Merro Kaam (My Work), Or What Am I Doing Here?

I was sitting in my district capital once with a friend, enjoying some spaghetti carbonara and good English conversation when the topic of work came up. I realized that as much time as we had spent together, despite the fact that I had visited his site several times, and that, being in the group two years ahead of mine and receiving trainings from him in our Pre-Service training, I had virtually no idea what work he had done at site. In my opinion, there are so many ways to be a good Peace Corps volunteer. There are volunteers who are very productive on paper, giving large trainings all over their VDC (village development community- collection of villages). Other volunteers focus on certain families, finding people who are receptive to learning and focus on teaching them a lot and helping them implement new practices. Some work with their government counterparts closely, training them on a technique and helping them teach others. Others, have no relationship with their government counterparts, some needing to avoid them all together because the volunteer feels that their counterpart doesn’t understand our role as a volunteer in village and that the counterpart actually hampers their productivity. Still other volunteers focus on really integrating into their community, becoming really good at Nepali, and planting seeds of cultural exchange and being an ally in community for under-represented individuals and working on empowerment that way. Additionally, the lessons about cultural exchange, being a foreigner in such a close knit and completely different culture I believe will be some of the most important skills I have begun to gain as a volunteer. I hope to bring these back to the United States and have a better understanding of minorities, and challenges facing immigrants in my own culture.

All this to say, that when we as volunteers get together, we don’t really talk about work because there are many ways to do “work,” all valid, all important. It’s hard to answer the question of “what are you doing in village” because some of my biggest sounding projects, are things that I don’t view as very successful at all. I gave a large training about jhol mal, liquid compost. Many people came, I got to put big numbers on my monthly report for Peace Corps. One person used it in their garden, other people got to say they attended a training by the American living in village. A bigger success in my opinion is watching my friend in village talk about wanting more for herself, and discussing our views on female empowerment and independence, and seeing her dedication to school. But I can’t report this. Mostly, we just talk about boys, and catch up on gossip.

This all being said, I want to address the question of what I do in village, and talk about my approaches to doing more of the food and nutrition security work that I purportedly came to Nepal to do. The main things I have been focusing my energy on is mushroom training, working with the government middle school, and doing trainings about how to cook more nutritionally dense food.

Mushroom Training!

This winter, I did a lot of trainings about how to grow Oyster mushrooms. This is a project that most everyone in village was interested in, some had received trainings on already, and was a pretty straightforward way for me to start giving more effective trainings in my village. Working with a few people at a time and using the time to talk about other work I am interested in accomplishing in village, I felt like I was able to provide a more practical training that was more impactful to my previous tactic of “here’s this tool, you should do it.” To make mushrooms in village, I first had to buy the spores from a supplier in Pokhara. Currently this man is the only man in Nepal producing spores from mycelium, allowing for a more pure source that doesn’t get easily genetically contaminated from using the same mycelia over and over again. I’m sure that description is incredibly lacking scientifically, which as a Biology major, I don’t feel great about. But feel free to do more research on your own! Regardless, as a side note, this man is trying to start a lab in Pokhara to teach more people how to produce their own spore and bring more mushroom cultivation to rural Nepal. This would be super cool! Another volunteer is working with him on this project to set up a go-fund-me which I will post here after it’s set up. Anyway, after I bring the spore to village the work begins! First, we cut the straw into lots of little pieces. Straw is readily available in many villages because of how large scale rice production is in Nepal. We then boil the straw for about twenty minutes to kill of lingering bacteria. Then we stuff the cooled, slightly damp, straw into clear plastic bags. Stuffing a small amount in, packing it down really tight by pushing body weight on top of the straw, sprinkling some spore onto the straw, then adding more straw (about four fingers in height), and repeating the process. From start to finish the process takes about a day. A Nepali day that is from about 11-4. We store the bags in a cool dark dry place, cutting the plastic after about 2 weeks, and then the mushrooms begin to emerge from the straw! From one bag, I have gotten up to 5 “flushes” of mushrooms, which provides several kilos of oyster mushrooms. All the people I have done mushroom trainings with have consumed their mushrooms themselves which is what I encourage to improve food security. However mushrooms in local Nepali bazaars fetch a pretty decent price of about 200 rupees, 2 dollars, a kilo. This was a pretty successful and easy way to get myself established.

Working with the school!

With the school, I have been teaching English a few days a week. Originally to 7th and 8th graders, but now basically to everyone who comes and sits down. It’s a bit tricky because the range of skills is so vast, and it can be hard not to let the really bright kids who have had the opportunity to study a fair amount of English do all the talking and allow the ones who don’t understand anything that’s going on to sit in the back quietly. To be honest, I have a long way to go in this task. But I hope that everyone gets something out of it at least, despite the range in English knowledge. In addition to teaching English, I have developed an agriculture club with some of the students. We have a demonstration garden at the school and I start our meetings by talking about an improved agriculture technique, discussing the science behind why it makes sense, and then practicing the technique at the garden. Recently the students have said that they want to practice these skills at their own gardens. Fantastic! So we head to their homes sometimes, and I encourage the kids to teach their parents what they have learned in the club, and be little agriculture Peace Corps volunteers themselves. It’s been so fun to watch them talk about the concepts we have learned, and try to improve their family’s farm.

Nutritionally Dense Cooking!

The other main project I have been working on in village is teaching women about how to increase the nutritional content of their food through simple changes in their cooking style. Rice and Lentils is the staple of Nepal, usually served with a side of vegetables or meat and often with a glass of milk in families that have a water buffalo or a cow. Pretty healthy right? Often however, the proportion of rice to everything else is ridiculously high, the vegetables are cooked in a ton of oil for a really long time with a lot of salt, and the lentil soup that is poured over the rice is little more than spiced water with a countable amount of lentils floating around. With little tweaks, I have been able to encourage a few women to cook more nutritionally dense food for their families, and by not telling them to make major changes, I think I have had more success. In recent months, I have started these trainings at a woman’s garden. We look at what she’s growing and discuss ways to improve her garden and maximize vegetable production for her own family. Then we harvest vegetables and make a meal together, talking about how make what they usually make, but healthier.

I talk about why you need certain vegetables and encourage them to make sure that they themselves eat enough vegetables. In Nepal, the woman generally eats last and thus consumes the least amount of vegetables, whatever is left-over after her husband and children eat. I don’t know how many women actually have begun to do this, but they usually laugh when I tell them to leave a little bit aside for themselves, telling them to be a little selfish because they do the most work in the house! This project all started when two of my friends, one with a small son who wasn’t getting enough protein in his diet, the other who was pregnant with her first child, came up to me to ask about how to improve their family’s nutrition. In my opinion this project has been the most successful for me in terms of long term changes, and amount of fun I have with my friends in village. My ultimate goal in Peace Corps!

With all this talk about work, I feel the need to say that a big part of Peace Corps is learning to slow down. Accept that many days you won’t have projects going on, and that’s okay. It’s a time for self-reflection and a time to be part of a culture that doesn’t emphasize being busy in the way that our American culture does. I’ve enjoyed seeing all the different ways that volunteers approach work in village, as each village has different assets and interests, and each volunteer is differently equipped to work with their village.