I decided I was going to take a year out quite early on, when I was in year 11. I researched many options from conservation work in Africa, to working in a zoo in Sri Lanka, to working on a summer camp in America. My requirements became clearer as I researched: I wanted something that would be challenging; I wanted to go to a place different from anywhere I’d been before; and I wanted to do something that was aimed at really benefiting the people I would be working with rather than just giving me a good holiday.

The organisation and placement I finally chose fitted perfectly into these criteria. It was to be in the stunning mountain kingdom of Nepal lasting 8 months in total from September of 2003 to May of 2004, with the youth organisation Student Partnership Worldwide. Named the Health Education Programme, it was to focus on teaching school children and locals about relevant health issues that affect them. The drawback was the £3300 I needed to raise, covering flights, accommodation, food and travel for the duration of the placement. Here was where the challenge started!

Fundraising however turned out to be quite a lot of fun in the end. I compiled a detailed proposal to send off to trust funds requesting money, organised a sponsored five day hike with seven of my friends and then there was all the money I had been saving up from my two years of weekend jobs. In the end I managed to raise most of the money myself, and was quite proud of this first time achievement!

After sorting out vaccinations, kit, travellers’ cheques, bank accounts and visas there remained the biggest hurdle of the whole adventure – to say good bye to everyone at home, take a deep breath and get on that plane.

Training lasted one month and took place in two different areas of the Kathmandu Valley. Throughout the month we received sessions on the four focus areas: HIV/AIDS, nutrition, reproductive health and hygiene and sanitation. Alongside this we did about four hours a day of intensive Nepali language training.

The first part of training was held in a small town called Dhulikhel in the south-east of the Kathmandu Valley. We stayed in dingy, rickety looking hotel of several floors with a fantastic rooftop view over the surrounding town and terraced paddy fields that covered the hillsides. Here we received our first fascinating and disorientating experiences of Nepalese culture and lifestyle.

Each day began at about 6am with a yoga session, followed by the ubiquitous sweet Nepali tea. This would be follwed by the first session of the day, then at 10am we would be served the traditional meal of dal bhat taarkari. Sessions then continued throughout the day until about 5pm, when we would have two hours off before dal bhat at 7pm. Some evenings there would be some eductaional activity organised for us, other days we would entertain ourselves.

One of our favourite games to play was called ‘Maffia’. It involved one mediator dealing out cards to determine in secret who was to be in the Maffia. Then at each go the maffia would silently kill one person while the others had their eyes closed and the people had to guess who was in the Maffia and trial them. It was great fun and really helped us to get to know each other and settle in.

A couple of days in the week were reserved for relaxing and exploring, which were spent wandering around the town staring in fascination at the buildings, the people, the temples, the children and wrinkling our noses at the often offensive variety of smells. I also bought my first two kurta sewaals, quite a complex process involving choosing the aterial I wanted then taking it over to the tailor’s and choosing the style I wanted and having my measurements taken. When I first donned my new gear I felt like a clown…I couldn’t imagine how I was ever going to feel comfortable wearing it!

While in Dhulihkel, we were given preparation sessions for our three weeks in Godawari. However, no matter how hard we tried to imagine it, we simply couldn’t be really prepared for what it was going to be like there.

The village was small and staggered on a hillside in the south of Kathmandu Valley. It consisted of maybe 30 houses and a tea shop, which I was pleased to live very close to, as it became our regular place of congregation! We were split into pairs and each lived with one host family. We followed their daily routine, having to get used to home-cooked dal bhat, scant kaajaa (a lunch time snack), washing ourselves and our clothes under the tap and using the family’s Nepali toilet Nepali style!

Our sessions became more varied and detailed, with people coming in to give sessions on a subject. One session I particularly remember was given by an Englishwoman called Christine Stone, who had lived in Nepal for many years and wrote the standard English textbooks for government schools in Nepal. She had some fantastic ideas for games and activities to do with large classes of children to help them to learn more effectively than the usual Nepalese approach of learning every textbook off by heart.

Towards the end of our training, everyone began to get very anxious about the upcoming placement – who would be our partners, where we would be, but mostly whether we would all be able to meet up often. All of us were reluctant to stretch the strong bonds of friendship we had formed over the last month.

My partner in crime was a lovely, softly spoken Nepalese girl call Sushila. We were assigned to the northernmost placement in the district, a village called Shivapur. When we arrived I was surprised to find that Shivapur did not seem to be any more impoverished than Godawari. However, our focus community, Kumari Gaun, just down the road from Shivapur, seemed much more as I’d expected, with its mud and straw houses and straggly children wandering around.

Our work was based in the local school, Sri Shivapur Secondary School. Mostly to make the head teacher happy, we taught lessons in English and Health on the school timetable, but our aim was to teach extra-curricular health lessons and get the ‘Green Club’ going.

We also did other activities such as teaching health and English in Kumari Gaun. On top of this, we became fully immersed in the sometimes hectic activity of our host family’s life!

Our first activity with the Green Club was to play dhaushi bhailo. This is a Nepali tradition that coincides with Tihaar, one of Nepal’s most important festivals. Tihaar lasts for a couple of weeks and each day is specific to the worship of a certain god. It so happened that we arrived on placement in the midst of the tihaar celebrations and this was a perfect opportunity to get the Green Club going with a big event.

Dhaushi bhailo traditionally involves a group of people, usually from an organisation, going around villages and houses and performing for the people there. Everyone comes out and watches and in return for the entertainment gifts of money, rice, tikka (a red powder given as holy blessing) and flowers are given, often beautifully presented.

