Was the universe putting obstacles in my way to direct me homewards? While I enjoyed both teaching and traveling, issues at work and outside -- especially ones based on my nationality and/or skin color -- were making it harder and harder for me to continue to do so. With time, I also discovered my options for places I could seek work decreasing. I even lost a job!
All the time I was abroad, even while preparing for the eventuality of returning to Nepal, I had never had a timeline. The first time I contemplated a timeline was the Summer of 2009: I gave myself five years. In February 2013, almost four years later, I decided, the time was right to return. Timing was right for a number of reasons, namely, financial, career, weariness with moving, and a little one at home.
This is all about how I went from thinking of myself as a Tibetan-Buddhist to a humanist, from a Tibeto-Nepalese to a human being first etc., and how and who I have become and where I have gotten to in life -- through my international education, profession, and travels -- was one of the reasons for turning down a job offer in February 2013 to return to Nepal.
Development aid industry is a failed industry. Sustainable development rests in the hand of the locals, not the big bilateral and multilateral development aid agencies. To be part of that I decided to turn down the job offer and to return to Nepal.
On February 12, 2013, feeling ready to return to Nepal, I turned down a job offer. All through my student life in Nepal as well as when studying, working, and traveling abroad, I had been doing a number of things in preparation for that eventuality to really fulfill a dream.
In February 2013, I had a job offer paying several thousand dollars a month. I either accepted it and continued on with my international teaching career or, as I had been contemplating for a while, turned it down and returned to Nepal to pursue a new career. I choose the latter.
The first month and a half back in Nepal following my ordeal in Qatar, I discovered a lot of people, both on social media and outside, who were interested in what I had to say and did. The attention, while flattering, made me quite uncomfortable, and at times embarrassed. But while on social media I gave the impression of doing decent enough job of moving on with my life, internally and also in my daily life, I was struggling greatly. With hardly any emotional and social support, I was having to deal with that on my own, by myself.
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Returning to Nepal after twelve days in a Doha, Qatar, jail, I have made a number of interesting discoveries. One of them is the fact that I shouldn't travel to the Gulf at all and the other is that the charges of insulting Islam has, indeed, NOT been dropped.
A reproduction of an excellent twitter thread on the question of the Hijab.
Jailed for allegedly insulting Islam in Doha, Qatar, my cries for freedom were answered four years ago today (May 12, 2017). Then came (and I discovered) freedom cries (too).