Nepal

So close and so far away

Although it’s just a 3 hour flight from Dubai to Kathmandu, Rio remarked that it would be hard to find two places further apart. Where Dubai boasts gleaming 12 lane highways, Kathmandu’s ancient alleys are barely wide enough for two scooters to pass each other. In Dubai, nothing seems older than 20 years whereas in Kathmandu nothing seems that young. Dubai has had a single, unopposed ruler for decades. Nepal has been whipsawed by more than 20 governments in the past 20 years. Where everything seems connected to retail in Dubai, everything seems connected to the divine in Kathmandu. Walking the streets the morning after we arrived, it was hard not to literally trip over sites of active worship on the streets. The occasional stone is marked with tikka and marigolds, beautiful reminders of the sacred hiding within the mundane. While we found awe and wonder at the Burj Khalifa, we also found it in the unnamed cobblestones that locals had been caressing with oil and colors for a thousand years. Kathmandu holds wonders in every corner and alleyway. 

Abby and I decided to go to Nepal after a conversation with Maggie Doyne, the co-founder of the BlinkNow Foundation, Kopila Valley School, and Children’s Home. Maggie had stumbled into Nepal during a gap year after high school, met a girl who needed help, and never left. Nearly 20 years later, she and her team have built a K-12 school, a children’s home, a women’s center, a health clinic, an ambulance service, etc. That would likely be “enough” for many entrepreneurs, but for Maggie and her team – somewhere between diaper changes, high school graduations, and birthday parties for the ever growing number of kids in their care, they are still hatching new ventures. Rather than pitching the type of exponential growth Silicon Valley tends to venerate, Maggie’s strategy is built on limitless love and deep investment in community. It’s a totally different approach than the global development work I’ve been involved with to date, but I left humbled and certain:  it works. So, when Maggie invited Rio and Luca to enroll at the Kopila Valley school in Surkhet, the capital of Nepal’s largest and poorest province, and we immediately knew our answer was "yes!"  

Touchdown

Arriving at Surkhet’s one room airport, we were the only obvious foreigners. Few tourists visit, and even fewer bring their kids. I can count on two hands the number of  white people we saw during our month, and nearly all were ensconced in a white SUVs marked UN, FAO and Save The Children. 

Dubai now seemed a world away, but its influences were all around us. Nepal’s formal employment rate is around 11%, so many families in Surkhet send their young men abroad to work. A quarter of the country’s GDP is remittances; two thirds of which comes from the Persian Gulf. 

Just ten years ago, Surkhet was a leafy valley, populated with farmers living in traditional mud housing. Today, remittances help families replace their mud homes with multi-story, colorfully decorated concrete construction. New money has also fueled consumption of mass-produced packaged foods – chips, drinks, candies –  whose plastic wrappers line the streets. In the midst of a construction boom, giant trees are now worth more dead than alive. Where ancient banyans used to shade dirt paths, we could see them being dismembered to make way for scorching blacktop.

Dismembering an ancient tree in favor of more pavement

Remittances have also literally changed the air. While Surkhet only has 40,000 people, unregulated development keeps its air quality on par with pollution from cities a thousand times its size. Brick kilns burn 24/7 to fuel construction. Old trucks and buses belch their fumes as they rumble down the highway. Most households burn their waste in open fires. Even the municipality burns the waste it collects, sending the fumes back into the valley. The result coated everything we touched (not to mention our lungs and eyes) on a daily basis. Without functioning environmental protections, the cost of development is extremely high. 

Amazingly, the boys seemed unfazed by the trash, the smoke, or the material poverty that surrounded us in Surkhet. On the first day of school, they boarded the Kopila School Bus, whipped out their rubik’s cube and loops of string, and started making friends. 

The Lotus of Surkhet

The Kopila Valley School rises from the Surkhet Valley the way a lotus rises from a murky pond – immaculate and resilient amidst challenging conditions, and perfectly designed for its function. Built on a hillside, with classrooms nestled between mango and papaya trees, the school offers everything its 500 students could need. A 300,000L rainwater harvesting system ensures water year round in a location with seasonal water shortages. A 25kW solar array keeps the school powered even when the surrounding town frequently has has blackouts that can last  18 hours per day. Teaching gardens and farms help stock the kitchen which provides daily lunch and snack for everyone, using concentrated solar thermal power rather than imported propane (which is also occasionally unavailable). The school has a health clinic, social workers, career counselors, and a dozen other wrap-around services unheard of in other local schools. Most importantly, the staff at Kopila made it clear how much they cared about their students’ learning outcomes. Luca and Rio were delighted  with everything about the experience, from ping pong at recess to the what they declared was the hardest math class they’d ever taken. At dinner one night, Luca blurted out “This is the first time I really like school!” 

