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

http://woobox.com/8syf5q/gallery/MgSlsn8vYIY

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.