Blythe McWhirter
Spring 2022
Rupa Neupane is 35 years old. Before meeting Damakant, she lived with close relatives while attending nursing school in Kathmandu. Her parents weren’t happy to send her away from the home, outside of her hometown, but allowed it if she stayed with family. While she felt fortunate to be able to attend nursing classes, her dream profession, the home was cramped. “It was a two bedroom apartment, but we are living as .. five people,” she said, “… and no hot water, a very difficult, very congested place.” But, “.. it was still being with them, and it was a very supportive family as well.”
Damakant Jayshi is 52 years old. He is from Nepal, but spent most of his childhood and adolescence in India. As he explained, most Nepalese in his father’s generation would migrate from Nepal to India for work, and his father ended up in Kolkata. Damakant was 12 when his father retired, and when all his family returned to Nepal, Damakant stayed for his education. For three or four years until he finished high school, he was on his own. “And then, it was kind of tough because all of a sudden I’m staying alone … with no family, but I had good friends in school. And, here’s the thing, they didn’t know that I was living alone for three and a half years.” After meeting in the early 2000s, they married in 2006 and lived with Damakant’s nephew, mother, and brother – tending to the latter two through the stages of terminal illness.
They first visited the United States together that same year. Damakant was offered a Nieman Fellowship, the fellowship for “promising and accomplished journalists” sponsored by Harvard University. The Fellowship is reserved almost exclusively for journalists reporting on political instability and threats to human rights, which Damakant had experienced while attempting to report under King Gyanendra in the mid-2000s. Visiting the United States and participating in the Nieman Fellowship program, Damakant and Rupa began to create friendships and build community with other journalists and their families. They began to even imagine a life in the US, as they saw the other reporters with babies and toddlers. Nonetheless, after a year, they were back in Nepal, and happy to be reunited with family.
But Damakant was forced to leave his job shortly thereafter; it was just Rupa at home taking care of his mom and brother, who were getting sicker and his baby daughter, born with heart defects, who was seriously ill. It was around this time that they first tried to return to the United States, to gain access to more adequate healthcare for their daughter. But her heart condition worsened before they could make it, and she passed. “It was a terrible situation and we weren’t sure what we would do, whether we would have our own, you know, be able to raise a family.” Damakant said, “But finally, when we came out of that trauma, when it got to be a little less, we thought – ‘Okay, we’ll raise a family, but not in Nepal or India.’ I know this sounds very harsh, but I honestly didn’t trust the medical expertise there.I thought we would be in a place where, if something goes wrong, at least we’ll have access to a good healthcare system.” Rupa added, “So basically that’s the main reason why we’re here. We thought: We will be here. ‘It’s temporary’, but once you come, after coming here, it seems like it’s going to be longer.”
Upon arrival in the United States, Rupa looked to further her education. She had degrees from Nepal, a masters in Rural Development, but had to come alone at first while Damakant continued to work back home. This was a daunting year and a half for her, finding work and stability, “I came without any experience of work and, because of my English, the way I speak, … I was having difficulty. Because of that, I was not confident of doing a job that was related to my studies.” She started a job at the local YMCA, which she said developed her English skills, as well as a job at the local Indian grocery store, which gave her community ties and the ability to communicate in Nepalese and Hindi. She also took classes at Georgia Perimeter to work towards nursing and improve her technical skills. Today, Rupa is in nursing school while working in a clinic that serves a mostly Nepali/Indian community.
“If I see someone applying, having an American degree and somebody from Nepal or India, I would, I think, you know, if everything [else] remains equal, I would go for an American degree applicant honestly, or somebody who has experienced [America].”
Damakant struggled for a while to find his footing as well, although he had some more experience with migration, the US, and a better grasp of English. “The way I speak. I know that’s my weakness. I don’t have an American degree. All my degrees are from India,” he continued, “I know those things matter. If I see someone applying, having an American degree and somebody from Nepal or India, I would, I think, you know, if everything [else] remains equal, I would go for an American degree applicant honestly, or somebody who has experienced [America].” Despite his accolades, the ones that got him a journalism fellowship at an Ivy League institution, he struggled to find work for the better part of 6 years. He offered that this is also due to journalism struggling as an industry, and that if he had studied tech or science, he may have fared much better finding work and establishing his career in the US. Even so, journalism was what he had always done, and the only thing he wanted to do. Now, he has found a stable living, and enjoys working freelance for a paper in Wisconsin.
Damakant and Rupa now live in a quiet Atlanta neighborhood with two daughters, ages 5 and 1. Both girls are healthy and happy, and they are being raised to understand and take ownership over their positionality and culture. As the parents said, “… [we] feel that the children should be supplied with everything that the parents can give them. Provide language, culture, everything. It’s up to them what they want to do with that knowledge. In the future, if they feel like they would go back to Nepal, their parents’ place and stay there and live there, that’s fine. We want them to know the language. If she wants to stay in the US, or another place, she should still be able to do that. But, we don’t want her to feel that she was deprived of things that could have been useful.”