27 YEARS IN NEPAL, 1967 to 1994 Adventures of a missionary family

By Robert Buckner

When Bob and Hazel Buckner and their family went to Nepal in 1967, there was great need for education and modern health care. The life expectancy was just thirty-nine years. With Bob's mechanical and construction background, he was able to make the work of teachers and medical people more productive. In two places, they were the first missionaries to establish a home within the local communities and facilitate the arrival of international and local staff people. One of those places (Pokhara) could only be reached by one road back then, and the next (Jumla) was seventy-five miles from the nearest road.

Set against some of the most magnificent mountains in the world, with people who lived very close to the carrying capacity of the land and often had no reason to hope for a better future, their story tells about trying to bring a better life and the good news of Jesus Christ to the amazing, resilient, and resourceful Nepali people. The backbone of this book is the letters written home weekly by the authors, and these are supplemented by vivid memories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798888325810

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27 YEARS IN NEPAL, 1967 to 1994 Adventures of a missionary family

Robert Buckner

ISBN 979-8-88832-580-3 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88832-582-7 (hardcover)

ISBN 979-8-88832-581-0 (digital)

Copyright © 2024 by Robert Buckner

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

This is a work of non-fiction. However, to preserve anonymity, some of the names of the people portrayed in this book have been changed.

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Dedication

Introduction

1

The Call, 1963

2

Training in Nashville and New York, 1965–1966

3

Change Horses, 1966–1967

4

Shanta Bhawan, July 1967–August 1968

5

Pokhara, November 1968–December 1977

6

Jumla I, October 1979–June 1984

7

South Lalitpur, June 1984–August 1986

8

Butwal, February 1987–June 1990

9

Jumla II, March 1991–August 1994

Glossary

About the Author

Dedication

Although I was the main author of this book, it would not have happened without the input in many ways of my wonderful wife, Hazel, who did far more than let me quote from her letters. Conversations with our missionary friends and research in other published works about missions in Nepal made a profound impact on the telling of the story. Our three children also had strong input, starting with our youngest, Kathy Swanson, who suggested major improvements, placed all the pictures, and even made many punctuation corrections. David made major contributions in addition to those credited. Our oldest daughter, Judy, made meaningful contributions and essential early reader feedback, but mainly her love and presence are evident throughout the book. Husband and father, Bob Buckner.

*Where Surkhet is mentioned in the book, look for Birendranagar on the map.

Introduction

Among the many well-loved possessions I inherited from my parents was a box of old letters. My wife Hazel and I had been unable to come from Nepal for my mom's memorial service, so my two brothers saved some of the things they thought we would be able to use when we returned from the mission field after twenty-seven years away. When we wrote letters to my parents, I had no idea that they were saving them. For many years the box sat in a corner, unopened. We didn't pay any attention to it. Our focus was on sharing our stories at churches across the country, establishing our lives back in the States, and serving God in new ways to slow down and reintegrate into the States.

The foundation of this book is those letters written to my parents—Hartzell, affectionately called Hartpa within our family, and Allene Buckner. My father was a career pastor in the United Methodist Church, as his father had been before him, so our family moved around the California-Nevada Conference all my life. My mom, the tough and ready mother of three energetic boys and always to the daughter they lost to whooping cough, was a supportive and exemplary clergy spouse. My parents were both resourceful people. They had to be, living on a pastor's salary. They built, repurposed, or saved many of the necessities for everyday life.

We tried to write every week. If we missed a week, we heard about it since my parents were sure something dreadful had happened to us. Nearly all the time we were in Nepal, communication was difficult. We never had a phone, and this was way before the Internet was even thought of. In those days, telegraphs were used for emergencies; and the outstations, where we worked most of the time, didn't even have them. The information about the death of both of my parents came by telegram to our United Mission to Nepal offices in Kathmandu and were then relayed by phone to our station offices. A normal letter took two weeks to reach home and often longer if we had a glitch at the outstation, which often happened. If my parents had a question, it would normally take a month to get an answer.

One thing for sure is that in many ways, Nepal has changed. For instance, reaching Jumla is now possible by road, and both Gandaki Boarding School in Pokhara and Karnali Technical School in Jumla have greatly expanded in facilities and level of instruction. Both schools are now under Nepali administration. Having said that, there are still lots of places in Nepal where the nearest medical care is a day or more away on a foot path.

When we finally opened the box of letters, it took at least a month to get them into chronological order. When we started reading them, it brought back all kinds of memories and a desire to share them with others, mainly family and friends. Perhaps this helps put more meaning into what we experienced and felt we were called to do. After all these years, we still feel strongly that God wanted us to be there and that the people need Jesus, as we all do daily.

