Three years ago I decided that I wanted to go to Nepal. The diversity of the country interested me, and it still does. With the Himalayan Mountains in the north, the hills and the valleys in the center and the tropical plains in the south, Nepal is quit amazing. Different kind of ethnical groups are living together and sharing their religions.

When I finished my Bachelor study in Cultural and Social Development, I got the opportunity to work as an educator for 15 months in an ethnological museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In the museum I developed educational programs for primary students. I also taught primary school classes that visited the museum.

When I finished my work at the museum in October 2003, my plans to go to Nepal still remained. I wanted to do some kind of volunteer work, because that seemed a good way to get to know the culture better. Because this was the first time for me to travel to a country that is so different than my own country, I felt that I wanted a base from which I could get used to Nepal. And of course I wanted to do volunteer work to develop myself and to do something useful, instead of only traveling (which is going to make me too lazy).

At first I wanted to teach children in a school until I heard about Spiny Babbler. I decided to do volunteer work for Spiny Babbler because I like the combination of teaching children and working with (visual) arts. Spiny Babbler gave me the opportunity to develop art lessons for the art syllabus which is going to be used for the children of the People at Risk Programs. In the future the art syllabus will also be implemented in schools.

In the beginning it was sometimes hard for me, because there were no books on art history and I had to find all the information on the internet. That took a lot of time. I also had to get used to the organization and their way of working. After a while I got used to this and I really enjoyed developing the art lessons. It was a challenge, because education in Nepal is different than the education in the Netherlands. A lot of people don’t know much about art. Especially western art movements are difficult to understand, because it is so different from what children are familiar with. Nepali young volunteers are teaching the children, so the lessons have to be understandable for them as well.

It has been really good to work for Spiny Babbler. It is amazing what they can do with a small staff and without having lots of money. I am still surprised by the amount of projects that they set up and run. For me Spiny Babbler is important because it is one of the few organizations in Nepal that combines different disciplines of art with people at risk and schools. Spiny Babbler tries to make people express themselves through arts as well as teach them about arts.

I’ve been traveling and volunteering in Nepal for 6 months now. Next week my visa is running out and I have to leave the country. I feel like I could stay here at least another half year and work for Spiny Babbler and enjoy Nepal and the Nepali people. I’ve had a really good time; I lived with a Nepali family, did a trek around the Annapurna, saw a tiger and leopard in Chitwan, ate wonderful food and cycled to small villages in the Valley. In the Netherlands I told everyone that I was going to travel in Nepal, but now I realize that I actually lived in Nepal for 6 months.

Tineke