People sometimes ask me: “Why Nepal? What is it about Nepal that makes
you want to stay there? Why not somewhere else?" It took me a long time to put
my finger on it myself. After my one-year contract with UNDP in Nepal came to
an end in July 2014, I stayed in the country, despite not having a job and amid
a very difficult personal time. I stayed for months, looking for some job
leads, believing they were there, believing there was a reason I should stay. Amongst all logical signs that I should go, I stayed. By November,
it was time to start thinking about booking a ticket home for Christmas and I
couldn’t do it. I knew that I couldn’t justify a return ticket if I didn’t have
something to come back for. And I wasn’t ready to go. By that time, I knew why:
It’s simple: potential. Seemingly endless potential on the horizon: in
terms of both my own personal growth, and Nepal’s growth. It’s palpable in the
atmosphere. It’s exciting.
Since I first arrived in Nepal I have completed my first triathlon, won
my second triathlon, conquered my fear of cycling (in the craziest traffic in
the world), learned to rock climb, and designed a new project during my time at
UNDP, seeing it through implementation.
My project provided business-centred training to micro-entrepreneurs on
disaster risk management. When I looked for training packages amongst other
development organisations to modify for the Nepal context, I found nothing. It
had never been done before! I also co-organized the first ever obstacle race
(think Spartan…baby Spartan) in Nepal.
Where else could I have been the first ever person to do anything? Only
Nepal. And there are so many other firsts that I get a chance to lead, be part
of, or witness happening. It’s a drug: pushing yourself, achieving something
new, making something happen that wasn’t there before, creating something,
making a real change in someone’s life. And I’m a full on addict.
Yet, with no means of supporting myself, I didn’t have much other choice
but to try to move on.
In the last days, as I began to prepare myself mentally to depart, I got
a call from a former UNDP colleague to come in to talk to the boss. She asked
me to come work for them for a couple of months starting in January. I had my
reason to return, and Nepal kept its grasp on me. Almost simultaneously, I got
three other requests for work from different organisations, and suddenly I was
busy!
So I went home for my best friend’s wedding, Christmas, and skiing with
the family. All the while doing work from abroad on Nepal time, getting up in
the middle of the night for interviews, and even completing a written test for
a job I had applied for months before. I returned to Nepal in January and got
to work for UNDP right away. During the time there I had two, successive
interviews for the position with a regional NGO based in Kathmandu that I had
done the written test for over the holidays. Things were starting to look up.
But within a few weeks I was almost back to square one. Persistent visa
problems seemed to plague me, making it impossible for me to accept some jobs
that otherwise would have been mine, and even preventing me from being able to
access the money deposited into my account for work I had done. Add to that,
weeks after being told that I would hear about the job shortly, it was still
radio silent from the NGO. I had finished my work for UNDP by this point, and
had been jobless again for about a month. I had come to the decision, finally,
and somewhat painfully, that if this job didn’t come through, then I would have
to go, because I could no longer stay in relative “illegal” status (at least
for work). I had come up against enough walls to realise when it was time to
thrown in the towel. And it certainly hadn’t been for lack of trying. I started
sending out some feelers through my network in Canada.
The NGO had advertised for six programme officers, and I knew someone
else who was also waiting to hear. On the night that I found out from her that
she had learned a few days earlier she was selected for one of the
positions, I thought that was officially it for me. My boyfriend and I made a
plan that night for how we would manage the next months, or year, living across
the world from one another.
The following evening, as I made dinner, I got the email offering me the
position – a three-year contract. And Nepal pulled me back from the brink of
leaving again.
Many weeks later, in mid-April, reference checks had all gone through,
the official offer had been sent, and though it was a smaller salary than had
been advertised, the job description was exactly what I had been looking for,
and I figured out how I could make it work. The final step was that I had to
leave the country and return with the right type of visa, as it was impossible
to transfer a tourist visa into a working visa. So a flight was booked to
Sydney, Australia for one week – an opportunity to visit Dad, Pia and Claire,
considering my relative proximity (when compared to Canada at least).
The day before I was set to fly I got a call from human resources to let
me know that they had decided to change my role – considering that I had been
quite set on the job description I had applied for, and already accepted, I did
not take this as good news. Regardless, I felt I was pretty much stuck at that
point, and I boarded the plane to Australia, with the intention of starting my
new job, the following week, on Monday, April 27th.
In advance of my start date I landed back in Kathmandu on the morning of
Saturday, April 25th at 11:15am. Forty-five minutes later I was
waiting for my luggage at carrousel three when the earth started to shake, the
ground began to crack and pieces of the ceiling began to come down around us.
And here I was, almost a year after all logic told me I should have gone home:
still in Nepal.
Every time I almost left, Nepal pulled me back, and it pulled me back
the last time just before the big earthquake. I can’t help but wonder, at
times, if the reason I stayed all this time is so that I could be here now.
And so, I said goodbye to my nice, secure, three year job in a field I
hadn’t set out to work in, and now I’m back in an incredibly uncertain,
unsecure job with the UN. But maybe, after all this, now isn’t the time for
security. It’s the time for using your skills to do what you were meant to.
I thought I was done with the UN. And happily so, actually. I was ready
to try something else, and after my experience, I just wasn’t sure that it was
for me. But as it turns out there’s this other UN body, that hadn’t been in Kathmandu
before, called the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA),
and their job, basically (in layman’s terms) is to make friends with all the
actors who rush in after an emergency, and get them to work together. Now
that’s something I can do! I don’t know if you, reading this, know my father:
Glen Brooks…I expect you do, even if you and I have never met. If you do you
know that these skills are inherited directly from him, maybe the best gift I
could ever have gotten. It is not the first time I have been thankful for the
fact that, as a result of being his daughter: I was born for this job.
And yes, Nepal needs help now, but it still has that potential that I
have always loved about it. As horrible as this has been, it is also an opportunity
for Nepal. I don’t want to fix Nepal, I
don’t want to save it. I just want to help along the path to realising this
potential and taking advantage of this opportunity.
