My name is Hannah, I am a 24 year old Masters student in Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptations at Lund University, and I’m currently enjoying the immensely valuable experience of spending my internship period at Creasion in Kathmandu.

While I have lived and traveled abroad before, this is actually my first time discovering Asia. So I started talking to friends who have traveled in Nepal before to get an idea of what to expect during my 3-month stay. Still, after all these conversations it felt to me like I’m just getting bits and pieces and I struggled to put together a complete picture of what to expect. After finally arriving in Kathmandu at the beginning of August, I understood why: It was impossible to properly put into words all the impressions and experiences waiting for me. Over the first weeks, I sent extensive voice messages and countless photos to my family and friends, trying to explain what the energy in this city is like, how welcoming the people are, how amazing the food at lunch in the office tasted, how overwhelmed I was crossing a big street for the first time, the joy of being greeted by the street dogs on my corner once they started recognizing me, the sound of monsoon rain on the balcony roof with the bells from offering rituals ringing through, and exploring the maze-like streets on the back of the countless scooters in this city.

I am beyond grateful for the colleagues at Creasion who are helping me navigate these new experiences. They have made me feel welcome at the office from day one and I immediately got the chance to dive into the projects. It’s a great environment to learn more about working in an NGO and also the general working culture in Nepal, as both of these are new contexts to me, and my colleagues are so open in answering all of my questions. In my first week, I already joined an event during which university students from different backgrounds participated in a presentation competition on plastic circularity. It was amazing to learn about the different perspectives from their academic fields and experience the students sharing their passion for innovative approaches to sustainability in Nepal. Shortly after, I had the joy of facilitating a workshop of my own, this time focusing on how to write a CV with the group of young students from Volunteer For Change. I was positively overwhelmed by their motivation, interest, and initiative, and it was incredibly gratifying to learn about youth empowerment in practice this way. I’m already looking forward to the next sessions where we will talk about how to write cover letters and practice for job interviews. I’m also working on conducting literature research and learning a lot about the circular economy of plastics, as well as how to educate schoolchildren about climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. I got the chance to implement these learnings into preparing a presentation for young students at one of Creasion’s Waste Smart Schools. These insights are helping me prepare for my Master’s thesis already, and I’m excited to learn more about Creasion’s different projects over the next few weeks!