In this interview, you’ll hear from Shay Kent, a Peace Corps Environment volunteer in Nepal. Shay 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.
Volunteer Experience and Motivation
1. What do you do as a Peace Corps Environment volunteer in Nepal?
As an Environment volunteer, I spend half my time working at the school and half my time working with the community. At the school, I teach weekly environmental lessons to grades 4 through 8 while working informally with students of all ages on English practice. I also help facilitate an Eco-club for students and support other environmental programs and activities as they come up.
In the community, I work with Community Forest User Groups to support community forestry goals. In Nepal, it’s common for communities to come together and manage a shared forest near their village, which they use for environmental conservation, firewood, fodder for animals, and income generation, so my job is to support their goals for and uses of these forests. That means I’m attending their informational and planning meetings, planting trees, working on water conservation, and providing general forest care support and information.
When I’m not working at the school or with the community forests, I’m often discussing and addressing other environmental concerns, like solid waste management and erosion, with my community. I do this both formally through trainings and community meetings and informally one-on-one while sharing a cup of tea or helping with chores like goat herding or rice planting.
2. Why did you decide to join the Peace Corps and serve in Nepal?
Joining the Peace Corps was always a consideration since I got to meet and hear the stories of a few RPCVs while growing up and loved hearing their stories. The idea of getting to learn and understand a different culture and language so deeply always sounded like an amazing experience.
Then I had the opportunity to be an intern in Uganda while I was in college, and I loved working with my rural community there, so Peace Corps felt like a natural next step.
I applied to serve where I was needed most with no expectations of where they would send me, and they ended up offering me 3 different posts. From there, I chose Nepal because the job description sounded really interesting and in line with my experience, but also I loved the idea of branching out and getting to explore a new part of the world.
Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
3. What is your housing like in Nepal?
At my permanent site I’m in a rural village of approximately 500 to 600 people. My village is a bit bigger than average but serves almost as a small hub for people from villages up the hill to come for certain goods like pantry staples and toiletries or services like a tailor or mill. We also have a few small shops that sell tea and snack foods, and most notably we have a bakery that sells donuts, cakes, and much more.
PCVs in Nepal live with a host family during Pre-Service Training (PST) and then also at their permanent sites, like I currently do. I live with a host family made up of a host grandmother, mom, 2 younger sisters (who live elsewhere during the school year), and a younger brother. Like many Nepali families, my host mom’s husband works abroad and sends money back.
Our house
Our house is made up of three buildings: a shower and bathroom in a small building, the kitchen, which is the last remaining room of the original stone and mud home that was damaged in the 2015 earthquake, and the new concrete home built after the earthquake where we all have our bedrooms and a western-style bathroom. We have a water tap outside where we collect and use most of our water because there are no sinks.
However, we cook using gas, have reasonably reliable electricity and internet, and are blessed to have a nearly year-round availability of fresh fruit from the fruit trees around the home. I’m also one of a handful of volunteers in Nepal to have a fridge, a washing machine, and hot water; while I’m not the only volunteer to have these small comforts, and they are increasingly common across Nepal, they are never guaranteed or expected.
Host family meals
My host family prepares Nepal’s staple meal of dal bhat, which I share with them in the morning around 9 or 10 and again in the evening around 7 or 8. In a restaurant dal bhat is served as lentils (dal), rice (bhat), a vegetable (tarkari), a cooked leafy green (saag), a Nepali pickle which I usually find more similar to salsa (achaar), meat if requested (masu), a few pieces of cucumber, carrot, and/or radish (salad), and yogurt (dahi); at home each meal always consists of the rice and lentils while the other components vary each meal based on availability, time constraints, and preferences.
In between these two large meals, I snack in the afternoon both on Nepali snacks like chatpate (spicy snack mix) and puwa (sweet rice crumbles), American snacks/foods I make like pasta or chips and salsa, and sometimes foods that both cultures share like instant ramen and popcorn. Regardless of what’s on the menu, I enjoy cooking with and for my host family, which helps me enjoy a hobby of mine and connect with my host family.
