Passing the Design
There has been a lot of perseverance in reaching where we are now. Backwards and Forwards, up and down, from the top of the mountain to the bottom and back up again, along the winding bumpy dirt road. I was bouncing on the back of Purna’s motorcycle as we travelled together, between the village office and the main municipality office in Kavre district. I used to feel almost like I was in a different country at the bottom of the mountain, enclosed in a different climate with its incredible heat across the level plain dwarfed between the mountains that suffocated the wind from passing through. It was littered with banana trees across the vibrant landscape and your pores opened floodgates to the sweat that begins to pour down your face in streams on arrival. After so many trips you don’t forget you’re in Nepal though. We also get our sand from down by a river running through near here for our construction projects. The road may be long and winding but we were finally getting around some of the red tape blocking our way to getting the main building under construction.
We are learning a lot of lessons right now, and I have honestly been learning a lot through this whole adventure which I value greatly. It took many rides together and modifications amending the design originally donated by our local friend Sandesh to reinforce the prospective structure. On this journey we have not really known how everything will turn out since the beginning when this project launched, but we always knew it would be an uphill climb to success, something I feel we are slowly winning with every trip back up to the village. I have been gaining the necessary experience through our stubborn perseverance to make this project successful and raise the bar on the early learning, rural educational experience, as we reignite Purna’s dream which for a while felt like it was collapsing with the earthquakes. Still believing very much in the success of this project, growing with confidence along every step of our journey together, thanks often to the people we have met and the support we have already received; driving us both to be strong in testing times so we can help the school have a safe place to learn again, with the efficient furnishings and materials needed for a thorough education.
For now, the mission is simple: To approve the design that Sandesh had kindly donated to us with the municipality, incorporating a complete, current and detailed costing. My main constant fear is how long paperwork and official process can take, especially in Nepal, as a westerner with a clock ticking in my pocket bouncing between my own country and here in Nepal often leaving you with a cultural jetlag of the local perception of time. Life does seem to tick at a slower rate per minute here, yet there are still never enough minutes in the day, it’s a strange paradox I am still trying to figure out.
You learn to accept a great deal of the way time is perceived, while constantly meditating on the subject, especially when things need to be done. I also think at times it has been a strong life lesson I probably needed in patience. The many times you here ‘boli biyanna’ (tomorrow morning) only to hear it again the next day, keeps you looking at that clock with frustration, but as slow as it ticks, it keeps on ticking. It’s time to turn up the heat to get the project cooking again. This took a fair few follow up calls and visits to the municipality offices, but things were starting to look up. We finally seemed to have a genuine contact in the office now. Purna and myself were also enjoying some of the waiting times in corridors, learning about each other and comparing the systems we know, while sharing the ability to laugh and smile in these moments, also sharing countless lunches together, which we often took turns to respectfully get up to pay for meals that cost about 50 pence in a local cafe. Our waiting times seemed to slowly decrease with every visit, as we waited against the backdrop of swarms of local people still buzzing up and down presumably still developing their family residences since the disaster, all at various stages, some seemed much more lost in the system than us. Some looked in complete despair by the look on their kind faces which reminded me that we were actually doing OK. The engineer’s focus seemed to grow with each visit, curious with my being a single foreigner killing time or watching it drift by like a tumble weed, listening to the clock ticking on the wall, counting the seconds for him before he was ready to speak to us. The engineer though became more personal and willing to have more small talk extending further with each visit than the work we were doing on the design, he always offered me a chair, which is quite a luxury in that environment, and promised his support. The municipality office always treated us well, and were happy to wait; we had to be and at least we had their attention.
Purna was showing genuine passion, always willing to step up to the challenges for his school. This is always good to see, always making the time to do what was needed and direct certain procedures he knew more in one of his native tongues. Through the passing of time spent with him and his commitment, my trust in Purna keeps me alive as we grow to know each other through the project, looking into the big picture together as his trust in us reciprocates with each step. Right now, as a farmer’s son who has many commitments, the season was just between the heavy planting and the harvesting times the calendar has now opened up, which meant he could spend more time with me jumping through the hoops we still needed to jump through. I enjoy spending time with Purna most when our mission takes us on these excursions, or on site together developing the land. We are fortunate to have each other in these times because there can be a lot of waiting around when calling the government offices in Nepal; it doesn’t seem like appointments are ever scheduled there, it really is a case of just turning up as much as you can and prioritising your application, but by that very way we are more in control to push it through with this more personal, old fashioned approach.
All in all, it took around 55 days to complete the design process and only a ten-day cooling off period for any contest or complaints, which is obviously mandatory (and actually seems a relatively short time), but we were pushing as hard as we could now. In this time, I was also with my dear friend Ujwal liaising in Kathmandu with another government engineer who was taking care of the design’s modifications. Finally, on one visit the magic happened in the municipality and the Government engineer stamped and signed the design while giving us a registered number. Wow! We can actually build what is on the paper now. That’s an awesome feeling!
True to my promise to keep the donations strictly for the building work on this project I have also managed to personally donate costs incurred on the design modifications and taxes on the design being passed and I am deeply grateful for our friend Sandesh Prajapati; a local civil engineer, for his great effort and the donation of the original blueprint as we continued to develop and cost the project with the municipality. It has certainly made developing the project a great deal easier with his original voluntary support.
We have actually designed the building for the future development of Budland School, for them to grow from strength to strength once we finally get them to the first phase of building which we are only currently promising. We have made sure the design’s foundations can take the rise of building further stories in the future if the school develops further, however we are only going to be building the first floor in the near future to get the current children into a safe, secure and real building that enhances their learning experience.
It’s taken some serious time and networking getting this stage passed and a milestone in the project that feels like tremendous progress. The design is relatively simple but should be efficient for the needs of the school, with your support we can actually build it! Let’s build Budland!
We will publish the design soon.
