Welcome to Team Nepal's Website

Hidden from the rest of the world, Nepal is a landlocked country enclosed within the rugged Himalayan Mountains. The dramatic landscape creates significant obstacles to health care and education, including limited or delayed dissemination of information. Literacy rates are significantly lower in rural areas; those who live in remote mountain villages are often a day’s walk from health and education services. Formal schooling in Nepal is constrained by economic and cultural factors such as a bias against educating girls and a need for children to work at home or in the fields. The culture is rich and very different from our Western world.

Team Nepal hopes to investigate how the East meets the West in Nepalese classrooms because we experience something similar in our classrooms each day. There are twenty-five different cultures from around the world represented at our school. On any given day, one can find a classroom as colorful as one might hope for in an ideal American class; the melting pot truly is represented by the students that make up our school. Each of these students brings with them culture, experiences, and backgrounds that we hope to help preserve. Through this project, we aim to find ways to help our colleagues and students learn how to expand their own cultural competence, develop cultural awareness, and embrace cultural sensitivity to those around them.

Cultural competence is the development of skills by individuals and systems to live and work with, educate and serve diverse individuals and communities. It is the willingness and ability of a system to value the importance of culture in the delivery of services to all segments of the population. We feel that by sharing this project with our entire school community, we can celebrate diversity and help increase cultural awareness to all members involved. We believe sharing and celebrating different cultures promotes growth and change in ways that are beneficial to each individual's own personal development and to the world.

Team Nepal feels this unique project will provide learning that has the potential to break the bonds of traditional learning, while increasing each member's cultural competency. As each member of the project interacts with others, relationships will be formed and opportunities will emerge that will engage each of them to be better teachers and learners. This experiential journey is a uniquely transcendent opportunity for our team that will enhance them both professionally and personally.

As a part of this project, we will investigate the direct benefits of a successful social justice project and see how one person can make a difference in the world. This attitude and spirit of caring is the essence of teaching. By visiting new places, we gain the benefit of seeing that each person does make a difference; on a large scale or small scale, we all matter!