Rotary: First Darjeeling Report!

Now that I'm in Darjeeling, the stories about my Rotary Club experience here multiply. Until now, I've simply been traveling to get here, stopping along the way to visit Rotary Clubs and to do some volunteer work for social justice and poverty organizations.

I arrived by jeep taxi on Thursday, June 1st. My Rotary contact here, Udaya Mani Pradhan, had already arranged for a hotel room at a reduced price. The Seven Seventeen is owned by a Mr. Tashi, also a Rotary member. We're paying $20 a night here, which is quite reasonable by American standards, but the backpacker rates are about one third of that. True, the backpacker hotels are located up on the ridge of the mountain, whereas "downtown" Darjeeling is about halfway down the mountain, but there is no navigating the streets of this city without climbing and descending. I'm either going to be in great shape when I'm finished with my three months here, or have a heart attack-- one or the other.

As it turns out, the Darjeeling club meets in the hotel restaurant on Thursday nights, so I was invited to attend my first Rotary meeting here practically before I had time to unpack my suitcase. The club had about twelve or fifteen members in attendance, and they are in the middle of planning for the transition to the new club officers and committee chairmen. But they were kind enough to let me make a short speech. I told them how I came to apply for the Rotary Club scholarship, about my work as a computer systems advisor to non-governmental, nonprofit organizations in Nepal (and elsewhere!), and why it took me nearly five months to reach my posting as Cultural Ambassador. Then I told them what is still missing from the program:
1. A place to live-- Rotary International prefers that its scholars live in homestays, partly because the language immersion would then be total, but also because Rotarians know that the most important sharing and international understanding takes place one-on-one, person-to-person. Hotels are not the best places to meet locals, but homestays provide instant access to the whole range of local culture.
2. An educational program-- Rotary International expects its language scholars to spend five hours a day, five days a week, studying and practising the target language. Since there is no university-affiliated language program here in Darjeeling, the Rotary counselors and I decided we would have to patch one together. I landed here with some leads, but no program fixed.
3. Volunteer program-- Rotary believes in "service before self," and this means that every Rotary Club has some kind of humanitarian project going at all times. Rotary International expects its scholars to volunteer their services in the communities where they're living. I landed with some leads, but so far, no firm committment to a specific program of volunteer work.

Why are these key elements still not fixed? Most Rotary language programs are affiliated with a language institute which has the homestay component already in place and the requisite hours of classroom study for the beginner available. Rotary scholars just have to apply to the programs, get accepted and show up. Then they work with local Rotary Clubs to get the volunteer and speaking engagements that are also part of the program.

If I had been able to learn Nepali in Kathmandu, our first destination, the language institute is already in place. But political upheaval in the Nepalese capital forced me to shift to Darjeeling, which has a large population of Nepalese speakers. In fact, it could be said that the main language here is Nepalese. There are some differences that my Rotarian friends have started pointing out. For instance, the word "gravy" in Nepal means "gutter slime" in the local Nepali.

Also, India is like Nepal and other parts of Asia in that much of what gets accomplished happens through face-to-face contacts. Planning and execution of projects through email is just not the way the world works here. Since intercultural understanding is a cornerstone of the Rotary value system, it makes sense that getting an educational program in place would take personal effort on my part, here and now.

And I've got a great bunch of Rotarians helping me.