Volunteering in Dhading, Nepal!

By uoeabroad03/09/2018

With help from the Go Abroad Fund throughout June and July, I stayed with a local family in a little rural village in the Dhading District of Nepal. Over nine weeks I worked as part of a team of nine volunteers from the student-run charity Edinburgh Global Partnerships, where we helped to rebuild a primary school which had been destroyed in the 2015 Ghorka Earthquake.

During our trip we stayed with a local family in their home, and here is our Aama (mother) showing us how to make roti.

Here we’re wearing saris belonging to one of the women in the village. We spent the evening getting dressed up and dancing until Aama appeared to tell us off for missing dinner. We ended up with cold rice to eat that night.

Sadly a lot of our time in the village was spent waiting for materials to be delivered (which were usually delayed) This left a lot of us feeling restless, but very keen to get stuck in when there was work to be done. Here we are mixing cement by hand

Below this tree was a ridge which was the perfect spot to watch the sun set over the valley below. There was no such thing as a peaceful sunset though, as every evening we had the company of the village children, wanting to practice their English, play with our hair, and have their photos taken.

This is Sabina teaching us a secret handshake.

The finished school! (Minus doors and windows which were delivered after we left) Although I struggled to be positive a lot of the time because of constant delays which meant we weren’t working as much as I thought we would, it was amazing to see the school built and looking colourful.

After the construction was finished the village hosted a ceremony to thank us for our contributions. For three years five year groups were forced to share two classrooms, which was inevitably extremely disruptive for the children. With the new three-classroom building, the villagers have improved the quality of education for the school’s current and future students. Although I found the experience difficult and at times considered leaving early, the fact that we had the opportunity to help this little village in their project to create a sustainable and safe structure for their children to receive an education, makes me very proud.