On my second full day in Kathmandu Anil once again came to the hotel to pick me up. This time he came on a motorbike to take me to the office for the first time. Weaving through the streets and the traffic we motored to the office in half an hour.

COCAP, Collective Campaign for Peace, is on the second floor of a well kept building in a fairly residential area. Across the street is a school, next door a snack shop that serves delicious samosas and Nepali tea. COCAP the place is modest, with a few small offices, a well kept reading room and a larger meeting room which is empty except for cushions for people to sit on.

Simple surroundings indicate the state of COCAP’s finances but belie the wealth of ideas, experiences and positive outlooks that exists within the organization. My first impression of COCAP was overwhelmingly positive. The organization only has a handful of paid members of staff, but there is a constant flow of young volunteers as well as various human rights and political activists that come in and out of the office.

While the staff and leaders of the organization are absolutely inspirational, it was the volunteers that really left an impression on me. Mostly students, mostly somewhere between the age of 18-25, they volunteer their time to organize rallies, educational sessions, help coordinate COCAP initiatives. All of this is extremely admirable, but what really impressed me was how they come to the office everyday just to exchange ideas and to learn.

On my first day I spent most of the day with several volunteers and the librarian Ganu talking about the ICC. COCAP is currently helping to coordinate a civil society push to encourage the Nepali government to ratify the Rome Statute. They expressed their opinions of the institution, asked pointed questions about the American policy towards the ICC and generally wanted to know and wanted to understand.

This experience made me think of my time teaching in China where I was usually peppered with question about if I had a girlfriend or what basketball players I liked, only a few of the most thoughtful and gifted students asked about more substantive topics. COCAP benefits from dozens of exceptional young people, and it has been an absolute pleasure to interact with them over the past few days.

In the afternoon of the first day there was a meeting of COCAP leaders and community leaders to discuss how community groups could get more involved with the politics of the day. Dinesh, COCAP’s founder, led the meeting. Dinesh is one of the most dynamic and charismatic personalities I have ever met. We all filed into the conference room, set cushions in a circle on the floor and sat down. Tea was brought up from the store next to the office, introductions were made, and then we just talked…well…they just talked, the meeting was of course in Nepali. I really enjoyed the relaxed style of the meeting. It was a free exchange of ideas where people spoke their minds, and everyone else listened. All of the COCAP volunteers are invited to attend all of the meetings, many jotted notes and carefully weighed every word, while others drifted in and out of the room over the course of the two hours.

This meeting offered some insight into the philosophy behind COCAP. COCAP is a network of more than 40 groups, each group works on a specific issue relating to democracy as well as human and minority rights. There is no hierarchy between groups and people within the network, their connection is based purely on the belief that they are stronger and more effective when they work together. The strength of civil society lies within its strength to collective educate all groups of society, and the power to unite people towards a common goal, COCAP understands this. Bringing groups and people together and allowing for a free exchange of ideas and thinking about how to constructively cooperate to meet the many challenges of Nepali politics and societies is the basic goal of the network as I understand it.

Not taking minutes at the meetings, not setting strict work plans or schedules for volunteers these things that might seem like weaknesses to some are actually part of what has allowed COCAP to be so effective and impressive for me. Freedom to evolve with the state of Nepali politics, freedom to introduce creative and challenging ideas all root from COCAP’s general approach and mentality towards their work. They do not worry about the record keeping and busy work that many organzations put so much effort into. With this approach they have avoided the trap of existing to perpetuate their own existence, and rather they exist for the programs they are organizing and the ideas they are developing. COCAP is for me the embodiment of what a grassroots organization should look like, meaning just being here is like a breath of fresh air and that is a wonderful thing after a half hour in the smog and noise of the Kathmandu streets.