The idea of playing dhaushi bhailo was greeted with much enthusiasm by the students, as almost all Nepalis seem to love dancing as Westerners love playing computer games. Preparations went along swiftly and we soon had a banner along with a huge crowd to join in. We visited several villages, carrying on until late at night, then getting up the next day to carry on.

In the end the Green club played for about four days in total and raised a significant amount of money on top of the costs of making the banner and hiring the sound system. It was one of the most fun and successful events of our placement!

1st December brought an important day in our volunteering calendar – World AIDS Day. We decided to celebrate by organising a rally and street drama on the theme ‘Live and let live’.

This took a huge amount of planning and involved a huge variety of people. We had three organisations completely separate to the Green Club involved including a radio club. There were rehearsals for the street drama run by members of these organisations and older Green Club members; more banners were painted; leaflets, posters and placards were donated by a local NGO and Sushila and I ran around trying to ensure than everything was going to happen as it should!

The day itself arrived, and the whole school gathered outside for its usual school assembly. Then we were amazed to find that the teachers had decided that the whole school from class 4 to class 10 should be involved in the rally – that was probably around 700 kids!! All the teacher came along, and after being organised into straggly lines we set off. The parade stretched further than I could see most of the time, especially when we were walking alongside the fields, so we must have caught some interest! However, it was very disorganised, and I got myself extremely hot and bothered running from one end to the other shouting instructions and telling stragglers off!

Finally everyone arrived back in the school field, where an elaborate stage had been set up with fancy curtains draped from bamboo poles. After about half an hour of very boring speeches (which probably scared half of the audience off) the street drama took place. It went well, including my 30 second role as a foreign organisation member which required me to recite a paragraph of Nepali, of which I understood barely a word. It was entitled ‘The Pain of a Woman’ and addressed issues such as ways in which HIV can be transmitted, discrimination of AIDS sufferers and ways of raising awareness of HIV.

Throughout the year the Green Club took part in some smaller events, as well as regular meeting activities and projects that were strted but not finished for various reasons.

In celebration of our dhaushi bhailo success, we took the members who were involved on a picnic to a river a couple of kilometres down the road, Rohini Khola.

A Nepali picnic is so far removed from our idea of a picnic that I’m surprised they call it this, yet they do actually use the English word for it! Lots of equipment is required – huge cooking pots, sacks of rice, vegetables and meat, snack foods such as chiura (beaten rice) and noodles, plus spices and oil. Then everyone sets to work together to cook an immense meal of dal bhat – often including several courses. They make the traditional rice and curry, pickles and chutneys. Our Green Club students turned out to be extremely good cooks! Following all that food we put music on (once again the students had hired a sound system) and danced and sang. Later, it being a hot day, we all ran down the banks to the river and splashed around in the water, playing games and getting thoroughly soaked through! It was a fantastic bonding session for us and the students.

Another interesting event for the Green Club was a visit from another Green Club in the district which had been established by volunteers in previous years and was still very active and strong despite the fact that there were no longer any volunteers there. We discovered the Green Club by a chance meeting with their Green Club teacher in a tea house, and managed to convince them to come all the way over to our school to show our Green Club one of their street dramas. The meeting was very enjoyable and certainly inspired both the Green Club members and us as to what we could achieve.

Shortly after Christmas our Green Club was invited to take part in a singing competition arranged by the Green Club in one of the other placements of our district. The day was a great success in many ways – not only because our group on the competition, but also because the 2 hour bike ride there and back gave me a lot of time to talk to and get to know the students as individuals. I also found it interesting to see the other placement area and school and compare them to my own.

One activity that we started as a Green Club, but unfortunately never finished, was a brainstorm on street dramas. We split the Green Club members into random groups and asked them each to come up with a theme or title and then improvise a short play from this. We hoped that this would build on their team work skills and encourage them to be creative. It was interesting during that meeting to see how well some groups got on and how other groups couldn’t even decide on a title within half an hour! However this never progressed due to lack of time and also attendance in the following meetings - this was mostly because it was close to exam time and students wanted to revise.

School activites, apart from running the Green Club, mostly involved teaching timetabled lessons. At the beginning of the placement, being naïve in the ways of the school and how much work teaching involved, we each accepted two timetabled lessons per day – mine in English, Sushila’s in health. However, as the days went on we realised that these were taking up so much of our time and attention that we weren’t thinking enough about the placement itself and the objectives set by SPW, so we cut down to one lesson each per day.

My English lesson was with Class 7, the equivalent of English year 7. In Nepal students cannot progress up the classes unless they pass the yearly exams, so therefore classes can contain a large range of ages. My class of around 60 naughty young adolescents were a complete nightmare to teach and brought me the closest I ever came to tears in public. The worst problem was the language barrier – I was not confident in my Nepali, and any attempt I made to use it was received with sniggers at my accent. However I still managed to have great fun with them, and they loved the games I played with them – designed to make them learn without realising they were learning!

The English lessons with the women in Kumari Gaun were probably my most enjoyable and relaxed experiences of teaching out there. I had a small group of mothers and grandmothers and I taught them the very basics of English – the alphabet, how to read simple words, basic conversation and handwriting. They were very shy and reluctant to speak in English, but after a few lessons I managed to get some of them to practise in front of the group. The lessons were also a very social event – we usually all drank tea together afterwards and once went out for a picnic together.

We also gave two classes to the whole village on the subjects of nutrition and hygiene and sanitation. We talked about issues such as washing hands before cooking and after using the toilet, keeping the toilet clean, not over-cooking vegetables and eating a varied diet. We received a surprisingly good turnout for each of the classes and were very pleased with the responses we had during the classes, despite their incurable shyness.