In this interview, you’ll hear from Townsend Dotterer, a Peace Corps Agriculture volunteer in Nepal. Townsend shares what daily life looks like, the work being done, and how service has shaped their personal and professional growth. You’ll learn about housing, cultural differences, project work, language learning, and what it’s like to live and work in a new country. This interview offers a real look into Peace Corps service and what future volunteers can expect.
Table of Contents
- Volunteer Experience and Motivation
- Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
- Surprises and Challenges
- Advice and Support
- Practical Tips and Language Learning
- Social Identity
- Impact of Media and Final Thoughts
Volunteer Experience and Motivation
1. What do you do as a Peace Corps Agriculture volunteer in Nepal?
There’s no such thing as a “normal” day for an Agriculture volunteer here in Nepal. Some days there’s field work to be done, some days you need to meet with your local government official, some days you need to get some computer work done, some days you spend helping your neighbors inspect their beehives or make an organic insecticide, and some days–when it rains torrentially–you spend most of the day reading a good book.
The main agricultural work here relies on planting corn, then rice, then millet–every year. These planting seasons are accomplished only through the nature of cooperative farming (and complemented with lots of home-gardening in between). As an agriculture volunteer, you can almost always find some field work to do, and can always rely on being invited over for tea afterwards.
2. Why did you decide to join the Peace Corps and serve in Nepal?
I thought about the Peace Corps a lot throughout college–interested in the depth of 2 years of service, living with a host family, and experiencing the complexities of another culture first-hand. The two-year commitment initially seemed a bit intimidating, but when I spent 8 months living abroad after college, I realized how much time it takes to build community and begin to dig into that.
So at the end of that period of living abroad, I excitedly submitted my application. I decided on Nepal because of its mountains, its spiritual traditions, and the way that others talked about Nepali people and culture–the welcoming kindness that I now know very well.
Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
3. What is your housing like in Nepal?
I currently live in a rural village about 4500 ft above sea level–where the nearest bazaar (city) is about a 3-hour bus ride away. I live with my aama (mother) and my baba (father), who are both in their early 60s. We have a medley of animals that keep us company–goats, dogs, chickens, and cats.
Occasionally, my 94-year-old bhuju (grandmother) comes to stay with us to help out with household and agricultural chores. We have electricity and water that runs from a tank on the top of our house, and our house is one of the only cement houses in the village (the others being traditional mud-based structures).
We eat dahl baat–lentil soup, rice, a variety of vegetables, and some variety of chutney–every day, twice a day. While the twice-a-day, same-meal structure might seem repetitive and boring to some, I find the consistency to be comforting, and there is always much variety in the vegetables we eat or the chutney prepared. My aama cooks for the whole family every day, twice a day, and the love with which she prepares and serves food makes it undeniably delicious.
4. What moments or interactions stand out during your service?
I think overall, my host family has been the most influential part of my experience. One of the first times I left my village, for an In-Service Peace Corps training, my host parents called to make sure I had arrived safely–and called me every day of the training after that to check in. It’s incredible how much love you can have for people you have so little in common with and who you’ve spent so little of your life with.
But this experience of having your host family as your coworkers, your best friends, your teachers, and your family is a relationship unlike any other you’ll have in your life. This is the second marriage for both my host father and my host mother, so I am the only child they have had together–and I feel so blessed for this. They have made me truly feel like their own daughter.
Surprises and Challenges
5. What has surprised you most about living or working in Nepal?
What has felt most different to me since working in Nepal has been the cooperative nature of village work–which creates a sense of community deeper than any I have felt before. Pretty early on, I was stunned to experience the way that when a community celebration occurs, every person from the village shows up. During major planting seasons, men, women, and various caste groups all plant together and eat together in the fields–which has quickly become my favorite season in Nepal as a result.
When a community member dies, or the roads in the village need to be cleaned, there is a full community turnout. Sometimes this is challenging too because people have field work, but if there is a need, everyone is there to support. This version of community as family has made my Peace Corps experience all the easier as well–as I pretty early on felt like I had gained 200+ new family members, and I feel grateful that I was welcomed into that sense of community from the beginning.
