Nepal

I love Nepal. Kathmandu is basically a tourist city for people who don’t want to feel like tourists, providing all the amenities necessary for an easy stay, and the fun of exploring and feel of a foreign place. 

The foothills of the Himalayas are green and beautiful as they overlook a colorful city with buildings in every color. In some ways it reminds me of Ecuador, so it makes me love it even more. 

Many of the streets are dirt, and in monsoon season, they become mud. It rained on us almost once everyday, and while I often carried an umbrella around with me, I still got caught in a downpour more than once. 

We were in a more calm area of the city, and though we ventured into crazier areas a few times,  it was nothing compared to the Vietnam streets. Thamal was my favorite area to go to as the backpacker district of the city with shops and food. Colorful purses, bracelets, and pants constantly catch my eye, and I have to keep reminding myself I don’t have the money to buy ten pairs of pants and even if I did, that many pairs of poopy diaper pants (our affection name for them) would be incredibly impractical. 

So Nepal…it took a while to get to this post with our schedule and my distracted-ness in the countries that followed it. If I’m being honest though, a part of me just didn’t want to write about my experiences here and keep them to myself. I’ve struggled with how much to share since we worked in close relationship with so many amazing people that I want to make sure stay protected, so I may be a bit vague, but if you see me after the trip and want more pictures and details, I would love to share stories about all my new friends. 

What we did in Nepal

Our team was split into three groups for service. One group worked with a local seminary making awesome connections with others our age who are pursuing faith. The second group worked with a business called Higher Grounds which is a coffee shop, restaurant, bakery and jewelry store that supports women who have been abused. It’s an amazing organization, and our team was able to help with tech support, writing scholarship profiles for students, designing jewelry, creating advertisements, and working with some of the women and building relationships. I’ve included the link to their website and would encourage you to check out their mission.

http://www.higherground.com.np/

As for the last group, we called ourselves Joy Crew (a name given us by Erica, our team mom), and we don’t really know what it is we did. Everyday was a new adventure as we only sometimes knew what we were getting ourselves into. We worked mostly with our church connection in the city doing things like youth meetings and VBS. We weren’t always doing things with the church though, as we just focused on creating relationships with lots of people in various communities. 

Highlights include many name games where we all just butchered each other’s names so much that we created nicknames for everyone; acting out the story of David and Goliath where I starred as the stone; seeing a Nepali college campus with some of our new friends; playing futsal, or in my case attempting to just put myself between the ball and goal; hiking in the rain for no real reason; and learning Nepali songs. 

Classes in Nepal were even a bit more exciting with guest lecturers who were able to share their stories and teach us more upon Nepali culture and the religious atmosphere. There’s no better way to learn about Nepal, Hinduism, and some of the history than to hear from natives who are now professors and experts.

Pokhara

We took a weekend trip to the mountain tourist town of Pokhara, Nepal. There’s plenty I could say about the weekend and the drive to and from, but I’m just going to share the events of a single day, as it was one of the wildest of the trip. I woke up thinking I would maybe try to do a hike since we were in some of the smaller Himalaya mountains and I could actually see some of the tallest mountains in the world in the distance. Instead, I ran into some other team members at breakfast and half of the team ended up on an adventure.

It started with the idea to go paragliding. About 2 hours later, after getting a bunch of people together, going to an agency, and driving up the mountain, I ran off a cliff and was soaring over the valley. Not only were the views amazing, but I’ve discovered that I could be up in the air like that forever and now I’m ready for skydiving. 

The day only progressed when we tried to fit over 25 people in a 15 person van to get to the waterfall. We’re proud to say it worked, and we only bottomed out or stalled a little more than a few times. The waterfall was not as exciting as we wanted it to be, although the sheer volume and intensity of the water was impressive.

It was about then that we decided to go to the caves. I’m not real big on caves, or at least I thought I wasn’t. Turns out I’m not real big on the idea of tight, claustrophobic, crawling caves. The caves we went to had a few places to duck through, but always ended with bigger caverns. Our only problem was the bat that flew into and hit one of the boys. 

I didn’t really give the day justice in my brief summary, but it was the kind of adventure day that really gets at the spirit of the exploring side of our trip. We saw a lot of the area’s nature and had some time team-bonding. 

A second Nepal post will be coming in just a couple days…or less. It will have Reese’s passage AND I’ll have the picture page updated with Nepal pics!