Simple Life in Nepal

Life is simple
Dr Christy Standerfer would be proud to learn that the facilitation techniques that she taught us in school have come into play in the rural area of Nepal. Yes, we started the facilitation by asking the participants to set up the ground rules for the meeting. And we encouraged the active involvement of the participants by asking them to divide in groups, writing their expectations of the meeting as well as the roles and responsibly of the sub-committees that will be formed. And yes! We made a nice tea break. I thought it would be under control throughout.. until the rains came..
The sound of rain dropping hard on the zinc-roof of the facilitation hall made it impossible for us to hear anything. So we had to suspend the workshop.
But Nepali people took it easy. It’s not a big deal ! We could have a nice break! A local vendor in a nearby hut was asked to serve us nice Nepali milk tea during our “extra monsoon tea break”. When the rain stopped, we resumed the workshop only to face another unpredictable factor.
Pigeons disturbed the workshop by knocking the zinc roof so loud that we could not hear what the participants were talking. One of our staff had to go out to shoo them away by throwing rocks to the roof of our hall building. No worry.. no animal masscare here. We just wanted the birds to fly away.
Under the hot sky which made us all sweat very hard that my white shirt now turned permanently yellow, I found what happened here funny that I could not hold my laughter. How on earth could Peter Block be able to imagine that a bird could sabotage a facilitation session from the zinc roof-top. Otherwise, he should have included in the appendix of his book.

Otherwise, our workshop went well according to our plan. The participants wrote good comments after the meeting. Moreover, although this is the harvesting season where the farmers would rather spend time working on their rice field than sitting in the two-day meeting, around 30 participants showed up during the two-full day workshop. The workshop was done in Nepali but I could feel the energy of the meeting through their gesture and active participation.
I like working with READ Nepal because the organization is a real community based. All of READ Nepal’s staff are local people, which is a plus for the organization as they reached out to the communities and closely involved with the communities throughout Nepal. The staff went outside the capital city very often. During our trip, we had dinner with the community people. Malaria was not the pronlem as our small guest in Jhuwani provided us with cuty mosquito net.
Life is tough but the experience was worthwhile. During this trip, I rode the elephant for the first time in my life. And it was not scary as I thought it would be.
READ Nepal recently received a funding from Norwegian government to implement the rural and literacy development project. The workshop applied Best Practice such as facilitation format and micro-finance credit model of Grameen Bank. I believed that everything happened for a reason. And now I know that it’s not co-incidental that I was assigned to read “Price of a Dream” which is based on Grameen Bank, during my Communication Class.