A few months ago, Addison Weening went to Nepal, hoping to travel around the country and work on as many farms as she could.
The 27-year-old usually lives in Bristol, and works on a farm in neighboring Monkton, but she figured the winter would be a nice time to travel and get experience farming in other places before returning to Vermont for the summer season.
But when the coronavirus crisis began, the country gave just a day or two of notice before going into a total lockdown, barring all international travel. So Weening had to make a choice: go home before it was too late, or stay and try to help out. She decided to stay.
Now Weening is in Kathmandu, working with a group of volunteers to make hundreds of meals each day for people in need. The project, which they call “Lockdown Lunches,” has been making over 200 meals a day and distributing them to the most needed areas of Kathmandu.
Over $3,000 has been raised for the meals, which cost approximately $74 U.S. dollars to cook and distribute each day. At first, the volunteers were spending their own savings on the meals, but since their website launched, they have been funding the work through donations — both from locals, and from friends and family of the volunteers, who hail from all across the globe.
“I felt really wary of putting up this online platform to fundraise, because this isn’t just an issue here,” Weening said. “We’re facing a global pandemic, people are facing these same issues everywhere. Asking people for financial help when I know that so many people are struggling felt a little off to me, but we’ve had an immense response.”
Weening said the money they’ve already raised will fund their work for the next month at least. And as far as her personal finances go, Weening said extending her trip by so long was very challenging at first, though the $1,200 stimulus check from the U.S. government has made staying in Nepal “doable,” she said.
The trip was scheduled to be three months, but Weening has already been there for nearly four. All international flights have been halted until July 31, though that date has been pushed back several times, so Weening isn’t sure exactly when she’ll be able to leave — but her bosses in Vermont have said she’ll still have a place on their farm whenever she’s able to make it home.
Weening said it’s been very unnatural for her to spend so much time in a city, since she’s used to living and working in much more rural areas. But police in Nepal have been beating and jailing people who go out in the streets, she said, so it’s been impossible to leave Kathmandu. Her crew even had to get a special pass from police to be able to deliver meals by motorbike to different parts of the city. However, Weening said the city is starting to feel more and more like home.
“I haven’t felt homesick since I got here,” she said. “I’ve developed really strong community since I’ve been here, and I just really feel like this is where I need to be.”
Because of the harsh policing and travel restrictions, Weening said many Nepalese people have a higher chance of starving than contracting the virus during the crisis. She said most of the locals have little to no savings, and have been eating solely meals provided by volunteers like herself, with few other options available.
So far, Nepal has just 101 confirmed cases of Covid-19, and no reported deaths. However, Weening said Nepal’s test rates are still very low, so it’s unclear how much the virus has actually spread.
She and her crew all wear full-body protective gear when they bring the meals to their distribution sites, and have painted lines on the ground to encourage social distancing while people wait in line for the food.
Originally, Lockdown Lunches had several more distribution sites, and were making as many as 500 meals a day, but a few weeks in, a Spanish NGO approached them and asked how they could help out. The NGO ended up taking over some of the sites that Weening’s crew were struggling to keep up with, which she said has helped their operation significantly.
Now, she said, her routine has been pretty consistent: waking up early to start preparing meals, spending all morning cooking, and then bringing the food to the distribution sites around 10:30 a.m. The afternoons are spent cleaning up, making shopping lists, and preparing for their grocery run, which they make right before the store closes each night, to ensure that others get their food first.
They make the same thing each day: cooked rice, covered in vegetable curry.
“It’s also what we’ve been eating every day,” Weening said. “And I haven’t gotten tired of it yet.”
Soon, Weening said, she and her fellow volunteers are thinking about putting some of their funding towards buying dry food, since many people have the time and capacity to cook for themselves, and it can feel demeaning for people who are accustomed to working to support themselves to have to stand in a line to get their meals.
But as long as the need continues, Weening said she and her crew plan on finding a way to help out.
“It’s been over a month now we’ve been doing this every day,” Weening said. “And it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop anytime soon.”