Bob Buckner

April 2022

1

The Call, 1963

Every morning, I drove my 1932 Ford pickup the four miles to my teaching job at Yreka High School (this pickup had multiple parts in it from a wrecked 1949 Ford car that I had salvaged). I was always creating, fixing, and adapting things to teach auto shop and build a house—and dreaming about the future of my family. In 1963, it was ten years since I married my high school sweetheart. If we hadn't met in the high school marching band—this very same high school, in fact—our lives could have been very different. I had lived at the Methodist parsonage in town. She lived near the last stop at the end of the school bus route. I had competition for the attention of this pretty rancher's daughter. But it helped that I had a better car than the other guy, so I asked her to go to the movies in town often. It took $1 worth of gas.

When I went to college, she still had a year to finish school. Our parents thought we were too young (I was nineteen, and she was seventeen), but we married in the summer of 1953, just a few days after she graduated from high school. Since then, I had finished teacher training and student teaching while working full-time, pumping gas to support our growing family. Hazel kept everyone happy and fed in our twenty-foot trailer while I went to school. And we were becoming a team.

Yreka is a frontier town that got its start in gold mining days, now just a stop on the north-south highway. I was teaching auto and metal shop and working on our house in my spare time. Hazel was a busy mother of two kids: Judy, nine, and David, seven. We were both deeply involved at the Yreka United Methodist Church. I was also the scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 50. Our new house on Foothill Drive was nearly completed. The American dream was about to become a reality for us.

I walked into the house one day after work and said, My dear, wonderful Hazel, would you please come sit down on the couch with me? She never knew what new adventure I would think up. Dear, I've been thinking, praying, and trying to figure out where we're going in this life. And I want to do something more.

"Something more? Hazel incredulously replied. What do you want to do? Become a missionary? Being raised in the tradition of Whatever he wants, wife does her best to fulfill," Hazel saw us as a partnership for life, to make sacrifices and receive blessings together. Not everything is soft or easy.

Yes, that is what I had in mind.

As active members and descendants of a line of Methodist pastors, our family was particularly motivated to be the most positive example possible to our companions in the faith. For years, Methodist missionaries had occasionally visited our church, and Hazel was finishing up a unit for our youth group on the career of becoming a missionary. I had looked at her stuff and saw there was need for an auto mechanics teacher in India. At the same time, the American dream was losing its allure to me. I was starting to realize that I didn't want to keep teaching at a high school like Yreka High. I was not a natural teacher and seemed to be constantly dealing with difficult and unruly students. Where was God in all this? Then and still today, I see God's hand deeply involved and moving in our lives. Looking back, I feel God was preparing us for a special job and life.

Hazel, being bighearted and easygoing, just smiled and said calmly, Okay, if that's what you want to do. She was happy to go along with what I wanted and would do her best to support me.

Then I got in touch with the Methodist board of missions. Convincing people in New York, however, took some doing with their rigorous questions, interviews, and exams; but we finally were accepted even without a single Bible course in my college transcripts. Then there was another little interruption that came along when Hazel had her physical exam and the doctor announced she was in good health for a pregnant mother. The Methodist mission decided we'd better wait until Kathy came into our lives (September 29, 1964) before moving ahead. When we brought her home, Judy and David were thrilled. She was, without question, one of the best things that happened in our family.

It took almost two years before we were actually ready to go. Judy was now twelve, growing into a creative, caring, trendy young lady. David, at ten, enjoyed getting into mischief with his little sister, learning wilderness survival and other active pursuits. They were well established at school, both with excellent grades, thanks to their mother's brains and attention to their upbringing.

The hardest thing about leaving Yreka was leaving our house. Judy, David, Hartpa, and I had hauled all those stones out of a quarry on a nearby ranch and placed them by hand. We sold the house to a high school acquaintance of ours and it gave him a good place for his growing family. We packed up our worldly possessions, loaded them in the trailer, and stored them in my parents' basement. Hazel's family, not church participants, couldn't understand why we were picking up and moving to India, but they understood faithful partnership and supported us in any way they could. Several of our friends were appalled that we would do such a thing. To this day, all I can say is that God was in it in a powerful and positive way.

