KATHMANDU, Dec 14: On a cool winter afternoon, Haruka Katoh, 30, from Shizuoka, Japan, entered a jam-packed classroom at Mangal Secondary School in Kirtipur and drew up the class schedule. As a teacher of art and craft, she divided the class period into three sections: an explanation of the prompt she was providing, a period of sketching on the prompt by the students, and the collection of the sketches they drew.
An exam was afoot. But it was unlike any other exams that the students took.
Instead of getting anxious and fidgeting about their preparation for the exam, the students curiously listened to her explanation of the prompt: draw two oranges on a table; one closer to you, another afar. After a series of queries about the prompt, which Katoh, who is adoringly called ‘Aarati’ by her colleagues, clarified happily, the students started pouring their imagination on a piece of plain white paper.
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“I love working with children, especially imparting knowledge,” Katoh told Republica, “And I am looking forward to this two-year long volunteer program.”
Japanese national Katoh has been teaching art and craft to middle-school students since September. Since graduating with Bachelors of Arts in Geography from the Education faculty of the Yamagata University in Japan in 2017, Katoh, an aspiring educator, had been working as a tutor at a private institution in Japan. In 2022, she looked up job opportunities online to teach computer science abroad.
In her online search, she chanced upon a volunteership program from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) which would take her abroad for teaching. She was selected for the program a few weeks after she submitted her application and was designated to teach in Nepal.
After three months of learning the Nepali language in Japan, followed by a month of language training in Nepal where she arrived in August, Katoh was placed in Mangal Secondary School for her volunteership program. Although she had planned to teach computer science at the school, upon understanding that there were plenty of computer teachers and a dearth of art teachers in the school, she decided to teach art and craft at the school.
Katoh aspires to continue working in the education field and pursue a Masters degree after she returns to Japan. However, she does not want to fret over the chances of her teaching geography or computer at Mangal Secondary School, or continuing her teaching career back in Japan for now.
“I process each change in my life at a time, and I find joy in learning new subjects and teaching them,” she said, “I am optimistic at each point in life, and in some ways, find it a challenge worth exploring.”
Katoh’s mother and two sisters are back in Shizuoka and she maintains constant contact with them. “I call my family at times, but I do not feel homesick,” she told Republica, “The way Nepali people interact with me always lifts up my mood. In fact, I feel at home here.”
