Teaching English in Nepal

Nepal:
“Do you have any idea how dangerous Nepal is? It is not just any under developed country.” I’m talking to my father. He is not happy about my decision to spend my three month summer vacation doing volunteer work in Nepal. “It’s okay,” I say, “I am going with a safe organization.” The truth is my father scared me. I didn’t know anything about Nepal. When I saw the pictures of the cute children that I would be teaching on the website I did not know that Nepal was practically in a civil war, with Maoist attacks being of the order of the day and the resistance to the King who had just recently seized power increasing rapidly.

Maoists or no Maoists, a few weeks later, I arrived in Kathmandu. The first weeks were crazy. I had never been outside of the Western world and was shocked by everything around me: street children shitting in the middle of traffic, goats being slaughtered on the side of the road and bodies being burnt along the river. After ten days, I had experienced more than during my whole first year at UC: bungee jumping at the prettiest place on earth (and the longest free fall!), bathing with elephants in a river, riding on elephants through the safari in search for tigers, swimming near a crocodile and driving on the roof of a bus through the most amazing mountain landscapes.

The Airport School:
After this introduction to Nepal, I returned to Kathmandu to start my volunteer work. Together with Rens, also a Dutch volunteer, I was going to teach English at a public elementary school in the morning and give homework classes at a home for disabled children in the afternoon. The school was in a little village on top of a hill just outside of Kathmandu. Only the poorest children went to this school. They were the children of for example people who made their living by carrying sand out of the river. The school building looked terrible: five very small classrooms, an even smaller teacher’s room, a few wooden benches in the classrooms, and a toilet consisting of a hole in the ground which produced a stench you could smell through the whole school.

Our job was to teach class 1 through 5 extra English. Officially, the other teachers taught the children regular English, but since they could not speak English at all it was safe to assume their teaching was no more than assigning the children to copy an English text. As a result, the level of English in all classes was extremely low. So how on earth do I begin teaching English to children who do not understand a word I say? In class three I started out running through the class, hiding behind the door and jumping up and down to make the children understand these words. Later I taught them things like “left” and “right,” the colours, body parts and of course the song “head, shoulders, knees and toes.” We found out that class two could not read English letters, so we started with the alphabet. “B,” bu bu bu bu, bee, bird, bone, black, and so on. In the end, they were almost all able to distinguish “ball” from “bird” and “pen” from “men.”

It was no surprise that the level of English was very low, but it was a surprise that most of the children were extremely slow learners and very annoying. I once spent 45 minutes trying to teach class two the colours red, yellow, and blue by holding up coloured pencils, telling them the Nepali words and repeating, repeating, repeating. After a while, the class as a whole was able to distinguish the colours, but when I called the children up individually, they had no idea which colour pencil I was holding up. Also, if there was no Nepali teacher present in the class it would be impossible to keep the children quiet. They were used to being punished severely if they did not pay attention, but since they knew we would never touch them, they refused to listen. Still, we could clearly see that the children enjoyed our unconventional teaching methods and even though after three months the children still didn’t know enough English to tell us how they felt about us leaving, we have seen improvement.

The Disabled Newlife Centre (DNC):
From 4 pm to 7 pm we worked at the Disabled Newlife Centre (DNC), which gave a home to 32 disabled children of whom the parents were either dead or too poor to take care of a disabled child. Their disabilities ranged from having a deformed hand or foot to missing a leg and an arm or having a muscle disease. There was no proper equipment to support the children with these disabilities: no wheelchairs or for example artificial legs and adjusted shoes. The building had two big stairs that the children had to master. Some children came home exhausted and sweat-soaked after walking home from school. Even though their situations were far from perfect, the children were not at all sad and helpless. They were always cheerful and playful and almost never cried or fought with each other.

We sometimes played with the children but most of the time helped them with their homework. This was not easy since most of the children did not understand English at all and all the books were in Nepali. I have spent hours and hours trying to explain to nine-year-old Bindu how to divide using my hands, the few Nepali words that I knew and of course, numbers. It didn’t help that the questions she had to answer were something ridiculous like “what is 7892335 divided by 2451?” while she didn’t even know what two times five was without using her hands.

Another child that I spent a lot of time with was Kalyan, a 15 year old boy who always told me he was 12. He missed his left leg and right arm, but could still run up the stairs faster than I could. He was having a lot of trouble in school and at DNC. He teased the other children, had to repeat the same grade for the second time, sometimes ran away and was wearing watches, necklaces and bracelets he could never have gotten in a legal way. To me he was just a lonely and insecure boy who did not get enough attention. There was only one woman working fulltime to take care of the 32 children, so although all the children had enough to eat, they were definitely missing some personal attention. Helping Kalyan with his homework was extremely difficult, since he did not understand anything, was very impatient and did everything wrong. Still, if he did something right, he was extremely happy and proud and the more time I spent with him, the more he improved socially.

Going Home:
After three months of frustration about the heat, illnesses, the noise, the laid back attitude of Nepalis, the hectic traffic, the stench, the difficulties at the school, the lack of understanding at DNC and many other things; I thought I was ready to go home to quiet, clean, and orderly Holland. However, ever since I have been back, I have done nothing but missing Nepal. It is an amazing country and I have had an incredible time there. I will definitely go back some day to see if Bindu still knows how to divide.

So if you like to go there, cross your borders and join Cross Borders to make sure for a amazing time in Nepal and working for & with the poor people.

Greets,
Martinde Bonte

Go to Vrijwilligers ervaringen  |  back to top