Tag Archives: Birganj

A description of a service

Below is a copy of my official record of what I did as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, sort of. After completing my service, this DOS will be the only record of my Peace Corps experience in Nepal.
And it doesn’t nearly express what my experience meant to me nor all the things that happened—good [...]

Peace Corps volunteer safety and security

The last thing that I wrote about safety and security got my webpage shut down by Peace Corps’ Washington, DC, office.
Perhaps it’s just coincidental that my predictions about the situation in the Rautahaut, Bara, and Parsa districts have mostly come true, much to the frustration of Peace Corps’ Kathmandu office. Not that it matters.
The fact [...]

Finishing touches

During training, one of the hardest and seemingly most necessary things I wanted to communicate to my host family was that I missed home. I missed home. I missed my friends. I missed pizza and beer as dark as the nights in my new, lightless neighborhood.
But the best that I could do after two months [...]

Blogging in the Peace Corps

It was the end of December and I was coming back to Birganj from Rajbiraj. I’d celebrated Christmas for the second time in Rajbiraj and was thinking that this would be the last time I’d be there, the last time I’d make the trip I’d made perhaps ten times before.
Last year’s Christmas was, well, difficult. [...]

Haiku composed upon recent developments

This morning as I left my flat to head out into Birganj, I discovered something very troublesome.
On many levels.
I paused, then composed a haiku:
I gave this country
education for the poor,
and they stole my bike.
So there it is. Nothing else. Moving [...]