Villagers Are Stronger Than I Imagined

A quick thought about my experience on the Nepal expedition: villagers are stronger than I imagined and work far harder than I surmised. As expeditioners, our focus was to help villagers of Puranokot build a health clinic in their village. We spent a few days digging trenches for its foundation–hours of back-breaking picking and shoveling rocky earth and soil. I thought that was tough, but digging trenches paled in comparison to the afternoon I spent hauling rocks with a group of women. I’ve never done anything so physically taxing and yet, I was working right along side unphased fifty and sixty year-old mothers and grandmothers who had already spent the morning cutting grass and collecting fire wood. It was a very humbling experience in many respects but especially in this one: when villagers are willing to take part in the development of their own communities, they are volunteering for an excess amount of intense physical labor on top of the grueling labor it takes to survive. Can you imagine having to personally build public schools, clinics, and roads? And if you couldn’t mobilize your neighbors to commit time they didn’t have to hauling rocks or digging trenches, your child would not have a school to go to? I have a new found respect for the people we are working with on the ground and now realize that with each project Trivani Foundation supports, its beneficiaries are sacrificing whole-heartedly to make that project materialize. Check out this video footage of an afternoon of hauling rock with the women of Puranokot. –Meg