Welcome to Nepal!

Why Nepal? Now that’s a good question. While being in India as a social volunteer from 2012 to 2013, I learned Hindi, got to know some Hindu culture and traditions and fell in love with very kind people. Especially the big hearts and huge hospitality stay in mind when I think back to India. Maybe I thought of this while choosing Nepal into my 8 favourite countries for an internship at the German Embassy. Doing the application in April 2016, I finally got accepted in September while being in Tunis. At that time, I had already thought about staying in Tunisia forever, so that the decision to accept the next internship was quite hard. Well, not really accepting the internship in Nepal was hard, but rather the goodbye from a truly amazing time in Tunis almost broke my heart in many small pieces. Promising to come back ASAP and already making plans for the revival meeting, I finally took the step to leave in mid-November to get home to my family in Germany.

Close to Frankfurt, I spent two weeks preparing for Christmas, decorating the rooms with nice Christmas accessories and helped out to bake famous German cookies. I met all of my close family members, had to listen to their sorrows about me leaving to such a distant country and never being home at all anyways, and enjoyed the time albeit some critical voices. Most of the elder ones, after all, were proud in the end, as they could not access such unique chances when they were of my age. However, I somehow disliked their way of viewing other countries cultures saying “Pay attention who you talk to” or “Don’t look any man in the eye…”. Well, I’m sure it’s hard to imagine Nepali while only hearing about earthquake and bad infrastructure situations after all. At least, I am doing my best to provide them with further information and deeper insight into Nepal now that I’m staying there.

On the last day of November, I finally took my flight from Frankfurt to Istanbul and from there at midnight further to Kathmandu. In total 10 hours of flight + more than 4 hours of time change + travel to and fro the airport made it quite a long 23 hour journey after which I was the happiest ever having finally arrived at my new home.

Here, I am now staying with the family of a friend from university. She’s half Nepali and has most of her family living in the centre of Kathmandu very close to the German Embassy. Consequently, I am living with her Auntie Chadani and her Uncle Umes who are caring very kindly about me. Sometimes, we cook Nepali food together in the evening or take the breakfast in the morning with Nepali Chai and biscuits or German Muesli (Cereals). Like this, I was again incredibly lucky being welcomed so warm-heartedly and being accommodated so safely for the next three months.

The internship started well on the 1^st of December with crisis training for the case of an earthquake with every single employee being involved in building tents, creating an quick reaction force plan and cooking trekking food for emergency cases. I am lucky getting to know a detail of German diplomatic work every day during meetings with partners the German State supports, own research and miscellaneous tasks. Let’s see what will happen in the next days to come. I am very curious about learning a bit of Nepali language, which is very similar to Hindi, getting to know more about Nepali culture and meeting many new people.