Lost in translation?

“I copied and pasted all your blog posts into Google Translator,” says Nirajan. I can take a hint and will from now on write more in English. But I have to admit that, as all the participants at our trainings and workshops tells us; it is not as easy to express thoughts, feelings and reflections in English, but as they take the challenge, so will I!

So much has happened since last my last blog post, and it is time for a short sum up. I also take Nirajan, next year’s Youth Delegate to Norway from Nepal, wish seriously and will try to communicate in a language people that are important in my everyday life in Nepal also can understand.

Our biggest festival

24^th December 2009: Happy to Christmas! is written on the cake our co-workers at head quarter has ordered to mark our biggest festival and celebrate with eating oranges and handing out presents. We talk a bit about what traditions are important in our families, I tell them that every year my family goes and has dinner at each other almost every day for one week, we eat and eat and eat. They compare it with Dashain, their biggest festival that we celebrated in October, where main focus is on food and family.

4 in the morning – the end of December

31^st December 2009: Linn Synnøve and I are safe asleep in a bed in Tikkabairab. We wanted to do a new year trek from Kathmandu to Nagarkot the southern end of the Valley was the plan initially, but that suddenly changed when we found out that the map has no walking tours and what was “just a few minutes” turned out to be two hours, and that was particularly frustrating when it turned out that we missed a turning point and walked two hours in the wrong direction.

We met nice people all the way, helpful or not, we have some great memories from the trek :)

Here we're trying to find the way...

Oh no! Wrong way! But are we sad? Not at all! Lynn Synnøve even takes a few extra knee bending to show how much fun it it to walk just for fun!

The women in Tikkabairab

First night we had nowhere to stay and decided to try our luck in a nearby restaurant. Three lovely women were working there and they rented a room. They offered us one of their beds, and after eating dal bhat tarkari and drinking hot Tomba, we squeezed together five persons in a small room in about 10m2 with walls covered by stunning beautiful Bollywood actresses and one big white house with fence by the lake. That night it rained for the first time in two months in Kathmandu Valley, and I woke up several times during the night to put on warmer and warmer clothes and thanking these three hospital women in my heart for taking us into their rented home and sharing a small part of their life with us. The next morning we went to the local photographer to document our stay in Tikkabairab.

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Enabling Youth – enabling us

In our bi-monthly reports, the first part we as Youth Delegates are to answer is: “Describe your main activities during this period (including preparation, your participation & major achievements). – Any challenges?” Next report will focus on giving training in IHL, arranging Human Trafficking workshop and participating on Red Cross meetings organised by Nepal Red Cross. A common challenge is communication with spoken words. Body language goes only so far, but spending three days with two women and one of their sons at our field trip to Myadhi last week did wonders for both understanding and trying to communicate in Nepali. At this annual review and planning meeting for all the Norwegian supported Youth projects to Enable Youth to combat HIV, human trafficking and social discrimination, it was nice to see that the number of participants were equally men and women. As a women, I was immediately included in the women activities; going to temple in the morning as a big group, eating at their table, going to bed when the child in our room was tired. I wish my Nepali was better, I wonder how it is to be a women in Red Cross in Nepal – the woman with a son had no choice but bring him and the other women told me that she had never married, she did not want to. I was in a position to talk to them and try to understand their world, their way of living, their hopes and dreams in life. But I was not able to communicate what I wanted to know and some of what they told me, I was not able to understand. Some because of language, some because my world and way of living is so very different from theirs, some because I don’t dare to ask – am I frightened by the cultural differences, of stepping wrong, of making a fool out of me or out of them? This is for me to find out. This I think is one of my biggest challenges at the moment. What is lost in translation?

Participants at the Annual planning and review meeting