A Bittersweet Year

April 19, 2016

By 2015 Fellow Manil Maharjan

 

Life offers you numerous tastes at the same time. It offered me sweetness, sourness and bitterness, all within the single year. If you are a true foodie with appetite for different tastes of experiences and adventures, you should show that extra enthusiasm to take risks- which I did for the entire year. In fact, I was prepared to taste the varieties from the time I made a commitment to join the movement of empowering the students in rural Nepal. Of course it was not the first time I travelled and stayed away from my home and my mom, but that one year has opened new avenues for living independently and meaningfully. I shall try to explain this in my verses here.

Quake and its malice

The year started with a promising note and a lot of energy to push myself ahead in any kind of circumstances. The very first week of the Fellowship was enough to test all my energy, drive and motivation. I had to bear immense psychosomatic disturbances because of the April’s earthquake. It took more than a couple of months for me to be able to recover and gain back the confidence and passion that I had lost.

Then came the chaotic environment in school. Students had started behaving very differently and were difficult to control after the calamity had struck. I was having the pressure of completing the lessons mandatory for SLC appearing students, building up the relationship with new faces of the school and community and coordinating with different organizations, all at the same time. The hardest of all was to manage the internal psychological turmoil that even led to some physical weakness at some point.

Identity and relationship crisis

At times, my relationship with a lot of people including my co-fellows deteriorated. That was a great emotional challenge for me. Sometimes I felt that I wasn’t being able to earn the trust of the co-teachers in school. It inflicted more pain in me when I felt that I was so alien to my students. I wasn’t being able to gain their trust and compassion. When I couldn’t see any significant change in the results of my students, the sense of worthlessness and frustrations heightened in me to a level that left me questioning about my very purpose and existence in this Fellowship.

Personal limitations

Gone are those days when a person with disability used to limit him/her with the family members and care-takers. With this notion, I took a giant step into the Fellowship, and there have been many problems. Being someone with impaired vision meant more challenges and more dedication in the Fellowship. Sometime the challenge was with mobility while with the classroom management most of the times. Had there not been my co-fellows and other numerous helping hands, the boat would have sunk long back sinking all my students and myself as well. At times, this Fellowship even tested my endurance towards independent living as there were times when I had to navigate and cook, all by myself.

Teenage impulses

Problems kept on trickling from this corner and that and all in a span of a few weeks. First, a girl from tenth grade eloped with her male friend during the winter vacation. Next, a girl from Class 7 committed suicide just to vent her anger towards her mother. Both these incidents gave me a realization about the vulnerability of the female students whose responsibility I’ve been endowed with for the two crucial years. Add to that, these two incidents posed a big question on all of my efforts to instill value and culture in my students. I started seeing myself responsible in some way or other for both these mishaps which I think could’ve been avoided.

Motherly teacher

The year has not just left scars of pain but also has thrown lights of love and compassion in my life. During our trainings, our Head of Training keeps on telling us that teachers are similar to mothers. However, I was clueless about the validity of her statement until I involved myself in the process of sharing love and compassion at my school. Now I have a proof that if you invest unconditional love on your students, you will one day reap a harvest of similar love and compassion back from them.

I’d been through a time when I had just one cetamol left in my medicine box and two needy people. I myself was suffering from an illness and there was a student in similar, or perhaps, in needier condition. What next? I happily offered the tablet to my student without even letting her realize that I was ill as well.

My students have started sharing about their families’ hardships with me perhaps with a hope that their teacher has a magic wand or perhaps with a notion that their teacher is a professional psychologist who can relieve their emotional turmoil. All these compassion, trust and love that I’ve gained so far is the result of my motherly nature that I have demonstrated as a teacher. A mother bestows unconditional love and care upon her children and being a teacher requires similar traits to make one's students successful. This is my most recent realization.

Honey hopes

Amidst all these dilemmas, hardships and occasional exultations, my Fellowship has to go on and I’m happy that there are plenty of honey-like-hopes. I’ve gained priceless experiences and adventures from the past 12 months and would love to have more ups and downs in the days to come. That way, I believe, my life can become meaningful - for myself and my students - just as a bee’s honey prepared from several flowers and fruits.

2015 Fellow Manil Maharjan teaches at Shree Buddha Secondary School in Lalitpur.

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