2

Training in Nashville and New York, 1965–1966

It's generally accepted among missionary societies that you can't just send young American people in their twenties or early thirties off to the other side of the world without the proper training. Our mission board deemed it necessary for Hazel and me to get a grounding in cross-cultural studies, and I needed those Bible classes before starting the standard missionary orientation course. So finally, in 1965, we took the first steps to following our call to missions, with our going off to school in Nashville. In August 1965, the five of us were on the road, heading for Nashville, halfway across America in our 1955 Mercury two-door car. Kathy, now a precocious and engaged eleven-month-old, had her special crib that went in the car. The rest of us floated without seat belts since the car had none. We saw a lot of country and, most evenings, pulled into a state or national campground. But in Missouri, we stopped in a quaint little town with a mom-and-pop motel and managed to get inside just before an electrical storm hit. Judy was heartbroken when, in the morning, her prized flashbulbs, which were stored in the back window of the car, were all blown. We carried on and were delighted with the little concrete block house waiting for us at Scarritt College.

Weeks later, in September, the four of us went to four different schools. Judy is liking school just fine. She is amazingly adjustable and also got a very vivacious and well-traveled teacher, Hazel wrote to our family that September of '65. David came home almost in tears because he answered a question from the teacher with, Yes, when he should have said, Yes, ma'am. But David, being smart, quickly learned; and before long, he was one of the teacher's pets. Hazel took geology, anthropology, and philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She wasn't thrilled about any of them but needed to finish her undergraduate studies. I took New Testament (excellent except the prof didn't believe in miracles), Protestant Christianity, anthropology (excellent, taught by a lively older lady), and missions (good). Hazel sat in on some of my courses for no credit. I think she learned as much as I did even though she didn't do any papers. We soon figured out that Maidie, an energetic, affectionate Black woman who came with a glowing recommendation from another student family, was the best and cheapest way to take care of Kathy while we were all in school; and Kathy grew to love her. David was also fond of Maidie and remembered visiting her home before we left Nashville. We bought her family a Christmas tree, as David was told she was too poor to afford one.

All too soon, the semester was finished; and we were on our way to Stony Point, forty-five miles north of New York City on the Hudson River. The Missionary Orientation Center there was the premier training center, operating for six different denominations, and we were told not to arrive before dinner on January 25. Well—wouldn't you know it?—God decided that was a good time for a real snowstorm, but we changed routes and made it on time in two feet of snow.

What are the other religions of the world, and how do they compare to Christianity? Is God really calling you to this work, uprooting your family, moving into a new culture, and needing to learn a new language? and more practical stuff like What do we need to take from US to India?—these were some of the questions we explored with different speakers and with old and new missionaries. Then there were the visits to our mission offices in New York City, the UN, and the National Council of Churches offices nearby; vaccinations; health checkups; Bible study; overseas assignment options; and a myriad of other issues with many discussion groups among the participants. And there was also a visit to a local doctor to get a vasectomy. We were able to spend a good bit of time with our prime supporting church in Norwalk, Connecticut. Judy and David did well in nearby schools in the outer reaches of the city. They both found the other missionary trainee families very interesting, and meaningful friendships there helped them navigate the radical adjustments they were making.

In June, we spent some time at Drew University on linguistics (i.e., Don't mess up the local language with poor pronunciation and See if you can make these sounds). We attended a missionary conference in Greencastle, Indiana. And most importantly—and, for them, pretty traumatic—we sent Judy and David off to California to be with their grandparents while we did these various things and in preparation for leaving the country.

3

Change Horses, 1966–1967

During all this time of training, the Methodist board of missions and missionaries in India had been working on our visa to India for me to teach auto mechanics in Jalandhar, Punjab, where there was a technical school. One thing Hazel rightly brought up was, Why would a dissatisfied teacher be interested in trying the same thing in a foreign country? One answer to that was that I felt my students in India would be more motivated to learn.

Our first attempt to secure a visa failed, so we canceled our tickets on a passenger ship and took up residence in my parents' guest apartment in Chico, California. With church camp and getting together with the cousins, the rest of the summer flew by very quickly, and it was time for Judy and David to start school. The little apartment at my folks' place was a bit cramped for a family of five, so we found a house to rent.

There still was no word from India, so I found various projects to keep me out of trouble, including building a stone fireplace at Mom and Dad's house. Finally, the answer came from India: We have unemployed people looking for work that can do that job. No, you can't come to India.

The mission board asked us if we wanted to try for Pakistan or maybe Nepal. Bob Fleming, one of the first missionaries allowed into Nepal in the modern age, had visited our church recently and told us about Nepal and the medical mission he and his doctor-wife, Bethel, were involved in; and Nepal was famous. Nepal, a small country landlocked between India and China, had a glorious natural beauty that was all its own. The thought of working in the foothills of the Himalayas, with its serenity and mysteries, seemed undeniably appealing. Young David summed up the allure of Nepal pretty well: The idea of living in a lush, mountainous country versus the scorched plains of Pakistan is a no-brainer. And the hospital there happened to be in dire need of a maintenance man to fill in for the man who was leaving to go on a year's furlough. It all looked perfect.