Part teaching and part saving lives 

While in most places such extraordinary facilities would be reserved for wealthy students in private schools, Kopila has taken the opposite approach. This K-12 school only takes orphans or students from fragile families, charges zero tuition, and makes it all work on about $5/student/schoolday. Compare that with the $90/student/schoolday that it costs Oakland Unified Public Schools to operate. 

Maggie casually comments that Kopila School is “part teaching, and part saving lives.” Without the school, her student body is far more likely than the general population to be food insecure, lack access to healthcare, and be subject to child marriages and child labor. Once enrolled, Kopila kids rarely endure these outcomes. The school day is long, by design. Students arrive at 9am and stay to 4pm, 6 days a week, 11 months a year. For many, this school is the safest and most stable place in their lives.  Kopila means "flower bud" in Nepali – and just as the name promises, this is a place where kids get to grow and blossom. 

The children’s home is similarly extraordinary.  It was, by far, Rio and Luca’s favorite place on our trip so far. After school, they’d drop their backpacks at the gate and run through the courtyard to play soccer, roll around with the puppy, giggle with 40 “brothers and sisters”, and occasionally do their homework. On Friday nights they watched movies, and on Saturdays they learned how to do laundry without a laundry machine. This place completely flipped my view of what an orphanage can be, and stands a shining model to others. It was a place of such joy, love, and community that Rio and Luca seemed to prefer it to home!

English as “Gateway to the World” or “Unnecessary Overhead”?

In Nepal, knowing English can be a gateway to global opportunity, so Kopila makes every effort to teach in English. This made it possible for Rio and Luca to participate in class, but the decision to be an English medium school comes with costs, too. Nepal’s 30M people speak about 130 local languages, so for many Kopila students, Nepali is a second language, and English is their third. As a result, for many students (and teachers), English restricts their abilities to teach, learn, and express themselves – and with few native speakers in the community, fluency tends to plateau.  I sometimes imagined these kids as though they were wrapped in some kind of linguistic spider web, struggling to free themselves so that the world could see them, their abilities,  and their potential, more clearly. 

Further, the English medium curriculum provided by the Nepali government can be really challenging to understand, even for a native speaker. In a 9th grade math class, I had to read a geometry problem three times to understand what it was asking. It was inadvertently an English problem stacked on top of a math problem! English often added an additional hurdle to learning the basics. 

As real-time, machine translation gets better and better, I wonder if the arguments for English medium instruction may lose ground. In a future school, what if students simply choose their most comfortable language for instruction, enjoying the benefits of transparent translation? Until then, I’m not sure where I fall on the question. Teaching in English may limit what kids can learn in terms of content and skills. On the other hand, while Nepali medium may allow them to achieve greater content mastery, not speaking English could limit their future options. It’s a hard choice, and one I know that generations of teachers, scholars and policy-makers will continue to actively debate. 

Teaching as we were taught

In Nepal (as in many other countries) students are required to take a series of standardized exams which act as gateways to further education or employment. How students perform on these exams becomes a proxy for how well the school is performing. A sample from the 10th grade Science national exam (provided by a 3rd party website) gives a sense of just how Kafkaesque it all is: 

The first question has a typo that makes it nonsensical. The second is not solvable without more information. Even if the questions were rephrased to make sense, why should a student be graded on their ability to answer questions that ChatGPT could answer flawlessly in seconds? Why on earth would we gear a national education system to prepare students for these kinds of tests? 

Of course, this problem isn’t unique to the Nepali education system.  ChatGPT4 can already pass AP exams used for college placement in the USA. Education experts have been saying for decades that schools need to pivot to train children in skills that are uniquely human. Perhaps ChatGPT can create the crisis that finally prompts us to replace the obsolete industrial model of teaching and learning. School should cultivate the abilities computers don’t have. Rather than teaching to tests, school should help us develop emotional intelligence, engage in creative work, solidify our moral code, build with our hands, and follow our curiosity. 

And yet, old habits die hard.  In Nepal, many teachers have been trained to believe that their students will be best prepared to pass the exam if they teach from the government textbook, often word for word.  Frustration is assumed. Boredom is the expectation. Several adults asserted that if children (and teachers) are having fun, they are probably not learning, and vice versa. Few seem to be asking about the merit of continuing to teach to these tests, let alone what system will replace them. 