4. What moments or interactions stand out during your service?
Dancing
All the dancing we do in the village stands out the most. When there’s a celebration, a welcome or goodbye reception, when we’re planting rice, when it rains, or even when we’re simply bored, we are always dancing.
In Nepal, there is a lot of pride in cultural preservation through song and dance, which has played a big part in my Peace Corps experience. I cannot count the number of times I’ve taken a dance break or heard someone perform a song they’ve written about the event we’re at or the people we’re with.
Community relationships
I’ve also been able to form really close relationships with my community, which has made me feel much more at home within the village. One moment that really stands out was when I participated in Bhai Tika with my host family, which is when siblings exchange a special blessing signified by 7 colored powders placed in a line along a person’s forehead; my host family told me that this ceremony officially signifies that they’re your siblings in Nepali culture.
Surprises and Challenges
5. What has surprised you most about living or working in Nepal?
The cultural attitudes surrounding the environment and nature really surprised and impressed me when I came to Nepal. In my village, and based on my observations, Nepali culture emphasizes that we as people are part of the environment and not above it, so a lot of environmental considerations are made, considering the environment as an equal and/or that other animals should be given equal footing. So, even though my village has a lot of human-wildlife conflict with monkeys eating our crops and leopards attacking livestock, I have never seen or heard of community members attacking animals with the intent to harm them; they always have the goal to simply scare them away.
When it comes to my work as an environment volunteer, one of my goals is to support income generation through non-timber forest products, and in Nepal that includes the leaf of a Sal tree, a highly profitable leaf valued for its medicinal properties and importance in religious and cultural contexts. My village has a large established Sal tree forest that they have no interest in turning into an income source, even with sustainability safety measures in place, because they have other income sources and the trees were not planted for this reason. Instead, community members collect only what they need for personal use during specific times of year and never enter the forest without a specific purpose.
Jutho
There were a few cultural rules that surprised me, specifically the concept of ‘jutho’, which more or less means ‘impure’ or ‘unclean’ if you were to translate it to English, but it’s not quite the same; I’m also by no means an expert. The most basic example would be how food becomes jutho after you take a bite of it or eat from that plate so you wouldn’t put food from your plate back once you’ve begun eating or share food off of each other’s plates (except women can eat food that’s made jutho by their husbands or kids); since Nepalis eat with their right hand (the left hand is considered inherently jutho and only for dirty work) their hand is also considered jutho until they clean it after eating.
Other examples of jutho are more cultural in meaning, like how a person is considered jutho after a family member passes away, so they follow certain restrictions throughout the year following a family member’s death. For the first two weeks, they don’t touch others, go to the temple, shower, or eat certain foods; then they don’t participate in religious events or holidays for a full year after.
In some ethnic groups in Nepal (but not all), women are also considered jutho while menstruating, so while the specific rules vary by community and region, in my experience women can’t touch others (even indirectly by passing something like a plate of food), enter the kitchen, or attend any religious events. I learned these rules can be complex, and as someone who didn’t grow up with them, they aren’t intuitive to me, so especially in the first year I was frequently surprised to learn yet another application or rule of the concept of jutho.
6. What challenges have you faced in your Environment work, and how did you respond?
When I came to Nepal, I came with the first group of 2-year environment volunteers in Peace Corps Nepal’s new Environment program, so along with others in my cohort, we have had to navigate finding structure and what it looks like to put our project goals into action.
I have navigated this by creating my own schedule of different places to go each day and being really flexible as I learn what is helpful, what cultural perceptions impact my work, and how to work within the systems my village already uses; for example, my village development committee is really active and involved in addressing environmental concerns, which was surprising when I first came to my village.
7. What secondary projects have you worked on during your service?
I have done a lot of secondary work primarily at my village’s school. Last school year, I worked on helping with the school’s computer lab and updating the systems on the computers, and this year I’m working on organizing and updating the school library. As I’ve worked on both of these projects, I’ve been working on incorporating both computer lessons and responsible library use into my lessons and helping other teachers do the same.
I also help with conversational English practice and tutoring while providing and coordinating additional after-school programs for students like a school beautification program and a reusable menstrual pad making program.
