I’ve just arrived in Nepal for our second research and training collaboration with students and faculty from Berkeley, UCSF and the University of Puthisastra in Cambodia. Last year, this was a blast, brought me amazing new friends, and created my first chances to present our work internationally in California, India and Cambodia. This year we have a big group of sixteen people descending in to our Pokhara valley to five overlapping projects over the course of a week.

Getting ready for this research collaboration is, and was last year, somewhat like putting on a Broadway show. In the office we currently have just three full time staff, and they are responsible for getting all of the necessary government permissions in place, mobilizing unofficial social leaders whose support we need in rural areas, recruiting hundreds of participants for focus groups and surveys, securing transportation to remote villages (the entire group fills two buses), organizing food in rural areas where we can only eat at people’s homes, and not least of all, coordinating with our nearly 20 field staff to make sure everyone shows up from their respective villages for a week. On top of that, we need to design and print 40 logoed shirts, get hundreds of survey printouts, and translate multiple documents between languages. Our amazing office team of Muna, Gaurab and Rajendra manage to steamroll through all of this while keeping our regular work afloat across ten villages.

My role is to keep the different project streams sorted and to bridge between our foreign visitors and the reality of the ground situation in Nepal. I have an excel file featuring no less than ten tabs, tracking everything from hotel rooms to project leaders and bios to budgets. This is because, let’s say we need to buy 40 printed sweatshirts. That seems simple (nope), except that we have people ranging in size from Soba, our Team Leader in Sindure who is about the volume of a pencil holder, to me at 5’8” and a dozen foreign students of various heights and widths. So figuring out what sizes to order and then finding someone who can give us such a large quantity of them and print them on time is an entire spreadsheet. Everything gets more hectic when you are multiplying gaps in planning by 40, dropping them in the gap between two languages, and adding in the overall entropy of the Nepal environment. Do you know what happens when you show up with three dozen people for a project at an empty community building at the top of a hill and you didn’t think to plan ahead how many chairs you might need there? Or, let’s just say you don’t have enough pens?

Chaos, my friends. Chaos happens.

Appreciate my spreadsheet

I will write about the different project streams of this year’s collaborations in upcoming posts. But they include focus groups, observations of schools and shopkeepers, a survey on maternal and child oral health and nutrition, an oral health status survey being conducted by a British student who has also joined us, and last but not least, an ENTIRE WEEK OF TECHNICIAN TRAINING which I am so excited about I can hardly handle it.

For now, here we are just after I arrived in the office yesterday. I sat down to debrief with the team and doled out Amercian candy and Race to the Rock tshirts. Within a short time, my two favorite creatures came busting through the door and started stuffing all of the office candy in to both their faces and their pockets. Before the performance begins this week, it was lovely to land here in our red-carpeted office and find this cheerful team, to listen and observe as they jammed about how hard they’ve worked to support each other with this complex preparation, and to see the pride they are taking in seeing things come together. It is a wonderful feeling to see our tiny but mighty team take on a cohesive identity as host to visitors, and I especially enjoyed the trill that these three were getting out of how much more they know about doing this than they did last year.  We are all on a steep and exciting learning curve as we introduce the world to the efforts we’ve been making here over these years.

Ok ok ok ok…bring it on!

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