Travel letter from Nora in Nepal: A journey of contrasts

Nora Geiran Dingstad, 19, from the Jungeltelegraf1 podcast describes her experiences, meeting the young people in Samvad, the Strømme Foundation’s life skills programme in Nepal.

By Nora Geiran Dingstad, host of the podcast Jungeltelegraf1 and journalist.

On Monday morning, I started crying in the middle of a lecture. My American lecturer had just read a rather awkward quote about how hope leads to action and I raised my hand to share my thoughts – which I often do because it can be so boring to sit through an entire lecture without participating.

This spring, I’m studying conflict and conflict resolution in the city of Pokhara in Nepal through OsloMet and Culture Studies. I’m actually taking a year off from studying, so I’m mostly interested in the experience and less in the academic side. During the first half of my year off, I worked as a journalist for my local newspaper in Oslo and as a presenter in the Kavli Trust-funded podcast Jungeltelegraf1.

The weekend before the unexpected teary Monday morning, I had been on a work trip in Lumbini, a province in southern Nepal, to write articles and other content for Kavli Trust about Samvad, the Strømme Foundation’s life skills programme for adolescents that aims to put young people ‘in control of their own lives’.

With proceeds from Kavli and Q-Meieriene, Kavli Trust has supported the operation and expansion of Samvad for a number of years.

I was going to share my experiences here when I started crying.

The reason was that I had just spent two days in the field in different villages and heard young girls, as well as a few boys, ages 14 to 18 talk about their lives and what the Samvad programme has meant for them. It was a wonderful mix of painful stories, strong impressions and tears.

But what impressed me the most was how much hope these young people had for the future and how certain they were that things would improve for them. That’s why the quote spoken by my American lecturer really got to me that Monday morning.

Because in the middle of worse living conditions than I ever thought I would experience, I heard stories about deceased parents, growing up in poverty, girls who were denied an education and who saw their friends be married off before I had even finished middle school, and yet they all had a positive perspective in their stories.

The girls I met had become more self-confident and dared to voice their thoughts and hold their own in the room when talking. They were proud of the progress they had made and grateful for the opportunity to be part of Samvad. As a young woman from the other side of the world, I think that both me and other girls my age have something to learn from the Samvad participants. You often get much further when you believe in yourself and that things can change for the better.

One of the girls had stopped a friend from being married off and another had argued her way back to school after her family had denied her this. It was clear to me that these girls had learned to stand up for themselves and others, and they were eager to show how they had become stronger.

But one of the most powerful stories was told by one of the few boys who have participated in the programme. Girls are prioritised in Samvad, but there’s also room for boys. After all, societal development also depends on their participation.

Sandesh was born in 2004, making him the same age as I am. He completed the Samvad programme in 2021 as the only boy in the group. He told me that he had been teased by the other boys in the village and called a ‘Samvad boy’, but still thought it was worth being part of the programme:

“I knew the entire time that I was doing something good for society and my village, so it didn’t matter what they said.”

Sandesh was one of the young people who impressed me most. There was such a tremendous amount of courage and strength in that one sentence, which Sandesh has used to defy the incredibly normalised gender discrimination found in these villages.

Samvad is designed so that those who complete the informal one-year education programme are organised in what they call a ‘graduate forum’. These forums send representatives to a Samvad network, which usually covers a larger area than the subgroups. These young people were very familiar with the Samvad world and very self-aware. They were also just as curious about me as I was about them and asked a lot of questions.

It was these questions that really got me thinking. After all, how do you answer such questions as:

“In Nepal, women are not allowed in the kitchen or to touch other family members when they are menstruating. How about in Norway?”

“In Nepal, there is considerable gender discrimination. How about in Norway?”

These are situations that I can’t compare to Norway without sounding superior or ignorant.

I still don’t know how to best answer these questions, but I tried to respond honestly and openly. These young people are genuinely curious about how I Iive my life on the other side of the world.

For every question I answered, two new questions were asked and I got the impression that once given the chance, these young people wanted to soak up as much knowledge about the world and another culture as possible. That was, of course, also a large part of my goal with the trip, to get to know new people and learn about their lives. And the fact that they wanted the same thing allowed us to bond in a whole new way and to have more open and honest dialogue. It was comforting to experience that a joy of learning and curiosity are perhaps universal to all young people.

After this trip, one of the things I’m left with is that I am so incredibly lucky to have been born in Norway. I am also incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to go on this trip, even if it ended with tears during a Monday morning lecture.

Because had I not had this experience and broadened my horizons, I would not have had the opportunity to share everything I saw, heard and was told.
I don’t know how much it helps for me to report on my experiences with Samvad, but like my lecturer said when I started crying: “We can’t stop hoping until they have stopped hoping.”