Additionally, still within my environment program work but not expected in my job description, I have expanded from working with just one community forest, and I now work with a second community forest as well. Every environment volunteer is assigned to one specific community forest, and similar to the community forest I’m assigned to work with, I provide support, input, and sometimes manual labor to help care for a neighboring village’s community forest.
Advice and Support
8. What advice would you give to future Environment volunteers in Nepal?
I would say be prepared to be flexible because every village has different needs, and even year to year those needs may change. For example, last year my village was in a drought with water conservation concerns, while this year we’re concerned about erosion from the large amount of rain we’ve gotten. There’s also a lot of adaptability to have more structured work through the school or unstructured work within the community to make your service yours.
9. How did Peace Corps training prepare you for service?
Pre-service training (PST) gave me most of my language skills, and having staff around to ask questions to, especially about language and culture, was super helpful and helped me understand how to navigate Nepal in the ways I would need to as a PCV. During PST, I cannot recommend enough utilizing the help of the LCFs (language and culture facilitators who teach trainees Nepali) along with the other staff to figure out the language and cultural aspects. PST also served as a good introduction to the type of work PCVs do in their community.
Then, for in-service training (IST), staff reached out and asked what technical support we would like to learn more about, and that guided a lot of our IST. Overall, IST almost exclusively focused on technical work by expanding on what we were introduced to in PST and focusing on topics that we identified within our communities.
Practical Tips and Language Learning
10. What would you tell future volunteers to pack—or leave behind?
I would advise volunteers to focus on packing clothes that can be layered to work separately in the summer or layered for warmth in the winter. Nepal has a lot of microclimates, and volunteers live in all sorts of climates and travel to others. For example, my site doesn’t get super cold, and the most I need is a sweatshirt at night in the winter, whereas a volunteer who lives just 10 miles from me, but higher on the hill, has much colder winters and needs to layer up much more. So I prefer having layers to make a smaller closet more versatile (you also don’t need that many clothes!), especially for when I travel.
Prioritizing packing stuff to keep you busy in the village is also important because there will be downtime and there isn’t always a lot to do in the village, so bringing crafting supplies, a Kindle, or even a skateboard are all things myself and other volunteers are glad we have. Generally, if it’s something you enjoy regardless of if it’s hobby supplies, makeup, a journal, or whatever else might feel ‘unnecessary,’ I would recommend bringing it as long as you’re ok with the fact it may be damaged. Nepal is very tough on things; hand washing clothes makes them wear down faster, and monsoon season brings mold that will grow on almost anything, so be aware of that with anything you plan to bring; a spray bottle of diluted vinegar helps a ton with the mold, but it can’t guarantee anything.
I’m personally glad I brought a few portable chargers with me to help keep my phone charged when there are longer power outages or when I’m traveling; you can find portable chargers in Kathmandu as well. Liquid IV is the only thing from the States that I haven’t found in Nepal but that I like to keep on hand and have requested a restock of when friends and family visit; Peace Corps provides oral rehydration salts (ORS), but I prefer Liquid IV, and it’s nice to have something familiar when I’m sick. Overall though, there’s yet to be something I needed that I couldn’t get some version of in Nepal.
11. How has language learning been for you in Nepal?
I found Nepali to be a very difficult language to learn, and there aren’t a lot of resources that I’ve been able to find online to help. I came to Nepal and started pre-service training (PST) with maybe 5 words of Nepali that I learned from a training video Peace Corps staff made. Most of my Nepali I learned through PST language classes and resources that Peace Corps made in romanized Nepali (Nepali written in the Roman script instead of the Devanagari script Nepali is normally written in), but by far the most important and helpful way I have learned is through conversation practice with community members.
Social Identity
12. How has your personal identity shaped your service experience?
I feel that my gender and age have specifically played a large role in my service. Like many volunteers, I easily stand out in Nepal, especially outside of tourist areas, and play the biggest role in shaping my experience; while my race is noticed, it just makes people assume I’m American instantly.
