How to Appreciate Running Water

“Those with ambition will always find their way.”

I always believed that success was dependent upon dedication, hard work, ambition— all those intangible descriptions that look great on paper next to the word “successful”.

That saying kept me going for years and years. I would restate, “those with ambition will always find their way,” to motivate myself to do the hard things that life threw at me, so naturally, I was inclined to believe that you just need some grit, a never-ending source of inspiration, and a relentless work ethic to be successful... or so I thought.

That is, until, I volunteered with Global Vision International (GVI), an organization that specializes in community service abroad, in January 2019.

For four weeks, I volunteered on service projects working within GVI’s Women’s Empowerment Program in Pokhara, Nepal. (For anyone who doesn’t know, Nepal is a country in Asia, and it’s sandwiched between Tibet and India.)

I lived with other volunteers from around the world in a Nepalese homestay. I ate traditional Nepali dishes, worked alongside locals, took a language and cooking course, and felt as ingrained into the experience as one can feel within a four-week timeframe.

My day-to-day projects involved working with survivors of sex trafficking to teach them English and prepare them for job interviews. I worked with local women, too, some of whom were sneaking away from their husbands and family to learn English— a form of sin as an education translates to a more empowered woman.

I would also travel to a very rural village and help teachers learn how to read, write, and speak English. These teachers, however, were not standing at the front of nicely decorated classrooms using iPads to correct daily coursework. The school that I volunteered at was barely distinguishable as a school. It was rundown and really small. There were few books and poster boards on the walls, one slide on the “playground”, and a more alarming fact is that school is not mandatory in Nepal. If children have the means to go, they do. If they need to work to help their families make money, they prioritize accordingly.

The students were supposed to wear uniforms, but many didn’t have money to buy them. A lot just wore their ripped and tattered pjs. The kids were often dirty and hadn’t bathed in a bit, and there were very limited resources for the children to use. They’d write with pencils that were nubs, and use any surface they could find to write on. The conditions were subpar to say the least.

One day, I walked into the classroom I volunteered in and saw a young girl who was eleven years old managing all fifteen of the four-year olds. My first instinct was to wonder why she wasn’t in school. My second thought was that she didn’t have to be.

As soon as the other volunteers and I walked in, she gravitated towards us. She was inquisitive from the beginning.

I will never forget when she asked me where I was from. I bit my tongue and answered “America”. Her eyes widened and shined as if she just found out I were a celebrity, while mine were strained trying to hold back tears.

She said, “America is my dream country. I would be so, so appreciative if I could ever go there.”

I don’t even want to continue explaining the situation. I don’t think any more details are needed, quite frankly. I just stood there in front of her and had no idea what to say. Nothing felt like it would matter. She would likely never visit the US, but I was also not about to crush this little girl’s dreams. I wanted to say, “there are so many problems there, too!” But I have heat, hot water, a high school diploma... I have everything this little girl might only ever dream of, so how could I possibly say anything that would do it justice?

After one of my first visits to the center where I worked alongside survivors of sex trafficking, I was encouraged to read a book titled Sold. It is told in the perspective of a young girl who’s sold into sex slavery. It is one of the most raw and disgusting novels I’ve ever read, but I think it’s imperative to know the truth when you’re so far from it.

SASANE was the name of the center I worked at.

In the novel, the little girl lives in a mountainous village in Nepal. She is dirt poor, and when I say dirt poor I mean she literally thickens her soup with dirt to satiate herself on the days her family can afford to feed her. On the days she eats and the days she doesn’t, she wishes for better living conditions, one of those being a tin roof over her head.

That was when I realized: those with ambition will not always find their way.

People who live below the poverty line have tin roofs—those are far from luxurious. But here is this little girl longing for what poor people have. If she can long for what those in poverty have (material wise), you have to just imagine the conditions in which she’s living; her family is barely making it by every single day.

Before going to Nepal, I would have thought, “Okay, if she gets an education and gets a paying job she can make enough money to eventually support herself and her family. Then, she can get out of poverty and change the direction of her family’s lineage.”

Perfect. That’s a foolproof formula, right?

