When Herricks High School alumnus Rajeev Goyal joined the Peace Corps in 2001 after graduating from Brown University, he thought he was joining a two-year program that would give him a chance to experience another part of the world.
“I wanted to travel and learn another language. I thought I was going to do the two years and I was going to leave,” Goyal said. “There was a lot of learning and freedom.”
As he explains in a book being released next week, Goyal’s service in Nepal turned into something more – a decade-long experience filled with danger, local political intrigue, insight into Nepalese culture, globalization and how the U.S. government really works.
Goyal, who is now national coordinator for a campaign to expand the Peace Corps, calls it a “critical” agency to enable young Americans “to understand the developing world as the complex place that it is and who can share that understanding with others.”
That observation in the concluding chapter of his book, “The Springs of Namje, A Ten-Year Journey from the village of Nepal to the halls of Congress” is an indication of Goyal’s dedication to the Peace Corps’ mission.
The book is an engrossing tale of his experience as a Peace Corps field volunteer bringing a water system to a remote Nepalese mountain village and the transformation of the region – and himself – in the resulting sequence of events.
“I naively arrived in Nepal thinking I’m going to help these villagers. I’ve never seen anything that remote,” he said in a recent interview with Blank Slate Media.
As he recounts in the book, Goyal arrived less than two months after the Nepalese royal family had been assassinated by one of its own members. There was a violent Maoist insurgency underway and government buildings in the first village where he was a teacher were blown up in an attack by Maoists shortly after he left. That made him think about returning home.
“You were always inviting violence. Sometimes violence is the only solution they see,” he said.
Goyal said he wasn’t deterred by the Maoists, and was initially suspected of being a Maoist himself in Namje, the second Nepalese village where he taught. He started out teaching there and ended up helping to create a reliable water source that had a cascade effect on surrounding villages.
Goyal quickly realized the biggest impediment to his students learning English was the exhausting time they spent carrying water up to their mountain enclave from the only water source some 1,200 feet below the village.
Engineers in Kathmandu explained the sort of pump system that would be required to bring water up the mountain and the approximate cost: $45,000. Goyal flew home for the holidays and describes the fundraising pitch – with slideshow – he made to the guests his parents had invited to their Manhasset Hills home for a holiday party.
Many of the guests were Indian-American physicians, like Goyal’s father, and he raised $20,000 – an amount that was eventually matched by the Peace Corps. The ensuing project involved all community members in hauling the pipes and generator needed to make the water flow.
Goyal attributes some of his success to his understanding of the dominant Hindu culture, his physical appearance and his ability to master speaking Nepali.
“I could blend in whenever I wanted to, except for my watch and my Nikes,” he recalled, smiling.
Since 2001, Goyal, 33, estimates that he has helped raise $300,000 for the construction of five water projects and six schools. That was largely accomplished through the non-profit Phul May Foundation run by Peace Corps vet Scott Skinner, who became a mentor for Goyal.
When he returned to New York to attend law school at New York University – which he had deferred starting to work in the Peace Corps – Goyal hawked hats knitted by the Namje natives in a Greenwich Village street stall to continue raising money for water project there. Goyal said his three years in law school were “like torture” as his thoughts remained with those he left behind in Nepal.
In 2006, his narrative recounts his return to the country as a translator for the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights, helping to sort out atrocities committed by the Nepalese during the conflict between the Maoists and the country’s security forces. That included helping to sort out an attack in which 27 Maoists were hacked to death, near the end of that job.
“I was mentally and physically exhausted, and something about seeing ethnic conflict in Nepal and on a school ground no less, was too much to handle. While the others inspected the blood in front of the small shrine, I returned to the jeep and closed the door, feeling sick to my stomach,” Goyal writes.
The second half of the book is a kind of meditation on politics, as Goyal notes, “In the parched radish fields of Namje, politics seaped into everything.”
Goyal recounts how his 300 resumes for positions as a lawyer in 2008 after he returned to the U.S. were ignored. So he became national coordinator for More Peace Corps, an effort to build recruitment beyond the 7,500 Peace Corps field workers.
He became, as he puts it, two Rajeevs: the community organizer who crisscrossed the country in rented cars putting out the Peace Corps message in diverse locales and the Rajeev with a slick black suit who prowled the Capitol building, meeting hundreds of Congressmen to build support for a bigger Peace Corps budget.
Goyal entertainingly describes his tactics in “bird dogging” Congressional leaders to garner support for that cause, eventually drawing a majority of senators and congressmen to sign a petition to increase the Peace Corps budget.
“If you were willing to loiter in the right places, you could meet and talk to anyone. Lawmakers were biological beings. They needed to use the toilet, they got hungry, sometimes they needed to walk outside or get a Coke from the vending machine. I started to lurk in those places,” he recounts.
The narrative takes on a comical quality, as he realizes a Peace Corps rally in Washington, D.C. featuring hip hop stars Jay-Z and Beyonce could be a game changer to muster grassroots support. Just as it seemed the rally lacked the energy needed, the ambassador from Jamaica delivered a brief, inspiring speech that put the Peace Corps volunteers attending into high gear.
Goyal said he tracked down Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, who chaired the subcommittee on the Peace Corps budget, at an ice cream social to convince him that the then $374 million budget needed to be increased to $450 million. But in the end, the Peace Corps budget rose by just $60 million – still the largest annual increase since 1961.
Deflated at the result, and disillusioned that President Barack Obama never got behind the cause, Goyal moved to Toronto with his wife, Priyana. He directed a new campaign, “Push for Peace Corps” in what felt like “his own private protest.”
Today he notes that the Peace Corps budget is back to $374 million. He said he hopes his book gets Obama’s attention and helps him realize the potential the Peace Corps possesses.
“I still feel incredibly passionate about it. The project costs so little,” Goyal said.
The book ends with Goyal’s return to Namje in 2011 and his shock at what paved road in the area wrought in land speculation and the departure from the region’s previous agrarian focus. He said he also witnessed the installation of a “Spirit of Place” memorial designed by American architecture students as a memorial to the ancient Magar culture there.
Meanwhile, in 2011 CNN cited Namje as “one of the 12 best unheard of place in the world,” making tourism boom in the area.
Goyal has also gone on to establish Thumki Learning Grounds, a grassroots initiative, to enable the natives to partner with international volunteers to promote alternative models of development based on cultural and ecological sustainability of places.
He also maintains his connection to the Peace Corps in his studies for a masters degree in international agriculture at Cornell University. He said his thesis will focus on planned agricultural development of eastern Nepal.
Goyal compares his current experience, learning plant names, to the experience he enjoyed of learning about indigenous plants in Nepal.
“It’s viewing everything through a brand new lens,” he said. “I’m happiest when I’m learning something that can be useful.”
“The Springs of Namje,” a distillation of Goyal’s previous educational experience, is available on Amazon.com will be book stores on Sept. 12.