Wait a minute, were the words that came back from Nepal, specifically from Jonathan Lindell, the executive director of the United Mission to Nepal (UMN). Jonathan had volunteered in Nepal as a very young man and just could never get Nepal out of his system. He went and trained through the Lutheran Church in Minnesota, gained a family, and came back to spend his career in Nepal.

If we were to go to Nepal as missionaries with the Methodist church, it would be under the umbrella of the UMN, which was a group of twenty-two Protestant denominations working there. I knew nothing of this man and had no idea what he knew of me, but he had some serious questions for me. Did I believe Jesus Christ was my Lord and Savior and that I came to him as a sinner?—Jonathan put it better than that, but that was the gist of it. Whatever information he had didn't answer those questions well enough. I was a bit shocked by the basic question and had to search my soul for the answers. For Jonathan, that was the only qualification for being a missionary.

This man was someone I got to know quite well before he was finally called to the home office years later. Into all our lives come people we can model our lives on. These are people who epitomize what a Christian should be: people who just love without restraint. I never saw Jonathan with a wrench in his hand, although surely, he and his wife, Evy, must have had a hammer and screwdriver in their house. In so many ways, this man was someone I could strive to be like. He was someone to admire and respect. Was he perfect? No person was ever that but Jesus. But he sure was ahead of me.

Yes, I know Jesus and he is my Savior, guide, healer, and Lord. And I come to him in all my imperfection and sin. And we sinful men hung him on a cross—this was pretty close to my reply to Jonathan.

Yes, he said, come ahead, Bob and family.

And just like that, we were on our way to this fabled sacred land and turning my dream of forging a better world for those less fortunate into reality. Not knowing what lay ahead and the difficulty of life in a faraway and isolated country of perpetual poverty, lack of sanitation, and food scarcity, we had been carefully preparing and packing for months. I never heard my father ever question all the stuff Hazel and I were taking to Nepal, but there were a dozen or so fifty-gallon drums and several crates. They were full of everything from pots and pans to a table saw, as advised in our missionary orientation. My father was the one who ended up taking it all to San Francisco to go by ship to Calcutta after we left by air on July 2, 1967.

My brother Dick, who was in the US Air Force, and his wife, Vi, gave us a wonderful time of sailing and exploring in Okinawa for a few days before we arrived in New Delhi, India, on July 7.

California Methodists helped us buy this Land Rover. Bob, can you make it run again?

4

Shanta Bhawan, July 1967–August 1968

When we left San Francisco on July 2, 1967, none of us had ever been outside the States. When we had left Yreka a couple of years before, the population was near 3,500 in a very isolated valley in far Northern California. The population of Chico, where we had spent the last year, was sixteen thousand; and when college was in session, roughly another five thousand were added. By then, Judy and David had matured a good deal, but it was a shock when Judy went into middle school and David was still in elementary school. They were separated. Kathy was two years and nine months old. Add all this up, and an accurate description of us would have been country bumpkins.

Take that and jet lag, and you can understand that by the time we reached New Delhi, India, we were in a state of shock. There were people everywhere in all kinds of clothes, from some in what we would call rags to polished Sikh police in tall turbans, directing traffic. For high-class women, the sari is a very lovely dress, and we saw lots of those too. All sorts to strange cars were driving on the wrong side of the road, heavily overloaded buses, thousands of people on black (Indian) bicycles, people walking in the streets, and even ox carts. There were obvious signs of a civilization that was thousands of years old, with Hindu temples to old maharaja palaces.

We were there not much over twenty-four hours, but the Jan Path Hotel people insisted we take a guided tour before our flight to Kathmandu (and it was cheap). I suppose it is awful to relate that one thing that stuck in my mind was that our car with a driver was an immaculate twenty-year-old-Plymouth. The Red Fort was memorable, but it wasn't until years later that we came to appreciate its place in history. David remembers that

The hotel was all marble and [had] tall windows with white curtains. There were dozens of workers padding around the grey-and-white hallways in all-white garb, ready to serve our every need. This felt very uncomfortable to me because when I want a glass of something cool, I'm not used to calling for a beara. Even the titles were set up to show that I was the one to be served, and they were there to serve. Still, there is a richness that struck me as profound even as an eleven-year-old. The monsoon was just getting underway, and the climate was a twenty-four-hour sauna. The dining hall was huge and open-air, with marble floors and