This time when I went to my village in Western Nepal and I realized what does a single raindrop means to us. The months of May and June are for the nurture of crops especially rice which will decide the living year of people. This means if no rain, no cultivation, and no food supply for the whole living year resulting food scarcity, hungry and starvation. This all was going to happen because there was no rain. Without rain, we could not plant crops and no alternatives were there for us. The only thing we could do was just to sit and wait for the rainfall to occur. But what left with us was only a desperate hope.
I sometimes wonder at the mystery of alluring nature, what it does to make us starve and counts no value of each teardrops rolling through thousands of helpless people. And then I had a hope that we could just build a small canal across 10 km away from a seasonal river to cope with this problem. Being a civil engineer I started to work on a sustainable and economical initiative to build this canal handling a small amount of water so in future such situation will never keep us in tears. I used my knowledge as a civil engineer to start this initiative. For me, this issue is a war against a powerful monster but I am not a hero of this tale but together we can change our fortune. With a help of 300 villagers, we finally succeeded on our plan and water came in a very few amount but it was enough to distribute over our land. We enjoyed, danced and sang our folk songs. And right that moment I thanked this mother nature for giving a very important lesson that with the hope you could win a battle of everything, in every loss, there is a win. While the eastern countries rely on making Missiles and bombs to prepare for the wars to come, they should really be preparing for the war against nature because if we keep exploiting our nature then we will face a war against humanity, against every living creatures which will be absolutely undebatable. They should understand that a single raindrop is millions of times stronger than a dropped bomb.
Have you ever stumbled across the mustard field and watched what honeybee does to balance our nature. So, we don’t need to go very far from nature to learn. Look at it, we can learn the lessons of transformation from the humble-bee that it takes a very less nectar and helps flowers to pollinate. It never harms to flower and gives us a healing sweet honey. So we human if learned to design our world like this honeybee there will be no pollution and environmental degradation. Science observer and writer, Jannine Benyus calls it a “biomimicry” having observed the beauty, resilience, and intricacy of a spider. She says, “why don’t we humans learn from this and design our world like nature does?” Realising my situation, my simple aim to change the present irrigation condition across many districts of Nepal would be the very important lesson that I could learn from Nature. It seems unbelievable but it is possible to make better outcomes by learning from nature.
In nature, everything has a purpose. The trees feed animals, their dung gets composed by beetles who work the nutrients back into the ground for more trees to grow. So nature has a beautiful cycle in everything. But today developed world has ruined the beauty of nature while considering development. So it sounds like the irresponsible behavior of human beings. Living in a very poor country, I want to make a difference to leave this place with the feeling that I’ve done something, how small it may seem. So I have learned to become responsible, grateful, love, trust, and more importantly to breath and let every creature to live in harmony. I am committed to changing the current scenario of irrigation sector and the hardship we got from nature and bringing change to lives of millions of people who are still forced to live in starvation without the irrigation system.
Niraj Sapkota
