Living with Nepalese Students in Sydney

I live in an Inner West suburb of Sydney with three Nepalese students, all of whom are studying IT in many of sub standard Colleges in the city.

By sub standard, I am forced to look at the level of education these colleges provide. The teachers are nowhere near the required grasp of subject materials they are supposed to teach, the library and other facilities are there mostly just for a show. Plagiarism is not only prevalent but indirectly institutionalized because it’s easy for the teachers and easy for the students naturally, there is always four or five sets of papers students submit in a given class for any assignment. Most of the time even the names and student IDs of the passing on student is not omitted. The college management, as it exists in a pretty businesslike manner of any manpower company in Nepal, turns blind eye to any such activities, after all its not very strict in Australia and who bothers about learning anything or making any effort on the task? The college gets its easy cash, thousands of dollars, students get their degree, and most importantly get a chance to apply for Permanent Residency in Australia and live here in the future, or can extend their stay in the lucky country, legally. Inspite of that, they are not cheap and are extremely money hungry in nature, they will report a student to the immigration on slightest delay in paying the fees, which are by the way, on same level as any other university fees in Australia.

Anyway, all of the boys hold part time jobs, varying among cleaning to house keeping and so forth, enabling them to survive in one of the most expensive places to live in the world.

I met the first two through some other students who used to play soccer in the park nearby. The very first one even made me meet his elder cousin to look at myself and see what type of person I am, fair enough.Their lives seems to be that of a typical South Asian student, living and surviving hand to mouth. While students in scholarships can offer to travel a bit, inspite of very high costs of travel, these guys cannot even imagine that sort of life. Train Travel is very expensive, so is are the food, communication and other facilities.

Their indifference to being in a new country and among new people is obvious. They hardly go out to explore new places, visit beaches, or other attractions around the city or surrounding areas. Their lack of eagerness to learn anything about the country or city they are in, the people who live here, its culture is startling to me, not that I am poky enough to dig deep into Australian history. They haven’t even been to any of the world famous beaches here, even after living here for more than a year, just half an hour train ride away. Their whole day consists of going to work in the morning, coming back to the unit (flat), sleeping, cooking the same nepalese food – dal, bhat, tarkari all year round– and again either go to work or watch hindi movies. They listen solely to hindi songs anyway.Currently they have taken into the soccer video game that I bought a couple of months ago. Apart from that, their only extra curricular activity and modes of entertainment seems to be play dogs among themselves, teasing and laughing at each other. I have seen some other students going out on weekends to Blue mountains, or Dubbo or Newcastle, but these guys seem to lock themselves up in the flat for most of the time. Even when I ask them, they rarely want to venture anywhere out. I have managed to drag a couple of them to the swimming pool, two minutes walk, occasionally, even in summer. Thankfully one of them have a good skills with playing guitars and has taken upto his hobby recently. So even though its occasional noise, I have encouraged to keep it coming.It might have something to do with having to work to survive, which we as students in China did not have to do. But you don’t work whole day, and you have free weends anyway. I have contacts with several other bunches of our boys, who are just the opposite, playing soccer in different suburbs so that they could gather more people, going fishing, going hiking, sight seeing and so forth, which keeps my spirit high to see these guys being in sync with the world surrounding them.

I compare this to my days in China. I lived in Bejing for about eight months, before going to Wuxi, a southern city, near Shanghai to finish my Engineering degree.There is no place of interest we have missed out in Beijing - Great walls few times, every major temples and historical places, surrounding lakes and parks, cities – Tianjin even up north in Harbin. We basically never stopped travelling. Same went on in Wuxi. Almost every weekend we would visit our buddies in Shanghai – specially for night life, go to night clubs, I even worked in one of them for a short period of time, pubs and bars. In study holidays almost all of us would travel to different cities, I ended up going to every major town in China. Life was so enriching and exciting, every evening was like a carnival. Fortunately I had friends all over, and the fellow student friends I was with were also like minded, we all liked to explore, go places we had not been before, because it was all new to us and most of us had no major experience living in a new society. Impact of Chinese culture, way of life, history and education was very very deep on all of us. I admired their calligraphy, music, beautiful architecture, historical monuments and parks, people and their nature, everything was so new and fresh to me that I absorbed the experience like a thrist of thousand years. Lerning Chinese is definitely one of my favorites, so is going around in bike in the Cities. I remember Basanta and I riding in the snow in Nanjing! Life as a young student in a foreign land, fortunately it turned out to be China, was a blessing for me. It helped carve out the person I am today, my technical capabilites and looking at the outside world, enriched by the mingling with people from almost all countries in the planet.

I compare my experience with these guys living with me now, and can’t stop feeling frustrated and sad. These young guys have not been able to experience Australia in so many ways, the chance to expand the horizon of thinking and experience is flowing past them, while the next visa renewal date is arriving. Living with your countrymen definitely has its own obvious advantages, and I am fully supportive of the idea. But remember that this is not Nepal, this is a fully developed western nation, which is hightly encouraging and tolerant of multi culturalism. So you can taste any international flavour, see people of different nations, the locals of course and live in a totally different new world. Living with these guys have given me a sense of being among my own community, people and culture, but also deprived of a truly meaningful company that would have been brought about by living with different individuals under one roof. Because you might be going back to Nepal after a short while, its better that we enrich our stay here, see more, learn more.

Different aspects of living with Nepalese students is definitely worth it. But to have a sort of company that can be brought about by an eagerness and curiosity is vital to keep yourself spirited and upbeat. This is specially the case when you are not a fellow student but a career professional who is looking to grow in life and looking for a breakthrough in modern corporate world. This also highlights the importance of living with like minded people with whom you can share experience, talk in certain level of intellectual savviness and having jeal and eagerness to enjoy more from life, though its true,it means different things to different people.