Sunday Life

The work of the Trust had some useful coverage yesterday in "Sunday Life", the Sunday edition of The Belfast Telegraph. I hope this leads to some additional sponsorship and a few fellow runners when I embark upon the Third World Run in Belfast on the 31st May.

Colour at The White House

The Esther Benjamins Trust's first children's refuge, the so called "White House", was set up in Bhairahawa southwest Nepal in 2000. It is currently providing a temporary home for 30 schoolgoing children. Most are children of prisoners but there are also some former street children and conflict affected children in their number. Over the last couple of months the refuge has received the support of eight gap year students. Volunteer photographer Jonny Cochrane visited the refuge last month and I have just uploaded his striking images to Flickr.

Childcare at the refuge costs in total £45 per month and we need sponsors to help us meet this cost. Sponsorship can be at three levels; £25 per month to cover general care costs, £15 per month for educational costs or £5 per month as a recreational sponsorship. Let me know if you can help.

How to defuse a crisis in Nepal

This week The Kathmandu Post published a front page article explaining how over the past year a number of commissions had been appointed to investigate pressing issues ranging from natural disasters to the causes of unrest on the streets. Essentially these inquiries, which each cost around £10k (good expense claims for the board members), lead nowhere as the recommendations are never implemented. The implementation of recommendations is not what these activities are all about. Instead the setting up of a commission takes the heat out of a particular crisis and settles down protests and disorder on the streets. Invariably the media reports that a "top level" board has been appointed and the rioters go home. By the time the commission reports chances are the original problem has become history and no one notices or cares much whether anything useful has emanated from the process.

Just above this report on the front page of Wednesday's Post there was another report saying how the private education sector had finally caved in to government pressure to pay tax that could be directed towards the benefit of the (poor) government schools. After a lot of wrangling the private schools had agreed to pay subject to the tax being retitled "Education Development Support Fund" from the original "Education Service Tax". And to the appointment of a "high level" National Education Service Commission to define how the taxes would be spent...

Returning to the real world, I have just uploaded to the Trust's Flickr collection a batch of pictures taken this month by our volunteer photographer Jonny Cochrane. They show our integrated art workshop activities in Bhairahawa where deaf students work alongside child trafficking survivors whom we've rescued from the circuses. As well as learning mosaic techniques the students learn English and IT. It's been a great success and unlike commissions of enquiry the Workshop delivers real results.

Jim Edwards

Long term resident of Nepal, Jim Edwards, passed away on Monday. Originally from Jersey in the U.K. Jim came to Nepal in the early 1960's as a big game hunter but metamorphosed soon afterwards into a leading conservationist. He set up a company, Tiger Mountain, that inter alia managed exclusive holidays in Chitwan National Park ("Tiger Tops") and at Bardiya National Park where guests could indulge in tiger spotting from the safety of the back of an elephant. He'd a great sense of fun and introduced Nepal - and the World - to the sport of elephant polo which is now also played in Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Jim was very supportive to the work of The Esther Benjamins Trust through Tiger Mountain and has channelled support and sponorship to us, while allowing our refuge children to enjoy an occasional free holiday at his centres. This very distinguished and charming man will be missed by the British community in Nepal within which he was such an enormous presence. And as I read in the papers of how the endangered Asian one horn rhino population has been almost eradicated from Bardiya National Park through poaching, I can only reflect upon the scale of the loss of Jim to the conservation scene. His full obituary can be read here.

Outside my window I have just heard the first cuckoo of Spring announce its arrival.

Iron gate

The School Leaving Certificate (SLC) examinations have just started in Nepal, which equates to the GCSE examinations in the UK. It should in theory be taken by students when they're around 16 but older candidates present themselves who are re-sitting the exam or who have missed out on education for whatever reason. This year quite a few "People's Liberation Army" (PLA) personnel who are veterans of the recently-ended conflict are taking the exam. SLC is a critical qualification and is known as the "iron gate" for without it there can be no progression to higher education, to decent vocational training or much of a chance of finding a good job. In this very poor country there's always a great deal of hype around SLC and each year there is usually the tragedy of a few suicides that follow exam failures.

