As a volunteer you prepare for your time abroad by attending various training sessions in your home country where you consider various aspects of how it will feel to live abroad out of your comfort zone. One game, “The Trade Game”, imitates the unbalanced world economic system. Members of less well off countries have to make paper shapes (imitating GDP) with the minimum of paper and no geometry set, whilst their richer cousins have the full set and also the World Bank/IMF in their pockets congratulating them on how wonderful their shapes are and paying “top dollar” for anything they churn out. The effects are visible; even though the game is so obviously staged, with those from the economic power houses sitting looking smug, whilst those with less resources grind their teeth, staring in frustration. This obviously brings everyone involved nowhere close to the reality of the situation, but it does serve as an effective prompt to think about the context of how our work is carried out. Many of the activities are designed to prepare volunteers for being out of their depth and starting the process of creating adaptable individuals.
Lots of what occurs when you live in a foreign country is predictable in that you can write down on a piece of paper or say with words how it may be, or how you might feel. But the reality is oh so different, feeling something is so distant from words that it is like trying to draw the dark side of the moon without hands, a pen or paper.I might guess that I could get frustrated by the differences in food, with the ever abounding Dhal Baat Tarkhari, that my partner will never get bored of, quickly wearing thin. But I could not have explained before it happened how close I could come to tears to see pasta in a shop four months later.
Much else of what occurs however is unpredictable as your context is changed beyond your control or recognition. As an example, on my first day in Dailekh I walked into my landlady’s kitchen to see her with some potatoes getting them ready to cook, so I went to get her a potato peeler thinking I could share this time saving device. When I offered it to her she pointed up to the shelf where two peelers were sat slowly rusting away. A while later, after my embarrassment had faded, so quite a while later, I saw her peel them after she had cooked them, removing the skins as I might with tomatoes taken from boiling water.Who could predict that from 3194 kilometres away?
One thing that runs continuously through my experience of volunteering has been disempowerment. As part of your training you are prompted to expect it, it may even be at the core of the work you do, to empower young people through their education for example. But it stretches across all aspects of your life: you want to help managers disempowered by the lack of resources that you can’t provide in abundance as your placement isn’t about bringing finance, the disempowerment as you can’t teach everyone English, the disempowerment of your Nepali friends as they can’t help as you are just different in some unknown way or the buses disempowered by a landslide.
Where all this comes together, however, is in yourself. Before you came you could expect disempowerment. However you don’t necessarily expect it in yourself. You are one of the empowered ones who come from an empowered country to bring and spread empowerment to all (you may be excused for mistaking me for an American president at this point). The language barrier alone can make you realise how much you rely on communication as you see so many things you want to share, and so many things you think you could suggest things for, but you literally don’t have the words. One of the most enlightening quotes I heard from another volunteer was “just because I speak like a five year old doesn’t mean I think like one”. This inspired another reflection of my own “I haven’t felt this disempowered since I was a child and my parents made my decisions for me”. But as a bideshi you are useful in a number of ways and DO bring empowerment through being a tool for others in a variety of ways that you may or may not understand, as those around you who use you may or may not.
However one of the most empowering experiences of being a volunteer is the learning you take, and the drive you gain, from experiencing disempowerment yourself. Your disempowerment is something you can choose to take off at any time as you can always return to a place where you are more empowered. Those who you work with don’t have this option and through your momentary experience of this you begin to understand some of the struggle that disempowered people go through for their lifetime, the stares, the comments you don’t understand, the jokes you aren’t in on and the struggle to be understood. It’s at a point like this when, in my thoughts, I return to the “Trade Game” and consider how I, and the other “empowered” ones, could maybe help others by taking this memory of disempowerment with us when we inevitably leave. We could look to improving the rules of this game from far away as well as from near by. We could look to improving the lot of disempowered people nearby as well as far away. It makes me most of all consider how I can make the most of the empowerment I am lucky enough to have to redress the imbalance of disempowerment I have had the smallest taste of, as, unpredictably, this is the different taste I have liked the least, and I don’t want to serve it to anyone else either.
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