Monthly Archives: November 2017

Oral Health Care Project, Reflections, Work

Race to the Rock ’17

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When I returned home from my first year in Nepal, I decided to train for a marathon.  I needed people to train with, so I signed up with Team in Training, an organization that raises money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  As part of the team, I had to raise about $2,000 for cancer research.  I tried asking people for money; I tried going door-to-door and asking people for money; I tried thinking about asking people for money.  I raised about $200.

It was fall and the 2004 elections were in full swing, taxing people’s interest in solicitations.  One day while I was thinking about asking people for money, I had the idea that I could invite people down to a small green in the neighborhood to do a run or walk on Thanksgiving, and ask my neighbors to donate to cancer research as part of that event.  I didn’t set an entry fee or advertise; I just started knocking on doors and saying we were having a neighborhood walk/run on Thanksgiving, and would you like to make a donation for cancer research?  The next thing I knew, I’d raised $2000 and surpassed the goal. We did the first ever Race to the Rock in 2004 with basically no props or ceremony; everybody just got together, walked around the block, and donated funds to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  It was nice to spend the morning out in the neighborhood, doing something charitable.

Well, I thought.  Hmmmm.  Innnnterrresting.

The next year I adapted the idea to start raising money for the projects I had begun in Nepal, and in the intervening decade, Race to the Rock has grown in to a run with fifty business sponsors and printed t-shirts, but where we still run a course inside the neighborhood and time people on cell phones.  I still go door to door to fundraise for this event, but after thirteen years of doing that, people invite me in to ask how it’s all going and catch me up on what’s going on with their kids and jobs. We chat about current affairs and the state of the world. Honestly, in this day and age, how often does anyone walk house to house in their neighborhood, sitting in people’s kitchens and living rooms, talking?

Sujil with his Himalayan Heritage food truck

I also do the same thing with businesses in the area, and as a result, I now know a lot of the local business managers and owners in Bethesda by name.  For example, there’s a restaurant nearby called Himalayan Heritage that’s run by a Nepali guy named Sujil.  He always buys an ad in our race program, and this year he showed up at Race to the Rock with a food truck, and gave out free food.  In the thirteenth year of this little neighborhood run – which has a $40 entrance fee, or $15/person for a whole family – we raised $22,000.  About half of that came from local businesses, and the rest from people in the community.  I find this whole relationship to be totally wonderful: at the beginning, I was working on a small non-incorporated project in the single village of Kaskikot.  Now, my neighborhood and the surrounding Bethesda area have basically supported the growth of that project in to a public health program courting the National Health Care system of Nepal…by running around the block with race numbers written on mailing labels, crossing a finish line at a tree with posters that say PLYMOUTH ROCK stapled to it.  And the best thing is that people are totally in to it.  We tried using race bibs one year and everyone was like…what is this?  You want me to do four safety pins? Are you serious?  Give me my mailing label.

The Race to the Rock organizing committee consists of me, my parents, and some incredibly helpful neighbors who hand out fliers and get the word out.  My dad puts up the tents and signs, an intricate feat with complex and demanding steps that derive from his doctoral studies in Engineering Physics. I have tried to short cut this process. Just don’t.

On the business side, my mom gets a bazillion donations from local businesses and organizes a silent auction that includes gift certificates, jewelry, tickets to all sorts of events, donated services, and chachkies of all kinds.  The weekend prior to the race, we host a Mamma Lucia pizza party at my parents’ house and kids come over to make posters for all the business sponsors (thank you Williams Crew ergathon for formative experiences in college, where I got that idea!).

I thought I’d share some photos of this year’s Race to the Rock, which was one of our best yet.  We had lots of great entries in the costume contest (you have to race in your costume) and the Useful Item contest (you have to race with an item that would have been useful on the Mayflower…past winning entries include deodorant, limes, and puzzle books).  We had beautiful weather and there was a great vibe with lots of people in the community coming out and enjoying the morning together.  We raised about a quarter of Jevaia Foundation’s annual budget too, which makes for a nice day.

And for us, what a special opportunity to see the best side of people: connected, optimistic, playful, and generous.

Happy Thanksgiving from Bethesda!  Bwk bwk bwk bwk!

