I don’t think that I could have landed in a better place to volunteer than the Manjushri Di-Chen Learning Center. This monastery was built to specifically address the poverty and lack of education in Nepal; it’s nearly completely run on donations and the donations are used to sponsor more children as well as further develop the monastery with more appropriate classroom and dorm facilities for the children living and studying there. The children come from the poorest families around Nepal – areas where they live miles from …

Amrit is just about one of my favorite people who I met in Nepal. He’s 23 and just has one of the most optimistic and happy dispositions on the planet. Amrit’s uncle, Barbajaun owns Family Guesthouse  (and just about everything in Pharping) and Amrit lives at the guesthouse and acts as the “den-mom” of sorts for all of the volunteers living at the guesthouse through VSSN. Our first days in Pharping will forever be shaped in my memory by Amrit’s joyfulness. Although we had some problems with VSSN, Amrit’s …

I have come to a pretty clear conclusion from my four months of travel in Asia -the name Shannon is not common, normal, or in some cases, even comprehensible. It’s completely normal in the United States…and Ireland for that matter!…but Asia is a whole other story. I dare-say that the theme for my journey over the past seven months could be summarized as “The Changing Names of Shannon” or, perhaps even more appropriate:  “The Complete Bastardization of my Name.”
Where did this start you may ask? Well, in Australia actually. Shannon …

The site-seeing around the Kathmandu Valley was really enjoyable and gave Helen and myself a jump-start of sorts into the Nepali Buddhist culture into which we were immersing ourselves. After several days touring around Kathmandu and our crash-course in Nepali language we were ready to head to our volunteer placement in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal.
At this point it behooves me to just note right of the bat that our volunteer company really let us down from this point onward and I absolutely would not recommend VSSN.
*************************************** Particularly disconcerting are …

The flight into Kathmandu was short and fairly inexpensive – I was a bit bummed that we couldn’t do the more eco-friendly version by training/busing it from Varanasi, but we unfortunately cut Varanasi out of our trip and just bit the cost (and environmental impact) and caught a really short Air India flight between Delhi and Kathmandu.  Entering Kathmandu is seemingly easy – it’s visa-on-arrival for US citizens.  The one catch though: the airport ATM is never working.  Now, I learned my lesson previously in Laos and always carrying …