Meeting Prakash Bista (April Post)

On Saturday, May 29th of 2021, my mom, sister, and I  drove to Laguna Beach to meet Prakash Bista.

Virtually working with Prakash Bista and his school in Nepal for about a year now. Prakash himself is from Kalicot, Nepal, an incredibly rural area in northern Nepal. There, he owns a residential school with his Wife. I've interacted with his students, read books, donated time and resources. We got a text saying that Prakash would be in California and wanted to meet us in person.

If you're sitting on one side of the screen with Prakash on the other commanding a room full of toddlers, Prakash comes off as a bit intimidating. Maybe even powerful. Prakash is intimidating and powerful in many ways, but standing at 5’8”, he's a lot less intimidating in person. In fact, he has one of the biggest smiles I have ever seen. He actually never stopped smiling. While he was eating, he was smiling. He simply has an infectious positivity.

Although his character was somewhat different than I had expected, I always knew that he was kind-hearted. What struck me the most were our cultural differences. Even during the two hours, I was with him,  I noticed probably 10 cultural differences. Of course, I knew that he was coming from a different country and background, but I did not expect them to be so obvious. 

One that I didn’t expect was that he shared food in a way that I was not familiar with. About halfway into our dinner, his friends from California joined us at our table in a restaurant. Instead of ordering your own food, they just shared our food at Prakash’s instruction. Keep in mind, it was not a traditional family-style restaurant. Individuals were expected to order their own meals. It didn't throw us off to share our plates, but it was definitely not something we expected, especially in that restaurant environment.

At the time, I remembered that his Hostile children eat communally. So, food comes out, and they all share. I deduced that Prakash likely had limited experience at traditional restaurants because his home is so rural. He is quite the traveler and went to college in Orange County, but still, he likely had visited restaurants rarely. 

At the end of our meal,  Prakash also insisted that we finish all of our food.  Typically when I'm full, I stop eating without thinking about the people who have one meal a day because that’s all that is available or all that they can afford.  Having someone sitting across from me telling me to finish my food was more impactful than simply hearing about food shortages. 

Prakash was such a sweet man. He shared stories and told us how much we adored his students. As the meeting was to take place on Saturday night at 6, we did not initially want to make the drive because of traffic. However, we were incredibly glad we did.