In the past 50 days of Nepal’s lockdown due to the Covid-19, Gham Power’s team shares their experiences on what’s keeping them occupied and how they have been spending their days. Let’s peek into the stories of our team during the lockdown.
Helping the needy
Joshna Silwal from the ‘Operations and Finance’ department has been actively engaged in community service for a long time. She thus utilizes her free time to give back to society. While going through the news one day, she came to know about the people in need of food and financial support who the government had failed to help. She thus plays the role of a mediator as she collects all the necessary information of the needy and links them up with volunteers who give them aid. She also keeps record of the people who need help through tally marks and makes sure that the aid is equally distributed among them all. In addition to this, she also realized the importance of equally protecting stray animals in her community, so she feeds stray dogs whenever she gets the chance. 
Apart from this, she has been currently reaching out to NGOs and INGOs in order to help incorporate hand wash centers in her community.
Back to Agriculture
Prakash Gurung from the ‘Operations’ department and Mahendra Shrestha from the installation team both went to their respective hometowns prior to the lockdown. They spend most of their time indulging in various farming activities such as plowing fields and harvesting different kinds of crops.
Coming from a family actively involved in agriculture, Jiban Twayana from the installation team also spends most of his time indulging in his farm. He has been harvesting wheat, cabbage, potatoes, and maize among other crops in his field. Apart from this, he likes to spend time with his son and occasionally plays badminton or goes cycling along with this son around his neighborhood.
Dhiraj Thakur, from the ‘OGB and Marketing’ team, has started utilizing the empty vases/pots in his house to plant garlic, tomato, onion, and coriander. He has also started attending online seminars regarding marketing and sales.
Exploring new hobbies
Since the lockdown, Trisana has developed an interest in cooking and baking and spends most of her time watching Youtube tutorials to learn new recipes. With the help of YouTube, she baked a cake for mother’s day and gave her mom a sweet surprise. Besides that, she has also learned how to make potato chops, pakodas, and crunchy pastas!
Learning and Self-improvement
Kabita Poudel from the ‘Sales and Engineering’ Department says that the lockdown so far has been a lot more productive than she had expected it to be. Learning about new software related to PV system design and analysis has been one of the major highlights of her lockdown. She, along with her team of Sales and Engineering, has also been participating in various webinars organized by different companies/manufacturers. The webinars were important to her as she got to learn about various new inverters and batteries along with their set up procedures. This has helped her compare the products that she had been using till now with the new manufacturer companies. She says that this comparison will help her team choose the best products for their future projects. She has attended more than five seminars so far and will be attending more seminars that can be useful to build her knowledge about solar systems.
Damodar Pandey, also from the ‘Sales and Engineering’ Department has been utilizing his time to know more about his current and potential C&I clients. He has been working towards improving his skills on proposal writing in order to make it more attractive and has been keeping his work process updated. He has also been attending webinars related to inverter technologies and energy management and has been taking an online course on PV technologies.
Sujendra Manandhar from the ‘Research and Development’ department has been engaged in webinars and has utilized his free time to learn some pretty interesting skills during this lockdown. He has attended two webinars about new devices relating to his work-field, its features, application, and its impacts on the community and environment. He says there are still many topics to explore and further discussions to be done before working with those devices and implementing them at the office. He has also been playing video games, watching movies, and cooking just to keep my mind off the outside world and to stay inside home. Other than that, he learned how to fix his phone using screwdrivers through YouTube video tutorials. His greatest achievement in the lockdown so far has been learning to edit videos and audios. He is very fond of watching videos, movies, TV series etc. but had not created one yet. So, he went through different tutorials, downloaded the Adobe Premiere software, and started editing. He is very proud of learning this skill as he was able to edit and post his first video where he went hiking with his college mates. He plans to post more in the days to come. He is particularly excited about his work-related solo trip to Jumla where his team has now successfully installed a Micro-Grid of 11.52 KWp.
During this lockdown, Kiran Timilsina, Agri-analytics officer at Gham Power Nepal has completed two online courses related to disease and pest identification of crops and data analysis respectively from CABI Academy and Online Learning Harvard University. Being an agriculturist and extensively involved in extension works related to agriculture through the company, he says, “This course will be beneficial for me as well as the Gham Power farmers that I will interact with in the future as I will identify their field diseases and give advice on proper solutions to tackle these yield reducing pests and diseases.” As he has to deal with many agriculture and social data during his work, the next online course on data analysis will be a useful tool for him to analyze future research data. He is hopeful that the techniques learnt from this training will be utilized at various levels of research that he will be dealing with during his academic and professional journeys as well as various tasks of the company.