What inspired you to co-found The Mountain Volunteer?
The Mountain Fund has been working in developing mountain communities for a long time. We've built health clinics, hospitals and supported many programs for women and children. The Mountain Fund began brining medical teams to trek in Nepal and Peru back in 2005.
We discovered that everyone who came fell in love with the country, the people and the scenery. We also discovered that once people could see with their own eyes the problems we are addressing, they understood and wanted to be a part of the solutions.
We started The Mountain Volunteer as a way for others to take part in our work, to explore life in a developing country, to learn about issues that developing countries face and contribute to solutions.
It's much the way I first personally got involved. Myself and a group of friends had donated some money to a little health clinic in Nepal ,way out on the border with Tibet.
I decided to go over and have a look at the place. When I saw the villagers we were helping, the crushing poverty they lived with daily, the rates at which their children died from very treatable disease and the incredibly low cost to operate the clinic, one-dollar per person served per year ! I was hooked. (there is a much longer story about the start of The Mountain Fund that involves a childhood friend, a famous Russian climber, his girlfriend and the same tiny clinic above).
What has been the most challenging aspect of founding and growing your organization? Most rewarding?
In the beginning, we had one small project in a remote corner of Nepal that myself and some friends supported. Over time we were asked to build more health clinics and expand. Finding financial support is, of course, always a challenge, but I had, and still have, a full time job, a family to support and bouncing back and forth around the world on a part-time basis to get things done is a real challenge.
Working in developing countries itself is very challenging. Thing move at their own pace, move according to the rules, customs and culture of that place and not on our western timeline. Getting to where I could be OK with that has been the hardest part.
You see something that needs to be done, you have what it takes to do it and then, wham, you smack right up against the ways of being, thinking and behaving that created the problem in the first place and realize it's going to take a lot, lot longer than you ever imagined.
What milestones/achievement(s) are you most proud of so far?
I've been really happy every time we opened a clinic or hospital. The start of Her Farm, our farm project for women has been a huge undertaking and is particularly near and dear because of it's impact and sustainability It's hard to do things in developing countries that are truly sustainable and Her Farm is.
Of course getting the Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal was a huge moment for me and one I'll always treasure. It's hard to live up to the accomplishments of Sir Ed.
Where do you see The Mountain Volunteer in 10 years?
The future of The Mountain Volunteer and our parent organization The Mountain Fund are the same. We want to create more sustainable projects in rural villages. The village is the backbone, it's where the most poverty is, the least literacy and the village is least able to do anything to improve itself.
Sustainability is a term tossed about a lot in development work and often misunderstood. Our definition is a project that can 100% support itself in perpetuity after a short start up time.
Her Farm is a good example. It's a 2 year old project and nearly 100% paying for itself by a combination of volunteer visitors and agricultural output. It's empowering women, educating village children and demonstrating that change isn't something to fear in a society that's changed little over hundreds, if not thousands of years.
What should volunteers interested in heading to Nepal keep in mind?
I'll tell you the brutal and honest truth about being a volunteer. In a 2 week or 1 month trip to a place like Nepal the only thing likely to change is you. The problems we face there have existed for a very long time. Our western way of running in and offering solutions doesn't work, after more than a decade of working there, it's the most important lesson I have learned.
We want so badly to solve problems by applying our standards and we simply can't. What we can do is just as our slogan says, Explore, Learn, Contribute. Contribute is last for a good reason, without fully understanding where you are and how that place functions, you can't make an impact.
The most valuable contribution any volunteer has to give is by being an example. The people you desire to help don't have a frame of reference, for example, consider the young girls who run Her Farm, they've never been outside of Nepal and probably never will be. They have to live within the rules of that culture. What a volunteer can give them is an example of what it might look like to live differently, It's just a seed you plant by your own behavior and then hope it takes hold.
Be prepared for that to take a long, long time to happen. I can promise this, your own life and your own relationships will change forever. There is no way you can embrace Nepal and not forever alter your own thinking about what really does matter in life.
After many years and hundreds, if not thousands of volunteers, that's the one constant, everyone goes home a better person for having been there.
