What To Do?

Or “Ke garne?” (kay gar-nay) as they say in Nepali.

This is a common Nepalese exclamation (with equivalents in every tongue and people), kind of like a sigh of resignation (“What can you do?”). It’s an expression to use when you face a dilemma, or a challenge where you don’t see a way around or through it. Like when a project you’ve worked for months developing gets stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for the higher-up decision makers to work through issues of funding levels and budget allocations.

That’s where we find ourselves this week. Hurry up and wait. And wait. And wait! Ke garne?!

The question of what to do always has an answer, generic though it may be:

Do good.

Orson Scott Card’s “Ender in Exile” has Ender, the main character, saying:

“In philosophy class I think we finally decided that ‘good’ is an infinitely recursive term — it can’t be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it’s better than bad, though why it’s better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.”

So much for the philosophies of men!

Paraphrasing another character plus Ender’s unspoken thoughts — and substitute ‘Nepal’ — or your own country — for ‘China’):

“China’s a beautiful country. More variety inside China than in the rest of the world. [But he knew] that China was full of human beings, and that the mix of good and bad, strong and weak, courageous and fearful was bound to be about the same as in any other country or culture or civilization… or village, or house, or heart.”

So we continue to work through the dilemmas and challenges of “doing good to all men” (13th Article of Faith).

Here are some more of my favorite “do good” scriptures:

Acts 10:38

Jesus […] went about doing good.

We’re trying to be like Jesus; we’re following in His way, and we have His words:

2 Nephi 33:10

[The words of Christ] teach all men that they should do good.

Doctrine and Covenants 6:33

Fear not to do good, my sons, for whatsoever ye sow, that shall ye also reap; therefore, if ye sow good ye shall also reap good for your reward.

Doctrine and Covenants 11:12

[…] put your trust in that Spirit which leadeth to do good—yea, to do justly, to walk humbly, to judge righteously; and this is my Spirit.

Doctrine and Covenants 58:28

For the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves. And inasmuch as men do good they shall in nowise lose their reward.

Jacob 2:19

And after ye have obtained a hope in Christ ye shall obtain riches, if ye seek them; and ye will seek them for the intent to do good—to clothe the naked, and to feed the hungry, and to liberate the captive, and administer relief to the sick and the afflicted.

This last one really speaks to what we are about here in Nepal. Administering relief in various forms to the poorest of the poor and the neediest of the needy. Nepal surely has its share of those. But it certainly does not have a monopoly on suffering. So of course there must be hard decisions made at every level as to who to help and how much.

Though we didn’t go ourselves as observers this time, pictures were sent to us showing some beneficiaries of our earthquake-victim food and blankets relief package.

Does the share Nepal gets of a limited pool of funding depend on recognition? Much discussion and speculation on this question has been happening lately. In the midst of all this I can’t help but remember the counsel given to Elder and Sister Jones (who trained us in New Delhi) that they passed on to us:

It’s okay to be seen doing good. It’s not okay to do good to be seen.

PR-type recognition or not, what long-term positive impact all the humanitarian work we do will have is something we can only guess at.

What we KNOW is that Nepal has many, many good people. Parents who love their children, and children who love their parents. We love serving them. And not all work we do has been seen but not recognized, at least at the local level. Here’s a letter of appreciation we received (we meaning the royal Latter-day Saint Charities we) when we went to the inauguration ceremony Taunya described in her New Year’s Eve post:

 

We know others who are extremely appreciative, even profoundly grateful, for our help. Two in particular. We love Krishna and Santosh at the Kevin Rohan Memorial Eco Foundation, whose health clinic is nearing completion, and who we visited this week. We love them for the tremendous good they do serving their community.

Hopefully very soon they will receive the approved funding (currently stuck in our finance department’s gears) to outfit this clinic with its needed equipment.

 

 

From the Now-how-often-do-you-see-that? department: