In this inspirational testimony, Carine Verleye talks about her first meeting with Pranab, our YouBridge ambassador in Nepal.
Barbara and I have just arrived from Europe, we’re both jetlagged. We’ve invited Pranab to the quiet garden of a fancy hotel in Thamel, Kathmandu’s busiest area.
Quiet? We’d forgotten all about the electricity generator. It makes an awful noise.
“That’s one of the reasons I want to become an engineer,” says Pranab. “To do away, at least, with our electricity problems. Did you know Kathmandu only gets 3 hours of electricity during the day? Four at night, but that’s hardly useful for a student. That’s why it’s important to have a laptop with a long-lasting battery.”
We’re inviting Pranab to a drink, but he is eager to see the YouBridge notebook we have brought with us.
So we decide to make a little ceremony and hand the notebook over in a very solemn way, and take a photograph to show to the donors.
“My daughter Lisa has charged the battery, Pranab, but you’ll still have to register.”
It’s no problem to Pranab. He seems to have forgotten all about us, he’s so absorbed in checking out the computer. He’s smiling all the time, he seems very proud! The battery pleases him, but he’s a bit disappointed because the notebook doesn’t have a cd-rom drive, essential in a country with so little electricity supply.
We talk about possible solutions: “Maybe you can buy an external cd-rom drive here? But wouldn’t that slow down the computer too much?” Pranab is not very worried about it.
He says he’ll discuss it with Lut, the ICT teacher from Ghent who will participate in coaching the YouBridge Nepal project from the Belgian side, and they’ll come up with a solution.
Papers are handed over: Pranab is to be the YouBridge ambassador for Nepal, and he’s thrilled about the job! We sign an official agreement and talk about what his task will be: coaching the people who will receive a YouBridge notebook, making sure contact between donor and recipient is established, acting as “a bridge” between Nepal and Belgium.
We exchange some news about our lives, our families, our dreams.
Pranab tells us it’ll be his birthday soon: in March. He’s just a month older than my daughter! So I give him her e-mail address and he promises to invite her to become his friend on Facebook. He tells us he’s currently staying at a hostel in Kathmandu, it costs 2 euro a night, far too expensive for a student, he’s hoping to find a new place to stay soon.
“You’re from Pokhara, Pranab?”
“Yes, my family still lives there. They go to great lengths to allow me to study here. What I’m also interested in, do you think it would be possible to establish a link between our engineering department and an engineering department at a Belgian university?”
We promise to do our best. To me, this seems very close to the YouBridge ideal: establishing a relationship between like-minded people all over the world. I know from experience how rewarding and interesting that can be.
We tell him about our personal dreams: my Berlin friend Barbara wants to write about education in Nepal, articles for German newspapers. My dream is to develop educational materials that are cheap, child-friendly and environmentally-friendly, materials that can be used in Nepalese primary schools and that can inspire Nepalese teachers. It is already going well and Pranab promises to help wherever and whenever he can.
Then we talk about computers.
“How many students have a computer in Nepal, Pranab?” He thinks some 5 % of university students have one, the others go to cybercafés, but that’s quite an expensive solution.
Yet, Nepalese students are very much into ICT – even though they might not have a computer themselves, they all have e-mail addresses and are into social networks like Facebook.
“Facebook is quite interesting,” says Pranab. “But there’s also a danger to it.” “A danger?”
“Yes, once you start, you can spend hours on it – that’s not so good for your studies…”
We laugh about it.
It’s nearly time to leave. Pranab gives us some more advice: “Always make sure you give some official papers to the people who bring the notebooks into Nepal. Stamps are important too. For customs.” “We’ll tell YouBridge, Pranab.” “We’ll stay in contact over the Internet. If there’s anything I can do for you, please tell me.”
We still want to do some tourist shopping in Kathmandu. Pranab is going in the same direction. Time to say goodbye. We’re quite happy about this first meeting and a bit sad because we’re only staying in Nepal for a short time and won’t have the chance to meet again.
Then Pranab is on his way to the hostel he stays at. He is taken up by the Thamel crowds.
We see him walk away, lightly, the laptop case in his right hand. A happy young man.
Carine Verleye
. A typical feature of myself is that I’m always trying to be as creative as possible. That’s why I spent my spare time making jewelry, shooting photo’s with my digital camera or maybe ‘pimping’ my schoolbooks to a kind of scrapbook. Since this month, I follow a Spanish course but Icelandic still stays my favourite language (although I don’t understand a word of it). I live in Asse, close to Brussels, where I also go to school. I study economy-mathematics at Koninklijk Atheneum Vijverbeek. And that’s where I first found out about YouBridge..