Hello from our Luxembourgish homes this time,

where we are both currently trying to make dal bhat (emphasis on “trying”) while listening to Nepali music. Thinking about days when Covid-19 didn’t make use so frustrated. The crisis has meant for us that we could only do 5 months of our 6-month voluntary service.

We both feel similarly weird being back, like we’ve lost Nepal but got nothing to replace it with. It has been good to take things easy while we adjust and let Nepal sink in, at the same time, we’re not really knowing what to do with ourselves really. In Nepal we were super busy and very free and in Luxembourg we’re in a place where it’s the complete opposite. 

We just got “swept away” right back to where we started with the Corona wave, before we even knew what was happening. One thing we’ve both heard from our volunteering friends that it hurts to say goodbye “just like that”, especially when saying it to young people for whom you really didn’t want to become one of the people that left without an explanation. Many of us have worked hard to engage with the beneficiaries in SAATH & SCLC, and now it feels like we’re letting them down in the most irresponsible way. And maybe all of us volunteers are being a little hard on ourselves here because leaving was not really our decision, and there was also no way we could’ve suspected things to take this turn. 

Maybe it’s just that in these circumstances, we have the normal feelings that everyone has when big things end before you can personally draw a finishing line to them, but we have the feelings in an accentuated version, 

And for any volunteer, it’s probably normal to feel like the end came super quickly, but at least they knew it was approaching. What’s really sad for us is that Corona “stole” our end, and we all had to leave with this super accentuated feeling of things going too fast, and then being over without us being able to draw our own finishing line. 

As a final word, we both would like to say thank you to the ONGD-FNEL who made our EKHDAM RAMRO experiences possible, we both fell completely in love with Nepal and will be going back as soon as we can! 

Please take care and stay in good health

Tilly & Cathy