Only a girl who grew up in America, never had to wonder where her next meal was coming from, and had never heard of a tin roof would think that.

This little girl could not go to school. She had no chance of getting an education. She needed to work so that her family could eat. She was manipulated and tricked into working in a brothel for money; money she would never see. While there, she was continuously drugged and beaten in order to be whipped into submission and thus stay profitable.

It didn’t matter how much grit this girl had. It didn’t matter if she had a never-ending source of inspiration. You cannot succeed when your veins are being pumped with drugs so that you can be repeatedly raped and violently abused. There’s no foolproof formula for success when you’re concentrated on merely surviving.

There are a million and one reasons why I advocate for people to go abroad and volunteer. I could not name all of them if I tried.

But if there is one thing I want to get across it’s that the recipe for success is not solely dependent upon factors you may think got you to where you are.

Had you asked me a few years ago how I got accepted to college or landed a job post grad, I probably would have answered “persistence and hard work” or something of the sort.

Now, I know it’s a LOT more than that. It’s all the things I didn’t think of. It was the nutritious food I was fed, the vaccines I was given, the filtered water I was drinking, the safe transportation I was taking, the clean air I was breathing, the warm home I was living in, the safety laws in my state, the mandated education in my country, and every other little thing I never thought twice about before volunteering in a place where everything I took for granted was considered a blessing.

I never had to worry about being sold into sex slavery. I never had to worry about making money to support my immediate family, and I still to this day, have no idea what the roof over my head is made out of.

Ambition did play a part in my success. If I were complacent and unmotivated, I wouldn’t be where I am today, but ambition is not the full equation. It’s accompanied by a lot of other factors— ones I learned are not a right but a luxury.

It is vital to know that the success of an individual is not based on just the individual. No matter how you slice and dice a success story (I’m defining success in a really broad way here), any person that has accomplished anything in his/her life, has a lot of underlying components that have helped him/her along the way.

I could have looked that little girl in the eyes and said, “If you work really hard to save your money and buy a flight to the US, maybe one day you’ll get there!” But who would I be kidding? A little girl who has to care for fifteen four-year olds and whose family probably makes $1,000 a year, if that, needs money to eat, cloth herself, buy medicine, the list goes on.

Upon my return to the US, I had severe reverse culture shock. I had spent over four weeks without heat, hot water, proper sewage systems, and having to use bottled water to brush my teeth. I was constantly planning how to keep warm, which is a foreign concept to me in the US. I had always migrated from a heated home to a heated car to a heated building and back. In Nepal, I had to plan what to wear, and then add at least two layers onto that. I would boil hot water and pour it into a tea cup to keep my hands warm. I would sleep with hot water bottles and sometimes wear my coat to bed.

A hot water bottle that I slept with.

I had a hard time readjusting to my life when I got back. I didn’t have to think about getting warm anymore; I just walked into a heated house. I didn’t have to boil water to take a shower; I just turned the dial to “hot”.

The roads in the US are well paved (you don’t know how good we have it until you’re driving on the edge of mountains without guardrails on narrow roads covered in potholes). I could eat any fresh vegetable or fruit I wanted without thinking twice. I always had working wifi or some type of cell signal. It just felt as if my life at home were too easy, almost. I felt guilty and wrong in so many ways, and for a few weeks I just sat in my room while all my friends finished up college, having the best time of their lives, and thinking, “how do I reassimilate?”

I was born into a first world country and into a family where my bare necessities were met. I cannot change how I got here.

What I can change is how I think about my blessings and my successes. I can change how I interact with others. I can change how I view other people’s “failures” and successes, too. That, I have control over.

Going to Nepal changed everything for me. It made me realize that it’s not just about how hard you work. Sometimes societal structure and entire entities are the reason people don’t succeed. The fact that it’s 2020 and there are people around the world who still don’t have heat or hot water in their homes, pains me in a way I can’t quite describe.

There are nights when I purposely wash my face with cold water before bed to remind myself that turning the dial to “hot”, is not a right but a luxury. Likewise, ambition may have been present in my success stories but so was my running water.