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Reflections, Work

All the Pieces of Voting

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First, a public service announcement…if you’re on my email list and you’re getting this again, I’m sorry. At least it doesn’t take up any space, the way all your old 35mm photos do in their paper envelopes with the negatives falling out in the closet in your basement.  Redundant blog posts you can just delete.

Followers of All the Pieces: although this blog is only ever used for storytelling, I’m making an exception to ask you all a huge favor…I desperately, fervently, shamelessly need your votes! A few weeks ago I submitted a photo and short essay about the importance of education in my work in Nepal, and it was selected as a finalist for a $10,000 scholarship from credible.com.  The winner is decided by voting and I am losing in spectacular fashion.  And that is just no way to loose a $10,000 scholarship! Let’s at least put up a respectable showing.  I need all of you out there, wherever you are, to vote for my photo.  I call upon your cousins, the high school friends you only keep in touch with on The FaceBook, your pets and your barista.  I need them all to click on this link and click vote.

It’s very easy.  You and your barista just stand side by side, click here on your respective phones, click vote, and enter your names and email addresses.  You submit your vote and then you share the link because you want other people to be a part of this worthy movement, too.  See?  Easy!  Vote!

You can vote for my story once a day from now till Dec. 1 and I need you every day. All of you, including your relative visiting for Thanksgiving with whom you just don’t have a single thing to talk about.  You can talk about voting and helping me win a $10,000 scholarship so that my Master’s in Social Work can further my work in Nepal.  It’s like you’re doing it for YOU.

My photo and story are below, if you want to see them.  Otherwise, you and the mailman can just vote while your significant other is signing for the shipment of stuff you impulse-ordered on Black Friday.  Please???  Thank you!!  And then I will continue right on with great and wonderful stories about entertaining, unlikely and inspiring things from Nepal.

Gratefully,
Laura

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I was very lucky to grow up with a fantastic education. The summer after my junior year of college, I got to go to Nepal as part of a group studying medicinal plants. For me it was mostly an excuse to go to Nepal, a place I’d been inexplicably obsessed with for many years. It was August, and the monsoon had settled in a perpetual downy mist around the mountain peaks. One afternoon, I was walking through a rural village with the group of foreigners, and I locked eyes with a Nepali woman leaning in the doorframe of her house. ‘What a beautiful photo she would make,” I thought. And suddenly it hit me as astonishing that I’d come all the way to Nepal, to this village, right to this woman’s house, and we were still in completely separate worlds. I didn’t dare pick up my camera. Instead I thought, “I’d like to know what it’s like to stand in that house and watch people pass in the road.”

And somehow, that’s exactly what I ended up doing. After I graduated from college, I went to Nepal to volunteer in a different village called Kaskikot. It had a road running right through it where tourists would pass by. I ended up living with a widow and her two daughters my age, threw myself in to their daily routines and fieldwork, started picking up the language, and began to discover problems people were facing. At 23, I started working with teachers in Kaskikot to bring dental care to people in the village. Fifteen years later, our sustainable rural dentistry model serves an area of 50,000 people and targets the most widespread childhood disease in Nepal. We run on a very lean budget and I do all the fundraising. None of us knew a thing about dentistry when we began, but the people I was working with certainly new about their own lives. And what I knew was how to learn. That was all I needed.

About two years ago and eight rural dental clinics later – all run by rural Nepali people – we realized we were ready to try to get our model adopted in to the entire national health care system of Nepal. This put our scrappy project in meetings with government officials in charge of health policy, an arena dominated by huge international funders and public health research agendas.

And that’s when I decided to go back to school. Access to higher education is an incredible gift, not because it leads to a piece of paper, but because it opens avenues and resources and connections in the world. I’ve spent many years stripping back my academic training to work from the perspective rural farmers in Nepal. But it is my education that allows me to and bring that experience back to the institutions and structures that influence their lives.

Starting a Master’s in Social Work has given me the language of human rights to describe a project I started with no formal theory behind it. It’s helped me understand the world of research and grants, and start presenting our work to new and important audiences. With opportunity comes responsibility, and I want to use my life to be a bridge and a communicator for people who are left out. When I am in Nepal I still live in the same little house by a road in Kaskikot, with my adopted Nepali “aamaa” who cannot read or write, and I still fetch water and work in the fields with her. Now, thanks to the power of my education, I’m introducing her to you. I want #mycrediblefuture to also be my credible present: knowing when to put down the camera, but also when to pick it up.