An Educate the Children Volunteer Resurfaces
From 1994 until 2002 Educate the Children ran a volunteer program in Nepal. As time goes by we've learned that this program had a big impact on the lives and careers of many of them. Tim Whyte volunteered with Educate the Children in 1994, so he was one of the first to participate in the program. Here is Tim's story.
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Linda Farthing ran into Tim in Bolivia and interviewed him so that we could learn about what he's done since his time in Nepal.
In my introduction to a January 2007 talk for a group of Danish high school students in La Paz, Bolivia, I mentioned working in Nepal. One of the group's coordinators approached me after the talk and said he too had worked in the Nepal. That was when we discovered we had both worked with ETC! - Linda Farthing
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I first went to Nepal when I was 18, just out of high school. I had been very socially and politically active in high school and wanted to go to a Third World country. I spent seven months in South Asia - first working in Calcutta, India with Mother Theresa. I was very inspired by the devotion and commitment of the sisters to these often terminally ill people.
After travelling some around India, I arranged to meet Pamela Carson and volunteer with ETC in Kathmandu. I worked in Shishu Vidyashram where there were about six or seven ETC sponsored kids. I taught English for three months and lived in the hostal with the kids. There were times it wasn't easy, some of the teachers beat the children to discipline them and I wasn't used to this. However the principal and his family were kind to me. In the last two weeks, I went to Chitwan and did some documentation work for ETC in its program there.
My experience in Nepal with ETC left me with a strong desire to return. I went to study at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In my third year, I studied in Nepal through the University of Wisconsin program, and for my independent project, I got inspired to record the testimony of people who had been slaves but supposedly had been given land in the Terai under the Rana regime. I had read of testimonies taken of former slaves in the southern United States, and I wanted to do something similar in Nepal.
Well, I found out that these people had never been given land, only their masters had been given compensation. So my research turned into a thesis on slavery in Nepal. After I graduated from university and returned to Denmark, I went to work in MS, which can be loosely described as the Danish version of the Peace Corps. I worked for three years on a campaign in western Nepal to free bonded laborers. It was very exciting because the organization I worked with BASE, had a very broad base of support and had worked in 670 mainly Tharu villages in six districts in western Nepal. In 2002, the Nepali government finally enforced their own law against bonded labor, and overnight 30,000 laborers were thrown off the land during monsoon. Most people eventually got land as part of the Maoist-government peace agreement. I was also involved in writing an introduction to the book of photographs by Australian Peter Lowe called Kamaiya: Between Slavery and Freedom (2001) which chronicles much of the struggles of the bonded laborers.
In 2004, I started working with Operation A Day's Work. This organization began in Scandanavia after UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjold was killed in a plane crash. Every year high school students choose a project and a country to work on, and then raise money for it. (Ed. Note. The US version of Operation A Day's Work funded ETC in 2002!). The organization is youth controlled and youth run. My job as director is to help the board made up of high school students get their ideas for the organization turned into practice. The organization's goal is to create awareness among students about development issues. This year the students chose a project in Bolivia which is why we are here
I enjoy this job very much but am very keen to go back to Nepal. I met my wife there, and now we have a two year old daughter. I've been studying journalism and hope that I might some day get to use those skills to get more information out about Nepal. Going to Nepal to work with ETC all those years ago, started me on this path and commitment to the country and to the issues found in Nepal and all over the world in low-income countries.