We had a very different experience of an iron gate last week. My mosaic art workshop "Himalayan Mosaics" moved out of its old premises in Godawari, just outside Kathmandu. It transferred just a mile or so up the road and is now sited in purpose-built rooms on the roof of my partner Director Shailaja's new home. The problem was that two of our dogs had to move with the workers and Shailaja's compound had to be suitably secure to prevent these former street dogs from exploring their roots. That meant a gate had to be fitted and we took a chance and allowed local staff to install this for us. The outcome was the placing of an expensive monstrosity of a metal gate that looks quite incongruous and ostentatious in the midst of a rather poor hillside village. Fitting the gate took a long time as the chap who was supervising the work didn't think to measure the available space so they ended up having to cut away a lot of adjacent bank to make room for this expanse of metalwork. Shailaja, who is currently in India, is blissfully unaware of these goings on and will have a fit when she gets back.

I have seen this behaviour pattern many times over my years of being in Nepal - something I call "catastrophic decision making". Local workers can come up with the most bizarre solutions to problems the thought processes behind which just defy comprehension. Recounting the gate saga to a friend of mine the other evening she put it another way, referring to the "I" and "J" words. These stand for initiative and judgement and to her mind the two do not go hand in hand in Nepal. It takes quite an effort for a show of initiative to be displayed by a local worker, but one's delight at this is shortlived as it is rarely balanced with good judgement.

In my own display of folly this week I have registered for The Third World Run in Belfast on the 31st May, taking me back home to Northern Ireland for the first time in 13 years. This will be my fourth 10km run for my charity, The Esther Benjamins Trust, in its 10th birthday year. I have increased my sponsorship target to £40,000 and with £26,660 raised so far I am sure I can get there. If you'd like to support me either join me on one of my runs. Or, if you are blessed with better judgement than to do that, please visit my online sponsorship page.

Quixote's Cove

Nepali friends of mine have just opened a delightful bookshop called "Quixote's Cove" which is in the grounds of the New Orleans cafe in Jawalakhel, Kathmandu. If you go there you'll find a superb collection of classics and best sellers concentrated into a few shelves and a conducive environment to sit, relax and browse for a while. The proprietor, Pranap Singh, also knows his books very well and is well placed to give you a recommendation or two.

I am very happy to give the bookshop a well-deserved plug as Pranap and his friend Abinash Pradhan were kind enough to commission their logo from Himalayan Mosaics, a job that was completed very nicely by former circus girl Chameli. You can't miss that on the right of the door as you go in.

Hatemalo e.V.

Five years ago two German clinical psychologists, Katharina Tomoff and Micha Luedecke, volunteered for us at our Hetauda centre. They came as unknown quantities, but made a huge impact during their time with us, returning to Germany fired up to help us further. This is easier said than done as people return to their busy lives back home but last evening I heard from Katharina that she has now managed to register a supporting NGO in Germany. Her charity is called Hatemalo e.V.; Hatemalo is Nepali for "garland of hands" and e.V. indicates that this is a German registered charity.

Katharina will now have her work cut out in setting up website, literature and presenting plans to potential supporters. But this process has received an unexpected boost from Spain from where a translation agency, Uyngo.com, wrote to us out of the blue a few days' ago offering to translate documents and videos into a language of our choice as a free service out of respect for our work. Katharina's English is perfect but I have taken them up on their offer of subtitling one YouTube video which would otherwise have presented a technical problem. I will post the video on this site once it has been translated,

I love it when things come together like this and how marvellous are our worldwide volunteers!

Holi

Tomorrow is the Hindu festival of Holi and my least favourite time of the year. Once it was a time for good natured fun, with celebrations consisting of devotees throwing powdered dye and squirting water at one another. It used to be that this took place between families and friends with consent to becoming a victim being implicit in the merry making. In recent years though this behaviour has gone out of hand and become indiscriminate with anti-social behaviour being tolerated for a few days either side of the festival itself. You can't walk down the street without risking someone water bombing you. During the present water shortage one shudders to think where the water is being sourced from. Yesterday a water bomb narrowly missed my two year old as we went for a Sunday afternoon stroll in a back lane near our house. This kind of terrorism leads to the closing of schools for several days as teachers try to avoid the antics of the street being transferred to the playgrounds and classrooms - just as the end of year examinations have got underway.

