From Herricks to Nepal

Richard Tedesco

In a remote region of Nepal, Rajeev Goyal is disproving the idea that individual action can inspire any real social change on significant scale.

The 1997 graduate of Herricks High School is currently continuing his efforts to improve the living conditions of people in that country, a role that has earned national recognition over the past decade.

“It’s ultimately only individuals who create change, and through leveraging their identities, experiences and interests towards a goal,” said Rajeev Goyal.

The 31-year-old graduate of Brown University and New York University Law School has had plenty of time to think his tactics through. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer from 2001 to 2003, initially assigned to teach English in Namje, a village in eastern Nepal. He is now back in that same village in Nepal, working with architect Travis Price on a project called Spirit of Place, in conjunction with The Catholic University of America School of Architecture & Planning, which seeks to build a structure each year in some part of the world that reflects the culture or spirit of the region.

At the same time, Goyal said he is working with his wife, Priyanka Bista, on another project they’ve founded called Learning Grounds, creating organic agricultures and new forms of architecture that suit the local environment. They are seeking to raise $1 million to fund the project, and in his spare time Goyal reports that he’s studying Chinese.

When he met Goyal, Price said he felt there was a spark in them crossing paths, since the architect was contemplating a project in Nepal and Goyal was thoroughly familiar with the culture.

“It’s a bit of kharma. I’m a big believer that the right people and the place come together at the right time. It was that moment when Rajeev said that he really understood what we wanted to do,” said Price. “He talks and he gets things done.”

In this case, the project is a spiritual monument to the ancestors of the Namje villagers that will incorporate elements of Hindu and Buddhist tradition. A larger project, an agricultural education center, will be constructed in the ensuing year.

Ironically, Goyal’s sometimes frustrating experiences lobbying for Peace Corps projects in Washington, D.C. inform his ironclad sense of the impact one person can have in effecting change. He developed a reputation there as someone who was relentless in tracking down Congressional leaders in a virtual one-man campaign to keep the Peace Corps viable.

“I think my confidence grew as I saw how much waste there was in federal spending. The issue was something I had personal knowledge about and I knew I had the whole tribe of Peace Corps volunteers behind me. I knew they would help me if the powerful folks ever tried to clobber me down. I also think it was the purity of the institution and that made me kind of not fear anything. You can’t be afraid. That’s what I say to anyone who feels passionate about something,” he said.

Now in the midst of his 16th excursion to Nepal, Goyal obviously feels passionate about what he’s doing. And he said his instinct to emotionally invest himself in a cause first sprang from his educational experience at Herricks High. Goyal describes Ron DeMaio, who retired from Herricks several years ago, as the most important teacher in his life. “Take two steps into darkness,” he recalled DeMaio telling his drama students, and it is that advice that Goyal said led him to join the Peace Corps.

He also credited Herricks science teacher Karen Hughes as one of those who challenged him.

And she recalls his irrepressible, charismatic nature.

“He was very good at rallying students. His cause was to increase communication between the student council and the student body, and the student body and the administration,” Hughes said. “He could always bring people to his side with a strong level of enthusiasm and strong level of logic.”

It was while he was at Herricks that his sense of activism first surfaced, most dramatically when he led a grass-roots student effort to eliminate class rank. Goyal said that after months of research, a committee that included himself, another student and faculty and school administrators, concluded that class rank had no impact on college admission and was divisive to school spirit. But their recommendations to do away with it were summarily dismissed by the school board.

So Goyal launched a one-man campaign against the ranking practice, wearing a billboard around the halls of the school and gaining enough adherents to the cause that school rankings were removed at the next school board meeting.

While teaching in Namje, as recounted in a recent feature piece about Goyal in New Yorker magazine, he decided to solve the problem of a lack of access to water in the village. He studied books about electric pumps, piping, filtration systems and settled on a two-stage pumping system that could lift water 1,300 vertical feet to the plateau 5,000 feet above sea level where Namje is situated. He encountered a pipe salesman in the city of Dharan whose ancestors came from the same region of India as Goyal’s and ordered hundreds of pieces of three-inch galvanized pipe on credit.

He turned to his family and some of their friends for money, and lobbied for additional funds from Peace Corps, U.S.A.I.D. and the American Himalayan Foundation for the rest of what he needed. He still had to sort out the daunting task of how to assemble the pipe along a mile-long stone staircase that had to be built to enable the project. All the materials had to be carried over mountain paths by hand. And since the country was in the midst of violent political unrest, he had to get a letter from a local military officer, explaining why so many people were carrying pipes and other equipment to the village.

Ultimately, 530 people succeeded in building two pump houses, two holding tanks and 1,236 stone steps to secure the pipe. And just before his term in the Peace Corps expired, the village had running water.

Goyal’s parents, phenomenologist Ravindra Goyal and his wife Damyanti, who continue to live in New Hyde Park, visited Nepal recently, saw the project he son had spearheaded and met some of the village residents.

“It was amazing. People were praising him. They were crying,” Damyanti Goyal said. “It was a very good feeling.”

She said that she and her husband are very proud of the work their son is doing.

“People are benefitting and we’ve supported him always. He’s doing good work there,” she said.

Asked why he maintains such a positive attitude about the possibility of implementing changes for the in the world, Goyal replied, “The world never changes and nothing ever gets resolved in my opinion. It’s always a dialectic like in the ‘Tao de Ching’. I think we live in a world where people fear big ideas and spirituality and that’s why they get stuck. I’m not really optimistic or pessimistic. I think if you keep learning, that’s important. But if you get lazy and think you know everything that’s when you will fail.”

As he and his wife remain devoted to their work in Nepal, Goyal couldn’t say what long-term objectives he has in mind. He said he enjoys the energy of young people and might eventually become a college professor.

“I want to see where the world takes me and to continue to pursue what captures my interest at the time,” he said. “People are always changing and evolving. I would like to take on a lot of difficult and challenging projects and learn from them. That would be a great life.”

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