Five Trips to Nepal: A Volunteer's Story of Homecoming and Purpose

From a quiet suburb in Brisbane to the ridgelines above the Trisuli river, one volunteer's path has woven itself around a small nonprofit and the families it serves. Her name is not the point. What matters is the pattern that emerged: a single trip, then a second, then a third, and on through the fifth, each return deepening her commitment to safe, dignified housing in one of Asia's most earthquake-prone regions.

Australians have a long tradition of pitching in overseas. Each year thousands of citizens fly out from Sydney and Melbourne for short-term stints with humanitarian organisations, drawn by a sense that their skills in project management, building trades, nursing, and teaching can travel further than they could at home. Many of those trips last a fortnight. Few become a recurring chapter of someone's life. The volunteer at the centre of this story is part of that smaller group, the kind of traveller who treats the long flight via Singapore as a familiar commute rather than an ordeal.

One Home Foundation is the thread running through every journey. The nonprofit concentrates on shelter construction, integrated settlements, and health facilities for homeless and underprivileged communities in Nepal, with a particular focus on the Chepang people and households hit by natural disasters. Its model relies on donor support, volunteer labour, and partnerships with local builders, and it operates on a scale where every returning pair of hands genuinely shifts the workload.

The first trip, taken years ago, was meant to be a one-off. The volunteer, then working in community development on the south side of Brisbane, joined a small team heading into the hills west of Kathmandu. She expected to teach, to share knowledge, perhaps to learn a little about earthquake-resistant building. She did not expect to leave a piece of her attention behind.

A first taste of the work

The village sat on a saddle between two ridges, reachable only by a single lane that the monsoon had been slowly eating away. Houses were modest, often built from local stone and timber, and many showed the long memory of the 2015 earthquake in their cracked walls and propped-up doorframes. The One Home Foundation team was there to assess which structures could be reinforced and which needed to come down entirely.

The volunteer spent her days carrying aggregate, mixing mortar by hand, and listening. The listening part, she later said, was the harder skill. Chepang families spoke a Tibeto-Burman language, and the interpreters on the team worked in both Nepali and English, so conversations often took three passes. Even with three languages in the air, the work had a rhythm that everyone seemed to feel. Tasks were set at dawn, broken at midday for dal bhat, and resumed until the light failed.

By the end of that first fortnight, the team had helped stabilise two family homes and laid the foundation for a third. The volunteer flew home to Brisbane with the particular tiredness that comes from physical work in thin air, and with the phone number of a builder she had met, scribbled on the back of a receipt.

Why the hills kept calling

The second trip came eight months later, paid for out of savings and a small fundraiser she had organised at her local bowling club. Bowls clubs across Australia often host charity afternoons, and hers was no exception, with raffle tickets sold between ends and a plate of lamingtons doing brisk business. The takings covered her airfare and a portion of materials for the next build.

What pulled her back was less the construction itself and more the unfinished conversations from the first visit. Several families had asked about rainwater harvesting, a skill she happened to have picked up on a previous job with a Brisbane council water initiative. Others wanted advice on how to approach the local government about land tenure, a problem that sat well outside her experience but that she was willing to research and bring back.

The Chepang community is one of Nepal's most marginalised indigenous groups, historically living in remote mid-hill districts and facing higher rates of food insecurity and lower school completion than the national average. One Home Foundation's focus on the region is deliberate, and the volunteer found that her prior work on community consultation translated into something useful in those villages. People trusted her not because she had answers, but because she kept coming back.

Hands on the tools, heart in the work

By the third visit, the volunteer had become a familiar face. The interpreter on her first trip had moved to a city job, but the builder whose number she still carried introduced her to his cousin, who took over the translation work and became a friend in his own right. Names that had been difficult to remember on the first trip — Dawa, Sushila, the elderly couple whose house had been rebuilt twice — were now easy.

The physical work shifted too. On the first trip she had been a general labourer. By the third, she was supervising small teams of local masons, checking that reinforcing bars were correctly placed and that concrete was curing properly before the next layer went on. This is the unglamorous side of humanitarian building, the part that decides whether a shelter will still stand after the next tremor, and it is also the part where mistakes are most expensive.

Back in Australia, she found herself applying the same discipline to her day job. Site meetings on Brisbane apartment builds acquired a new seriousness. Trade jargon that had once washed over her now stuck. She started volunteering on the weekend at a Habitat for Humanity ReStore in nearby Woolloongabba, partly to keep her hands busy, partly to remember what the work felt like without a fourteen-hour flight attached.

Carrying lessons between two disaster zones

Australia and Nepal share more than a long-haul flight. Both sit in regions where natural disasters shape daily life. Bushfires along the east coast, cyclones across the north, floods in the inland river systems — Australians have their own catalogue of emergencies, and the country's disaster preparedness frameworks have grown sharper after every major event. So has the willingness of ordinary citizens to learn about resilience, retrofitting, and community response.

That shared vulnerability gave the volunteer something concrete to bring home. Her fourth and fifth trips were as much about listening to how One Home Foundation prepares communities for the next quake as they were about laying bricks. She sat in on training sessions, observed evacuation drills, and helped draft simple visual guides for households that did not read Nepali fluently. The work was slow, sometimes frustrating, and exactly the kind of long-term change that short-term volunteering can struggle to deliver.

She wrote about the experience on her return, in a piece that ended up being read by a few of her colleagues and, eventually, by the editors of a small Sydney-based development journal. The point she kept returning to was simple: disaster preparedness is not a single project, it is a habit, and habits survive only when communities own them.

The fifth return and what comes next

The fifth trip, taken earlier this year, was different again. The volunteer travelled with a small group of tradies from Melbourne, some of whom had never left Australia before. They spent their days doing what tradies do — framing, fixing, arguing about which way a roof should pitch — and their evenings talking about why they had come. One of them had lost a cousin in the Black Summer fires of 2019, and saw the Chepang rebuilding work as a way of honouring that loss by helping others.

For the volunteer herself, the fifth trip closed a loop that had been open since her first. She now mentors new arrivals before they fly out, runs an annual fundraiser at her workplace, and sits on a small advisory committee that helps One Home Foundation coordinate its volunteer rotations. The work is no longer a holiday with a purpose. It is part of how she defines a good year.

One Home Foundation's approach to disaster preparedness is laid out in more detail on its site, including the role of the One Home Foundation in disaster preparedness, and the page is worth reading for anyone wondering how a small nonprofit manages the long arc of post-disaster rebuilding.

If this story has stirred something, a memory of a place you have been or a thought about how your own skills might travel, consider supporting One Home Foundation directly. Donations fund the materials that volunteers like this one put in place, and they are the reason a fifth trip, or a fiftieth, remains possible. Sign up to volunteer, host your own fundraiser at your local club or school, or share the foundation's work with someone who has been looking for a cause worth their time.