However, as a woman in her early 20s, a lot of people assume I’m here as part of my university coursework and find it hard to believe that I have graduated and have experiences that have prepared for Peace Corps, Nepal is also deeply patriarchal so my gender adds another layer everything; it is shocking a decent number of people in my community that my parents allowed me to come to Nepal as a young woman alone. However, at the same time, because so many young Nepalis (men and women) move abroad themselves for better opportunities, it has given me something to connect over with their parents still in the village, which was surprising but reassuring to experience.
I’ve also found that my identity, and very specifically the fact that I present and am seen as a straight white woman who is culturally Christian, matches my community’s expectations of what an American looks like very well, and there are times it’s clear that they expect every American to look like me. Because of this, I also feel that if I’m to accurately represent America and what it’s like to be American, I’m making a conscious effort in my cultural exchange to talk about how diverse America is and all the different cultures and identities that together make America what it is.
13. Did your identity lead to specific challenges or situations?
Being unmarried
As a young woman in Nepali culture and especially within the village, there is the expectation that you get married, very specifically by 25, so I have fielded a lot of questions about the topic, especially as I get closer to 25 myself. It’s a cultural concern that comes from a place of love and care, but coming from my background, it started to grind on me quickly to be asked regularly about marriage and my love life.
A lot of volunteers handle this in various ways, sharing that they have to get a Master’s before they can get married, that following their cultural norms they won’t get married until their 30s, or similar, which have all worked well. For me, I happen to have maintained my pre-Peace Corps relationship, and we’ve been long-distance during my service, and I decided to share this information with my village, which has been received positively and has ended a lot of questions about my plans for marriage. When I meet people while traveling, though, I often default to simply telling them I’m already married, which is accepted without much follow-up.
Christianity
Beyond the cultural expectations of a young woman in Nepal, I was also raised Christian and identify culturally as Christian, but I’m not an active practicing Christian. However, Nepal is predominantly Hindu and was a Hindu kingdom until the monarchy was abolished; the Christian community in Nepal is very small, and I’m not aware of anyone in my village who is Christian.
So despite never seeing religion as a big part of my identity, it still comes up a lot with my community, and I find myself fielding a lot of questions around Christianity, mainly from a place of curiosity, that I hadn’t expected. It’s led to a lot of funny situations as I’ve tried to answer questions like why Christians celebrate Easter; I forgot to clarify that when Christians say Jesus came back from the dead, he didn’t stay on earth and he’s not actually a zombie wandering around Jerusalem still.
14. What advice do you have for volunteers who share your identity?
In the context of my experience, I would say don’t be worried about sharing aspects of your identity, especially the parts that aren’t visible. My community was just as curious to learn about me and my identity and background as I was to learn about them. They’ve been curious and open to learning about parts of my identity I was hesitant to share, like how I grew up culturally Christian, celebrate different holidays than my community, or that I’m in a relationship. It doesn’t hurt to slowly open up and wait to see what you’re comfortable sharing as you get to know your community, but I’ve ended up sharing more than I expected to and it’s been positive.
At the same time, I also don’t think you have to pretend to like everything expected because of your identity, but should be respectful of it. For example, as a woman, I do field a lot of questions about marriage and relationships that I don’t love, and I will share that I dislike it. In my community, I also follow menstrual rules, and while I follow them, they aren’t my favorite. I’ve found ways to make it easier on myself, like planning my overnight trip for errands in the district center to fall during days I have to follow these rules or treating myself to snacks from the pasals in town more often.
Final Thoughts
15. What final advice or thoughts would you share with future volunteers?
I would just say be adaptable, flexible, and just go for it. No one is going to be able to tell you what your exact experience will be, and that’s ok. The things that, at least, I was worried about have all worked out and aren’t actually as big as I was worried they’d be. As you get settled in at your site, you’ll develop relationships with your community and become comfortable with your surroundings; at times I find it almost strange to think that there was a time I didn’t ride in tuktuks or see goats grazing outside my bedroom window.
Are you thinking about joining the Peace Corps? If you’re curious about service and ready for something new, apply today. Like Shay, 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.