After observing classes for a couple of weeks, I was invited to guest teach a few science and math classes. In addition, I guest led the school’s science club. The first week was a set of soda bottle rockets I learned about on YouTube that went off with a “bang!” The second week was the classic egg drop, which was perhaps the most memorable moment of 6th grade for me, 30 years ago. Building contraptions to do spectacular things with household items was the highlight of my STEM education, and I was eager to pass it on. From the feedback I got, kids and teachers both had fun and learned a lot. I got so many requests to teach additional classes that the teachers invited me to their faculty meeting to share how I developed my lesson plans. In the end, most teachers seemed hesitant to try a different style of teaching. I can’t blame them: it’s hard to teach anyway other than how we were taught.  But we also can’t learn new approaches until we see them.  I have no illusions that STEM education will be transformed as a result of a few classes I led, but I imagine that YouTube may prompt teachers to make small experiments like these, and some students will find their unexpected talent and delight in STEM as a result. 

The heartbreak of visiting government schools

Three weeks in, we realized that the boys might think all Nepali schools looked like Kopila, so we went to visit a couple of nearby government schools. We arrived at the first around 9:30am to find about 20 students playing in the trash strewn yard. The school house was locked and there were no adults to be found. The headmaster eventually arrived and, upon seeing he had visitors, directed the students to clean up trash and raise the Nepali flag.

As he unlocked the doors of each classroom, I noticed that the basic tools I expected to find – books, paper, and pencils – were largely absent.  Visibly present were another set of tools: switches and sticks. I had heard that physical violence is common in Nepali public and private schools, but it was still shocking to see live evidence of it. 

When we arrived at the second school, once again there were no teachers visible. We saw one little boy chasing another across the yard. Upon closer examination, I saw that he had a stick in his hand and that he was actually hitting the other boy across the back as they entered their teacher-less classroom. The boy with the stick was the “class captain” tasked with herding his classmates into the classroom. Once they were seated, he kept his stick nearby as they focused on their textbooks. Remarkably, and disconcertingly, it worked. I think Rio and Luca were just as shocked as we were. 

Nepal has about 325,000 K-12 teachers. It’s estimated that approximately 80,000 of them are absent from school on any given day. While a teacher absenteeism rate of 25% would be headline news in the US, it’s unfortunately typical in many low income countries. I imagine that many teachers who grew up going to schools without teachers understand this pattern to be a normal part of schooling. The result is that most families who can afford private schools enroll there, where teachers are more likely present.

Seeing so many kids trying so hard to learn in the absence of a teacher is heartbreaking, but I felt a glimmer of hope, too. While there is no substitute for a skilled instructor, it does seem like a matter of time before textbooks are replaced with cheap tablet computers enabling kids to learn basic literacy and numeracy from a computer.  EdTech entrepreneurs have been advancing these concepts for decades. Large randomized controlled trials suggest that groups like Imagine Worldwide will make it happen for millions of kids in the coming decade. Tablets won’t solve Nepal’s education crisis, but given the costs of inaction, it’s a “moonshot” I’m ready to get behind. 

Divine protection

Our last day in Surkhet, we had the opportunity to join the Kopila kids to celebrate Holi. In preparation, the boys and I turned to YouTube to educate us on the history and significance of the holiday. We watched at least four different videos and got four completely different stories. Unlike Jews, Christians or Muslims, who can turn to the Torah, Bible and Quran for a unified story, Hindus are not expected to worship with a book in hand. In fact, literacy is not a requirement to become a Hindu priest. Instead, the broad range of gods, stories, and traditions make room for Hinduism to accommodate a diversity of interpretations. 

We’d joined the Kopila family in “playing Holi” on the banks of a river. As the kids gathered in a circle, Holi color in hand, I braced myself for what staff had told me could be an aggressive frenzy. We counted down  “3-2-1 Happy Holi!” and then the surprise came. Rather than being immediately blinded with flying powder, a small child got up on her tiptoes and gently placed some color on my forehead. Another painted my hair and beard.  Another, placed a few soft handprints on my shirt. Most kids held my face, each making eye contact, as they streaked color down my cheeks. The exchange felt gentle and intimate as we looked each other in the eyes and said, “Happy Holi”. 

I thought back on the Holi stories we’d watched the night before. In all of them, a boy named Prahlad ended up in a fire and emerged unharmed, protected by Vishnu. His face was smeared with ash from the flames, a mark of divine protection. Today, we smear festive colors in the place of ash to mark loved ones deserving of divine protection. In this way the holiday shifts from what I’d envisioned as a free-for-all color fight to an expression of our love and desire to protect each other from whatever harms may come. 

It was the perfect way to end our time there. Over the weeks together, we had grown close with the Kopila family, and wished nothing more than to mark their children for a life of health, safety, and love under divine protection.  

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