The coal mines of Meghalaya

This past week I went on a five day research trip into northeast India, joined by my colleagues Nick Sankey, Shailaja CM and Dilu Tamang. As our Circus Children Project draws to a successful close we have been looking at various other situations that could be considered as having a negative impact on Nepalese children who have found their way, by one means or another, to India. Over Christmas I had picked up a press report which suggested that there were trafficked Nepalese children working in the coal mines of Meghalaya, the Indian State which lies on Bangladesh's northern border. We decided to look into the mines (so to speak) and sent a research team there last month for a preliminary visit to meet the NGO Impulse and its dynamic Founder/Director, Hasina Kharbhih (who was named in the article). Upon receiving their intriguing report I felt that I wanted to see the situation for myself.

The target area for our visit was the Jaintia hills in the eastern part of the State, this being the main coal mining area. I suppose that this could once have been considered to be an area of outstanding natural beauty with considerable tourism potential but it seems to have suffered from years of environmental indifference that probably even pre-dated the mining which started just a generation ago. Driving into the area I noticed the almost total absence of bird life, including even the common scavengers that you see in the Himalayan countryside such as crows and myna birds. I suspect this is through a combination of hunting, the planting of sterile pine forests and burning of scrub which seemed to be going on all around. On top of this there is now the uncontrolled mining which is open cast, pit or "rat hole" - small tunnels that lead to seams in the hillside.

We had heard before our visit of the existence of a "coal mafia" which dominates the mining industry and of the risk to life and limb of nosing around and asking too many questions. However when we got to the area of the mines we were made most welcome and families were quick to share with us details of their lives. OK, perhaps we were being misled but the impression we gained was that we were in the midst of a community of Nepalese men, women and children - families - who were economic migrants, earning good money and living a decent domestic life. That's more than can be said of the rural areas of Nepal whence many of the families originate. Undoubtedly there are health and safety issues at the mines. Unlike Dilu Tamang (pictured bottom right) I elected not to descend a pit on a rickety ladder where the handrail consisted of no more than a branch. I am sure deaths and injuries go unreported in this isolated part of India into which the authorities or police allegedly fear to tread.

For now our jury is out as to whether or not we are looking at a trafficking problem as opposed to economic migration of families. We are assured by Impulse that unaccompanied children are trafficked there and that there are worse coal mines than those we visited. That is good enough to merit further research both in Meghalaya and in Nepal in the coming few months.

During our discussions with Hasina the issue of what constituted a "child" was raised. From Hasina's point of view the answer was simple; it is as per the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) which has been signed by all the countries in the world with the exception of the USA and Somalia (strange bedfellows) i.e. under 18 unless national law puts the age of majority at younger than this. That is fine in theory but in practice it is a different story altogether. For if that criterion were to be accepted we would most likely have to end child labour and remove thousands of "children" who are in their mid teens from the coal mines. This would be tricky if the teenagers were there, desperate to work to avoid starvation for themselves and their families with no alternative social support in Nepal. And if you were to extract these teenagers it would be not only traumatic and violent but also probably a total waste of resources as they'd be back at the mines within a week of being repatriated back to Nepal with all its economic woes.

It takes a brave person within the development sector to risk becoming a pariah by challenging the widely-accepted truths of CRC but, very sadly, to me there seems to be a huge gap between its provisions and the needs of the real, impoverished, world.

Uranium and urinals

I returned yesterday evening from a five day research trip to Meghalaya State in northeast India. The reason for my visit is that the State, which lies on Bangladesh's northern border, is home to coal mines which are reputedly a destination for trafficked Nepalese children. I will post on that subject tomorrow. There are also significant uranium deposits in the eastern part of Meghalaya and, as India flexes its nuclear muscle, this has become a highly important national resource. The deposits though lie in tribal lands and there have been strong local objections to the potential for mining to leave a legacy of lasting environmental damage and a very long term health hazard. It appears that these objections have been largely overcome recently, most likely through local leaders being bought off at the expense of the environment and the poor people the leaders are supposed to represent. Mining will start soon.

