Kirtika van Hunen-Malla grew up in Nepal and India. After exchanging hundreds of letters with her future husband, she moved to the Netherlands. She now works as a cross-cultural consultant, trainer, and author in Den Bosch, loves beschuit met muisjes and is puzzled by poepje as a term of endearment.
How did you end up in the Netherlands? I got a scholarship and came here to study at the University of Twente where I met another Nepali student there who was a colleague of my future husband. I was homesick and I was invited along on a weekend with them in The Hague. We had a Nepali dinner with my future husband and his family and we met a few times after that.
But I had a job in Nepal and went back for it. He came over a year later and we fell in love, but he had booked a vacation afterwards in Thailand. The first thing he did when he got there was call me and say he was buying a return ticket to Nepal.
When he got back, he proposed, but I didn’t jump to the challenge. I hardly knew him and was a bit scared, but he said we could break it off later if I wanted. I thought it was a good deal, so I agreed and he returned to the Netherlands.
We wrote hundreds of letters because we didn’t have Zoom or email in those days and phone calls were too expensive. I was very introverted back then so this gave me the opportunity to learn more about him with my writing. I would ask him questions in the letters and sometimes wouldn’t get answers until many weeks later.
We still have all th.