While many of Nepal’s 500,000 annual visitors come for trekking, white water rafting, mountain biking and other outdoor pursuits, this small country has so much more to offer than just dramatic landscapes.
Another of Nepal’s assets is its rich culture, sandwiched as it is between the two vast populations of China and India. Now, thanks to numerous organizations, travelers can experience this captivating country whilst learning new skills and immersing themselves in the culture. Many projects also enable travelers to help the communities they stay with. This type of tourism, known as volunteerism, aims to enable travelers to experience real cultures and lifestyles, whilst simultaneously supporting disadvantaged locals.
Volunteers Initiative Nepal (VIN) is one such volunteerism organization which runs projects in and around Kathmandu including women’s empowerment, medical and English teaching placements. Helping to ensure cultural immersion, participants on these programmes live with Nepali host families (or in monasteries) to gain a real sense of 21st century Nepali life. Most of VIN’s projects take place in the rural community of Jitpur, 11 kilometres from ‘I am from a very backward community myself’ says VIN Executive Director Bhupendra Ghimire. ‘My mum is illiterate but she educated my whole family – I wanted to give something back to community’. In attempt to help he founded VIN to improve rural communities’ quality of life.
‘The issues in communities are interrelated’ says Ghimire. To address these problems, VIN is running multiple projects in the Jitpur area including women’s empowerment, which provides local women with access to loans, business training and education, medical placements where volunteers assist local doctors and construction projects to build toilets and establish clean water supplies.
Volunteers Parmeet Kaur and Josie Korda both took part in a women’s empowerment programme. ‘I wanted to get out of the day to day working routine and give back to the community’ says Malaysian Kaur who previously volunteered on a similar placement in Bangladesh. Korda from Britain says ‘I like the idea of income generation for women. It seems like we’re doing a good job’.
On a typical day these two volunteers spend time surveying women in Jitpur to establish their needs and also in VIN’s Kathmandu office processing survey data. According to Kaur ‘we already see a pattern in what the local women want’. Recent surveys have investigated the profitability of vegetable farming to ascertain the women’s income after expenses and volunteers have helped to educate the women how they can best use their money to improve their own quality of life.
Austrian, Isabelle Fantina is doing a youth empowerment placement, teaching English to 18-30 year olds and helping local teachers to improve their English, as they teach their own students in English. ‘I worked before with youth and really enjoyed it’ she says. ‘When you want to change something you have to start with young people’ she adds.
Fantina’s daily schedule consists of a free morning in the village and then teaching sessions in the late afternoon and evening. Felix Hänsch from Germany is also teaching English, as well as Maths to locals. He says ‘I wanted to get in contact with another culture and to help with education. You’re really close to locals as a teacher’. Hänsch spends the morning teaching in one of Jitpur’s schools whilst his afternoons are free.
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