This is the experience of Sarah Kim, an American student who volunteered in the schools we have partnered with in Nepal (view her experiences in video at the bottom of this page). 

When I stepped into the seventh grade classroom, the first day of two months in Shree Biswamitra Secondary School, I had it all planned out. Start off with an icebreaker to learn more about the kids and to get them comfortable, then English language games to get their imagination going. Though my Nepali at that point was at most rudimentary, I observed that the teachers taught in English, and the students seemed to understand the language. Besides, I, in my utmost idealism, felt compelled to introduce a point of creativity in an otherwise stultifying Nepali pedagogy, in which English classes were the stuffiest of all. All the kids had to do was to write part of a story, switch papers with a neighbor, then fill out the rest of their partner’s narrative. Afterwards, get back their original tales, read the hijinks brainstormed up by the next student, everybody has a hearty laugh while interest in English and storytelling increases. Simple, right? When I got back the papers however, the general consensus, me included, sounded a resounding “Huh?”, a word that would continue to echo over the next three months I taught in two schools as a volunteer.

As a college student from a highly academic liberal arts college in the USA, I was by my junior year feeling the general sentiment shared by most my peers: “What is the point of my studies; what am I going to do with my life?” which translates roughly into “I need to get out of here and do something concrete fast” After months of Googling pages of NGOs, only to shy from their extortive costs, I learned about Santi School Project from a college alumni. At once I was intrigued by both the lenient budget offered both by the volunteer program and the country itself as well as the accolades of previous volunteers. With that in mind and many years of helping my elementary school teacher mother edit her lesson plans, I flew off to Shree Biswamitra Secondary School, Jyamikort, Nepal to try my hand at teaching to broaden my horizons, gain some experience, and help out in the schools. Though I knew that it wouldn’t be too easy, I had traveled widely in my childhood and with a English Major in the works, I knew it would be a worthwhile goal to apply my learning to teaching. After observing the teachers for a couple of days, I had three concrete goals in mind. First was to increase interest in English as a creative medium and originator of very real benefits. Second, on a more technical level, was to improve grammar, writing, and pronunciation. Lastly, I wanted the students to feel that I as a teacher was a figure of trust rather than of authority. Therefore, over the next two months, the kids would learn about storybooks and comic books, informal fun projects that would gently push the students to write more conscientiously and correctly. Later on, upon learning about the Nepali youth’s obsession of Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, and the rest of the pop, I wanted to integrate songs into the lesson plan to work on pronunciation and auditory comprehension, literary intepretation, and to teach a little slang.

However, the papers that I got back that first day indicated plainly the long and hard road I’d have ahead. Habituated to narrative templates since early on, my students had pretty much copied from their textbooks–regardless of whether their partners had written about those stories at all. I had overlooked, or rather, ignored that the English I first observed had a distinct Nepali tang that form a very real barrier to communication. For the rest of those two months, with short breaks for the school award ceremony, Dashain, and Tihar, it was generally the same story again and again. I aimed unrealistically too high and my class didn’t get it. The comics and storybooks faltered, the songs excited the students, but their enthusiasm and attention were limited to a fashionable few. I definitely formed a rapport with the students, visiting them often on the weekends and the festivals, even walking to a town an hour and half away to watch their soccer tournament. One of them I even dubbed my Nepali little brother. But while we joked, mocked fought, danced, sang, and played frisbee (an American import of mine) with each other outside of the classroom, the students unused to such familiarity with teachers mistook my friendliness to liberality, putting the classroom into chaos or stalemate, populated by neglected homework assignments.

However, as time went on, things slowly started to come together in unexpected places, a process that continued when I moved from Jyamilkort to Ramche, a small village near Barabise, to teach in its primary school. Though lessons based around English games and even songs were too complex for the students, and while they had difficulty grasping the basics of tense, a lesson based around a quiz game would always incite enthusiasm and draw out hidden reserves of information with competition. I found that they loved the photos that I had taken while I was traveling around the States and would ask about seals, New York, rock concerts, and American farms. I found that the kids, while restricted by the uninspired Nepali textbook and the rigid curriculum, loved to draw and loved to see drawings made, encouraging me to teach art more thoroughly in my second village. Best of all, I found that the students, while hampered by their poor English and despite my growing Nepali, were bit by bit pushing their English so they could talk to me more and more easily and give me a hand with my Nepali, creating a symbiotic exchange between us. Though I had despaired of being a proficient teacher by technical standards, my class was nonetheless trying to meet me halfway.

The culmination of all these moments and feelings arrived finally after days of struggling to teach shapes-to-detail drawing with no avail. As the school day drew to a close, my student Bimal produced a pristine ring with a cluster of crows feet petals bursting from the center: a lovely marigold. In another village six hours away, that “Huh?” that had followed me from Jyamikort, that I had encountered time and time again in my lessons, was finally answered, literally in a sense, by “I see!”

Which brings us back to volunteering. Advice to prospective volunteers, especially if you’re not trained: keep it simple and be patient. The primary mission, as a volunteer, is to expand the students’ worldview, not necessarily to get them to write grammatically pristine sentences or speak with diplomatic elegance, especially since their English won’t be the best. Expect communication to be difficult, especially with short term volunteers. Best to be playful and have fun with the kids, show them what else is out there beyond the limits of the village life, beyond stale cliches of globalized culture. Pulling out a song by Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift (admittedly, some of those same cliches) have often been my greatest tool in teaching pronunciation. The fact that the students love teeny pop doesn’t hurt the fun factor. Or even go outside for some good old flower treasure hunting. Whatever the plan, the students will surely carry themselves with enthusiasm, incomparable cheerfulness, and good nature.

To view more pictures that Sarah has taken, please visit this link.