It is a cliche to write that the "incredible" India of the tourist brochures is a land of contrasts but I am constantly amazed by how this new world power can have such ambitious national and international goals while showing so much disregard for the basic needs of its population. These include provision for essential bodily functions. On the trip down to Meghalaya I stopped off in Siliguri and after a light meal in a cafe opposite the railway station decided to use the lavatory at the rear of the premises. Beyond the door pictured top right lurked the worst toilet that I have ever used in my life. It consisted of nothing apart from a tiled room with two foot pedestals. Essentially the toilet receptacle was the floor around these comparatively dry islands with drainage being through seepage from around the floor margins. When you see an indoor facility like this you might justifiably prefer a simpler al fresco solution but later on in the trip I was warned that this option can come at a price. See the picture bottom right.

It was with some relief that we reached the Nepal border late yesterday morning. However this was short-lived as upon arrival we were advised that there was an ongoing "bandh" (strike) that was paralysing the south of the country and potentially preventing us from getting to the domestic airport and catching our flight from there home to Kathmandu. The strike, which started five days ago and is indefinite, has been called by the indigenous Tharu people who have objected to being grouped with the ethnic Indian (Madhesi) population in the discussions that are underway about the shape of the future all-inclusive "new" Nepal. During bandhs roads are blocked with rocks and fallen trees to prevent vehicular movement but we made it through by hitching a ride in an ambulance. The ambulance disgorged its patient at the airport, an unfortunate young woman who was clearly very seriously ill; she had no medical carer and all that the airport could provide was a wheelchair that didn't have any brakes. My colleague Dilu Tamang went off to find a couple of bricks to put behind the rear wheels. The woman's accompanying relatives were doing all that they could to try to get her on to the earliest flight possible, through showing her hospital notes and a doctor's letter to the airport staff. I imagine that they succeeded in the end but Nepal is no country for sick young women.

I read in the papers this morning that three people were killed yesterday because of this unrest. The police opened fire on protesters at a road blockade killing two and the locals retaliated later by hacking a policeman to death. If this strike continues it will add significantly to the national problems as much of Nepal's food and fuel supplies have to come north by road from India through this troubled region. As if the country hasn't enough to think about - as predicted in my last post the energy crisis deepened while we were away. We now have just four hours of electricity per day.

Money going down the drain

Water and electricity are currently at a premium in Nepal. The two are quite inter-related as the country depends upon hydroelectric power. And this electricity is in turn required by those of us who live in Kathmandu valley to pump to the surface the ground water needed for domestic use. The problem is that Nepal is now experiencing its worst drought in 20 years; last monsoon season was not as damp as usual and this winter's rains have failed totally. Normally the rivers and reservoirs get topped up in the Spring with melting snows in the Himalayas but the drought has meant that there's not much snow on the mountains. The 16 hours of power cuts per day means that whatever groundwater is available in Kathmandu valley remains largely untappable.

One solution to the water difficulty is the water tankers that shuttle between the springs in the hills around Kathmandu valley and the town centre (which is where our house is located). A tanker can fill our domestic water tank and that gives us a supply of reasonably clean water for about a week. It seems though that the springs are drying up, queues of tankers are forming at the springs and households all over Kathmandu are struggling to find a friendly water tanker that is prepared to deliver water. We've now been without mains water and had an empty tank for the last four days. I am having to flush the loo using mineral water which costs fifty pence a flush.

Essentially a full blown electricity and water crisis is about to break upon us as there is no prospect of significant rainfall until the monsoon begins in three months' time. And one of the main reservoirs that has been providing electricity to Nepal will only be operational for another week. Tourists who stay at decent hotels will be largely oblivious to this as the hotels have good generators and sound contracts with the tankers. The rest of us are in for a very difficult time indeed. I learned the other evening that the charity "Concern" is about to leave the country and no doubt others will follow.

Yesterday the Prime Minister attended a function where he took the oath as patron of the Nepal Scouts Association. He looked dapper in his uniform.