Responsible fun? Hell yeah!!

A couple of weeks ago, we started out on a project called Goreto. When I say we, I mean me and 3 others. We had all the time on our hands, and we decided to use it for a noble cause. Through the project we wanted the students to value Scholarship, Leadership and Citizenship in all their actions. Sounds wordy? It is actually.

Well I’ll not go into the details or the principles of the project. That would definitely bore you up too much. And you might think it was just some other ‘boring’ project. That is not the case though. We did have a lot of fun, doing the project AND enjoying the beautiful city of Pokhara.  It’s what I would like to call ‘responsible fun’. Roaming around lakeside as typical tourists, eating dinners and lunches at the famous thakali kitchens, boating for 3-4 hours straight, enjoying the serene night aura from the Maya Restaurant, going atop Sarangkot to get the view of the valley, going inside Mahendra Cave and coming out through the proper exit (YES!! I did it even though I’m bulky!!) … all these things we did were awesome, and they were made “awesomest” by the fact that we had a valuable purpose behind our trip.

One of the things that really struck me as silly is the variable price of literally anything in Pokhara. Like the internet. We had to use the internet many times to build up slides for the project and also to check the college application decisions. And we paid three separate prices at three separate places all in the lakeside area. At one, we paid Rs.100/hr, another Rs.60/hr and at the third we paid Rs.40/hr.  What more is that everything had dual prices, one price set for the “goras” which would be insanely high and another reasonable price, for Nepalis.

It was the first time I went to Pokhara with my friends. And this was the case for all of us, I think. Even though the trip was marred a little by the college decisions, and two of us ended up getting several denial letters while we were in Pokhara, we just drunk the negative sentiments off. It was like we created a shield from all those things that would’ve worried us to hell if we were at home. In fact, if we had viewed those decisions while we were at home, it could’ve SEEMED a lot worse than it really was.

Ahh, and don’t assume that we “misused” project fund. The “fun and booze” money were our personal expenses. We did have to rack our brains a lot and expend carefully towards the end because the project fund was not abundant. In the end, we were all broke, and I even had to cheat at the midway lunching place, by paying for just one and sharing by four. One of my friends even caught me on camera carrying a plate FULL of rice and vegetables meant for four. Embarrassing photo, really …

To sum up the experience in one word would be difficult. It would be a mix of satisfying-job well done, inspiring-interacting with GBS youth, heavenly-the sarangkot experience, enlightening-3-4 hours of boating, blissful-loitering around lakeside at night, in a good way embarrassing-when I had to load my plate at the lunching place, bankrupting-we returned broke in the end, and many more. The only word I can think of is “AWESOME”, but even that would be an understatement.