Crossing the street, crossing the divide

Crossing the street in a big Canadian city like Calgary isn’t very remarkable, but it’s a different story on the busy streets of Kathmandu.

Stefan Dyck, 25, from Okotoks, Alta., learned this first-hand after moving to Nepal in August to begin a one-year term with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Serving and Learning Together program.

“Getting off the plane, the first thing I thought was, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m going to get run over by a car,’ ” he says with a laugh.

As it turns out, communicating with Nepali traffic is another language Dyck must learn. “Honking is like a form of communication here,” he says. “You always know who’s coming around the corner.”

His first few weeks in Nepal have been a whirlwind of learning to speak Nepali and write Sanskrit, as well as safely navigating the busy city and exploring the hilly countryside with newfound friends.

There are many things about the culture and people of Nepal that are new and different to Dyck, but some of the issues facing Christian churches there are similar to what Canadian Mennonite churches are facing. One Saturday, Dyck and John and Lynn Williamson, the MCC India, Nepal and Afghanistan country representatives, attended a Nepali Christian church service and spoke to some members afterwards.

“I was talking about what some of my experiences of church have been back home,” he says. “We were talking about the younger generation leaving church and coming back when they have kids.”

For the time being, Dyck is focused on learning the language, but the bulk of his time in Nepal will be spent outside of Kathmandu in the province of Okhaldunga working as a monitor and advisor for food security and agricultural projects with Group of Helping Hands, a network of community-based organizations doing rural development whose Nepali acronym is SAHAS.

“I really value the relationships I’ve made [in Kathmandu] and the relationships I will make,” says Dyck, who majored in international development studies at Canadian Mennonite University, Winnipeg, graduating in 2011. Since then, he travelled throughout Latin America, volunteered with the Canadian Red Cross during its Alberta flood relief efforts earlier this year, and did construction work.