6. What challenges have you faced in your Agriculture work, and how did you respond?
Most of the younger generation of Nepalis have moved abroad or to Nepal’s larger cities for work opportunities, which means the village populations mostly consist of 60+ year-old farmers–an age particularly disinclined to behavior change. This has been challenging in my work because a lot of new farming methods I aim to promote are met with much resistance.
To combat this, I have used the few younger farmers and farmers who are more motivated to try new things as a tool to communicate to other farmers. This means a lot of one-on-one training with the more inclined farmers, who will then facilitate these learnings in farmer-to-farmer trainings.
Once one farmer tries a technique and has success, it catches like wildfire on the village scale. YouTube videos and photos have also been helpful in illustrating the benefits of certain techniques like pruning tomatoes, intercropping, or making natural pesticides. At the end of the day, the best you can do is try.
7. What secondary projects have you worked on during your service?
My best friend in my village is the headmaster of the primary school in our village–which currently has ten students. I, rather informally, go to the school once a week to play games in English, to lead creative movement activities (which often means dancing), and to facilitate some arts-and-crafts activities. It’s a nice opportunity to be with the kids but also to help support the teachers because the school is pretty underfunded and lacks resources.
I am also on the Peer Support Network for Peace Corps Nepal, which has been a nice way to connect with and support fellow volunteers. We write a monthly newsletter, plan virtual events, and support other volunteers over the phone, or whatever they might need. It’s been a really nice way to connect with other volunteers and to support a broader sense of community among volunteers.
Advice and Support
8. What advice would you give to future Agriculture volunteers in Nepal?
Coming in, I was very nervous because of my lack of technical agriculture skills, but I would encourage any prospective volunteer interested in agriculture to apply-the most important thing to have is curiosity, and the knowledge will come along with that.
On that same note, I encourage future agriculture volunteers to be open to whatever experiences might present themselves in terms of agriculture. If a neighbor invites you to go to their field, go–even if you just go for 30 minutes–go. If you see someone doing a task in the field you’re unfamiliar with, ask why and ask if you can learn. People will appreciate the curiosity, and when it comes time for you to be the teacher, you will have already built that trust.
I also encourage asking your host family if you can have a small garden plot for your own experimentation; it’s a great, low-stakes way to try stuff out, and if something goes well, you have an easy demo area to show your successes.
9. How did Peace Corps training prepare you for service?
I think Peace Corps training most readily prepared me with the skills for expecting and addressing challenges. While technical and language training were both helpful and necessary, I think some of the most important lessons I learned during training were cultural learnings that arose in living with a host family those first few months. It was really valuable for me to be in the safe, controlled environment of PST (Pre-Service Training) to discuss new cultural understandings with Peace Corps staff and other volunteers before heading to site.
Of the technical things I learned, I have found the most useful to be beekeeping training and mushroom-making training for my life and projects at site. But the tools I use every day are still understanding how to navigate cultural differences–and what tools I have to help me navigate them.
Practical Tips and Language Learning
10. What would you tell future volunteers to pack—or leave behind?
Power outages are pretty frequent in Nepal, particularly during monsoon season, so having a power bank, a charged eReader, and a battery-powered headlamp have proved to be some of my useful possessions here. In terms of creature comforts, my childhood stuffed animals, a few of my favorite poetry books, and Bananagrams have served me well. I am also a big coffee drinker–so having a hand grinder to grind and brew fresh, local beans every morning (and the occasional afternoon) in my Aeropress has made a world of difference!
I brought a lot of colder-weather gear that I thought I might need–but I’ve neglected most of the heavier stuff to opt for lighter layers, which I recommend in the range of temperatures that one can experience in a day in Nepal. More generally, I brought a lot of clothes I don’t wear that much–my advice is to pick a few outfits (preferably quick-dry, comfortable, athletic clothing for fieldwork) that you know you’ll wear a lot and stick with those.
11. How has language learning been for you in Nepal?
When I got to the region where my site is, I felt humbled by the difference in regional dialect in my village compared to the region where we did our formal language training during PST. For the first few weeks, I was mostly left to my own thoughts, with little understanding of what was going on around me, but every time I heard a new word, I would write it down on a sticky note and attach it to my wall with its English translation. My wall quickly turned into a dictionary, and slowly I began to piece together the informal verb endings used in my region.
