is absolutely beautiful. We are on the side of a mountain, and you can even see parts of Tibet in the distance. Most of the surrounding community is above us on the mountain, and there is mountainside farmland below our site.
The day is broken up into four working segments. We have breakfast on base in the morning, then head to site at 7:30. We work until our mid-morning water break, which lasts 15 minutes. We then work again until lunch, where we walk back to base and to a local family’s home, who serve us Dal Bhat. We then hang out around base for a while before returning to the work site at 12:45. We work the rest of the afternoon until 4:00 with one 15-minute water break in the middle. Then we head back to base, take bucket showers (if you want…it’s quite common to go days without a shower, or that’s what I told myself anyway) and have a meeting at 6:00 to go through the day’s accomplishments, tomorrow’s goals, new people, leaving people, and any random meeting topics people want to talk about. Dinner soon follows, which is by the school site, and then we have free time for the rest of night.
Water break!
Other side projects going around base while I was in Sindhupalchowk included a fence around base to prevent untimely falls down the mountain, stair construction and repairs around base to help volunteers navigate our space better, and bathroom construction and pit digging, since our main bathroom pit was filling up.
I was also given the opportunity to use my teaching skills while I was here, as some of the volunteers had been helping the kids around base learn English after the work day had ended. Around 4:00, we went to the house where we had lunch each day to teach English to two sixteen-year-old girls, Rupa and Sabita, as well as any other surprise visitors who stopped by. It was such a different experience from teaching large groups of kids in Korea. Instead, a volunteer from Slovakia, a volunteer from Colombia, and I taught a small group of kids basic English vocabulary and phrases from what they were learning at the time in school to whatever words they wanted to lean. The kids were older than the younger group I teach in Korea, but they were so heavily engaged and curious that it was refreshing to teach them. This part of volunteering especially moved me, as I wanted to stay and teach every day, but I was only there for a week and wasn’t able to build up much of a teaching base during that time. But I walked away from this experience inspired and filled with hope – here we were in the middle of the mountains, and volunteers were taking their free time after a long 8-hour day of working in the sun to teach these kids. In a world full of corruption and power struggle, there were still these kind people who want nothing more than to help others, and there were still these curious souls wanting nothing more than to learn what others were willing to teach. I don’t know where my life will lead me, but if I have any more experiences like this one, then I know I’m on the right track.
On a completely different note, while I was on site, we had enough volunteers to try to build a ping pong table as a side project. The entire project would have taken about a day, but our working time was cut short by rain. The basic premise was simple – we would dig holes for the feet of the table, which would be built out of bamboo, and then use a sheet of plywood as the table surface. We’d paint the plywood to protect it from water, and then make a net in the center of the table with more plywood. One of our volunteers knew basic table dimensions so we tried to make it as close to regulation size as our spare materials would let us. Before the rain, we were able to get the feet sturdily in the ground, and we finished construction of the table top and net. We didn’t have enough time to paint it, and as it was my last day on site I wasn’t able to see the table through to completion, but we did have a functional product to use when the rain stopped. Check it out!
Functional (and level!) ping pong table! Not yet painted, but still able to be used
The first official game!