Written by Nerea Gezuraga and Mikel Zubiaga, volunteers of Bhimphedi Children’s Home.

It’s hard to get up one day and decide it. You’re going to take off your seat belt and travel, for example, on the roof of a bus. You’ll go to some corner of the world where you can begin to change the world.

Soon you realize that this is just a nice idea. That the work you are going to do in Nepal is really a great personal experience, but – at least for the time being – you are not going to change the world.

——-

We arrived at Bhimphedi having traveled the 60 kilometers of “road” from Kathmandu in four hours. We are in a lost village in a lost valley surrounded by mountains, in a lost country of the world that we know. We have trouble adjusting to the poor hygiene. We have trouble adapting to eating the same Dalbhat twice a day for three months. We are in Nepal but no one says that we are not the same rich Europeans any more. Here there is no cinema, there are no hamburgers and there are no night bars, every time before drinking water you think it twice, toilet paper is scarce, here there is no place to see a rock concert, here there are no big clothing stores, nor even “our football”.

For three months we worked every day to make the environment of the 28 children of Bhimphedi’s Children’s Home more welcoming. We work as farmers in the kitchen garden and farm, repairing things, building a place to put a buffalo we want to bring, with our knowledge of architecture we contribute so thefuture buildings are more resistant to earthquakes, we work as carpenters in the structure of one of the building of the Children’s Home. We help the kids with their education; we help them everyday with their homework, in addition we try to make them learn something more than lessons by heart, we do activities to improve their level of English…

Three months later Som and Anoj have in their house a buffalo from which they drink milk every morning, we like to believe that now they will know more closely the farming life that most of their countrymen live, perhaps it will be useful for them when they grow up. Raju and Sumit are improving their level of English above average, which will hopefully open the doors to them when they are older, perhaps with this they can make a difference with respect to others. Rojan knows how to use a program to create and edit videos from the thousands of photos and videos that he loves to take with our cameras. We imagine that maybe we have helped him to become in future a director of Bollywood.

We feel that we have helped this group of kids to make their lives richer, just as poor, but richer. This is what we feel. We are the ones who have got more of all from this adventure.

And then there is that other thing, to change the world. Shit. We have not done it.

In the absence of gas, during the last month we cut wood to make fire and cook. In this poor country full of rich people this can happen. Suddenly the borders close and for months it becomes impossible to obtain supplies of gas and oil. Oh! there was an earthquake as well. The grubby but cozy Sumitra’s teahouse has now also a huge crack.

Her milk tea is still awesome.