I live in a village where the Gurung indigenous language is the most commonly spoken, which also presented another obstacle to my language learning–the language I was trying to learn was hardly spoken and was dominated by one I had limited knowledge of. About six months into service, after I had developed some sense of routine, I started meeting with a virtual tutor to learn Nepali and a tutor in my village to learn written Nepali and the Gurung language. This, along with my host father’s corrections of my grammar, has greatly improved my language and my confidence in these skills.
Social Identity
12. How has your personal identity shaped your service experience?
One of the most challenging parts of my experience here in Nepal has been the pretty strict gender roles for women. Women are expected to do most of the housework, field work, and child care work. “Thank you” is not a commonly used phrase in Nepali culture, relative to how frequently it is used in the US–so the lack of praised gratitude for all that women do here has felt equally as frustrating.
This was, and continues to be, one of the most challenging parts of my daily life. I often feel the burden to try to relieve at least some of my host mother’s responsibilities, but I often find myself exhausted after doing only a small fraction of the work she does every day. There’s definitely an American sort of “other” that allows for a bit more fluidity in gender roles here, but with all that women are doing around me every day, it feels necessary to try to do as much as they do.
When my host mother goes out of town for a night or two, I feel the weight of cleaning, cooking, caring for the animals, etc.–the house mostly falls apart when the matriarch of the family leaves.
13. Did your identity lead to specific challenges or situations?
There have been a few times when men are not carrying their weight in a group setting or when women are doing the majority of the work, and I find myself very frustrated, with little power to alter the situation.
Instead, I try to support women in their work–whether that means cutting vegetables to help make dinner-time work a bit easier, insisting on doing the dishes, or helping out in the fields. There’s a lot of camaraderie in female teamwork here, which has also led to me supporting the creation of four different female-led farmers’ groups in the two villages I work in. So I think I have learned, from the women in my village, how to find strength within the challenge.
14. What advice do you have for volunteers who share your identity?
It can be hard to avoid applying our biases to cultural norms that feel “unethical” or “wrong” to us, and that’s only human. But I do think it is important to view a culture through its own lens. It can feel really frustrating to see the responsibilities put on women here and the lack of gratitude or appreciation given to them, but what I have learned is that most women here feel a deep sense of boredom if they’re not constantly busy with work, and that for most mothers in Nepal, preparing food for others is an act of devotion and love. Which is not to say they don’t deserve more support and gratitude and days off within this role, but to say I had made assumptions that weren’t entirely true. So my advice is to be patient and open-minded in your cultural assumptions and to support those who need as much as you can.
Impact of Media and Final Thoughts
15. If you share content online, how has that shaped your service?
I have a Substack page, which has been a great outlet for me emotionally and has also allowed my friends and family to be more involved in my journey. It’s given me a space to be vulnerable about my experiences, reflections, and hardships and also a space to share pride in the victories of my experiences. It’s been nice to have friends and family reach out about experiences I have shared or observations I have made. I have never been very good at journaling, but having a blog has held me accountable to sharing my thoughts, to keep track of my journey, and to share photos and memories.
16. What final advice would you share with future volunteers?
I think there’s a super important line to toe between making space for yourself and being out and about in your community. The first few months can be especially challenging in trying to navigate this– trying to integrate, but also feeling really tired of integrating. Sometimes you need to take a day to read your book, but often serendipitous things come from just leaving the house, even if you find it hard to motivate yourself to do so (I promise it’s usually worth it).
So my advice is to set your boundaries early on and know that everything gets easier with time. Later on, it’s fun to reflect with your community on what it was like when you first arrived at the site. Cherish these relationships, find the people in your community who support you and care for you, and stick with them. Know that time goes shockingly fast, and seize the days when you can read your book all day. Peace Corps work is really the best (and hardest) decision you can make–my advice is to do it!
Are you thinking about joining the Peace Corps? If you’re curious about service and ready for something new, apply today. Like Townsend, you can live abroad, work with communities, and grow in ways you didn’t expect. Apply to the Peace Corps and take the next step.
The content of this post does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or Nepal Government.
