The weekend has been the most breakthrough weekend for us in terms of getting to know people. We were especially keen to meet the expat community because even though we’ve been here three months now, we hadn’t gotten to know the foreigners like us residing in Nepal. And we were just a 15 minute walk away from the area that was home to many expats as well as many INGOs!

Take and I are moderate introverts. We love talking and meeting new people, but once we put a hold on this flow, it’s pretty hard for us to get back on it. Especially with the past couple of months trying to get the product ready and interacting mostly with our students, meeting new people seemed like a looming hurdle in front of us.

But we knew that it was about time to get out there and start getting to know the expat and entrepreneur community. Not only because I knew there were going to be a lot of people doing extremely cool stuff, but also because we definitely needed a fresh a pair of eyes on how we were operating TECHRISE.

When I put a post up on the facebook page called the Nepal Expat group, about how I was interested in partnering up with individuals or organizations, I was surprised by the overwhelming responses I got. I immediately received multiple comments and direct messages. Everyone was super helpful, either saying that they wanted to talk to us personally or referring us to other people that may be interested.

So the next couple of days were spent meeting these people over Skype calls or over coffee. Every time we finished the conversation and walked out, we were all smiles. There were truly many givers here, ready to impart their experience and knowledge to newbies like us. One of the guys we met ran one of the very few co-working spaces in Nepal called the Platform. It was a bright and modern-looking space, furnished with custom-made wooden furniture. It was only open up to 5pm unfortunately, due to some restrictions over what businesses could be run at night – most of the town was asleep by 9pm.

On Friday evening we stepped into the Happy Hour at Nepal Communitere, a collaboration / makerspace for post earthquake reconstruction initiatives. They held a Mini-Maker Faire a couple of weeks back, showcasing the different hardware and technologies that were trying to address some existing challenges in the country.
At the Happy Hour, we made more friends (yay!). We met a young Nepali women entrepreneur creating water filter technologies that was distributed to more than 10,000 people last year after the earthquake, and another women entrepreneur who was the head of the Nepali Innovation Lab, which was a hub for various post-earthquake innovations.

I found a deep respect towards these people I just got to know over the few day. Many of them were in it for the long run, taking action in hope to make positive change. Challenges that came their way, especially because they were foreign, was something they had to overcome continuously with good spirit. Realizing that they had all run up against similar problems and struggled through the same dilemmas, gave me a sense of confidence to keep going forward.

The people whom you hang around with definitely influences your attitudes and actions. One way to prevent any unproductive burn-out feelings in the future, I think would be to intentionally surround myself with these kinds of people. The positive energy and the supportiveness of the people whom we met definitely brought to us a fresh start to a new week.