The suitcases are packed and I leave at 5.30 a.m. tomorrow for the return journey to Kathmandu. The last two days have seen very useful meetings. The first one yesterday was with a supporter who's helping us to establish our presence on Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com/). This is a virtual world which I found rather chilling on first encounter. But actually it is very exciting and clearly has massive potential, offering another way to connect with supporters; this medium is already being used by some of the larger charities. The second meeting of the day was more conventional and I had a really useful chat with the Trustees of another charity that is prepared to fund the medication and clinical care required to manage HIV/AIDS. This isn't an issue for us at all at present but I expect that when we get to grips with the problem of trafficking of children into the Kathmandu sex trade it will be inevitably - and tragically - be very high on our agenda.
During this visit I also picked up some supporters' letters from my London office. One lady sent us a donation for our art workshops for circus returnees but wrote:
"Can you not bring them to do things through the schools to lead them all lots of jobs (sic) in our country - a more realistic life style?
I feel that you will fail in the attempt you are making and should help them by concentrating on training that will lead to jobs.
Please try to think of another way."
Some initiatives do indeed fail, others enjoy a degree of success (and even that is a huge achievement in Nepal) while others really take off. It's quite hard to predict which particular outcome one will experience and the only option is to keep trying. But for our art and mosaic training I am very confident of great results. This is already bearing early fruit. For example see the response to our online mosaic auction as of today:
http://www.ebtrust.org.uk/site/auction.php
