For local teens, building school in Nepal taught valuable lessons

No running water. No cell phones. Traditional food, along with early-morning yoga and manual labor that involved digging in the dirt, transporting bricks and laying cement.

It sounds like a teenager’s worst nightmare. But traveling to Dhurjhanna, Nepal for two weeks to build a school for children living in the small village, gave Marble Hill High School for International Studies students Devon Dodson and Penelope Bencosme a lot to be grateful for.

“Some of the stuff that we take for granted, like having clean water to drink … over here, it’s just given to us, we don’t have to search for it,” Devon, a junior, said.

The Marble Hill students, along with the school’s math teacher Nicholas Pesola, were in a group of about 18 volunteers from across New York City who traveled to Nepal from Feb. 11 to Feb. 25. They went with buildOn, an organization with 38 programs across the country that organizes trips to poor, rural villages to construct schools. 

BuildOn’s program coordinator Mai-Len Kennedy leads Marble Hill’s buildOn after-school program’s approximately 25 students in community service activities and lessons about global issues, such as genocide and poverty. 

Two are selected from each buildOn school to embark on a service-learning trip. 

Students attended cultural workshops that involved talking to villagers about their lives, making pottery and meeting important figures in the community, including a witch doctor and a midwife. 

Working alongside villagers, students spent time building the base of a school. After the foundation was constructed, it was time to carry the bricks by hand to the worksite, rinse them off and transport them again to different areas of the worksite so they could be stacked.

The end result would be a school the size of two to three typical classrooms.  

Students lived with host families, in small houses made of clay, dirt and cow dung and ate traditional food — rice, potatoes, spinach and lentils, combined with an extremely spicy mixture of spices, which at first made some students sick.