London Mosaics

I am not a particular fan of meetings which are so often a very soporific unproductive use of time; after I left the Army I vowed that I would never call a charity one unless absolutely necessary and that they would be as short and to the point as possible. But this week - even though it is week one of a "holiday" - has started for me with four brilliant ones in rapid succession.

The first of these was on Monday morning with Lesley Hynes, partner at Midas Charity Appeals (http://www.midasappeals.org.uk/). An external strategic review of The Esther Benjamins Trust that we commissioned last year flagged up a need to develop our grant-making Trust fundraising capacity. Unfortunately we can't afford to appoint a fully trained fundraiser so instead recruited Chris Kendrick with his excellent written and interpersonal skills with a view to training him to meet our needs. Part of that will involve support and mentoring through Lesley over the course of the next four months. We have been running up a deficit of income over expenditure for the last two years and I am confident that Chris and Lesley will take us back into the black.

Monday afternoon I met with consultant child psychiatrist David Jones, friend of a friend, whom I was meeting for the first time. David had visited the project work in October and, hearing of our need for specialist support for maltreated children, offered to help out. As a consequence I am now having a very fruitful exchange with David and with another new interested party, child pscyhologist Steve Shears. Ultimately I hope we can set up an excellent referral service in Kathmandu to complement the existing art therapy that we have been conducting indirectly through our art workshops. No such facility currently exists and the need is huge with all the abuse that trafficked kids suffer together with the trauma that children have experienced through the recently-ended conflict.

On Tuesday I linked up with Ian Kerr, Founder of ActionAid and of Midas, who came to see us in Kathmandu in December. Struck by the calibre of the project work - "it is as per what it says on the tin" - he offered to help us with fundraising and making contacts. That process began on Tuesday with an introduction to former gymnast Jane Walker who is a major gifts fundraiser by day and a circus performer by evening and weekend. She has been trained at the very impressive Circus Space in Hoxton (http://www.thecircusspace.co.uk/) which even trains its students towards obtaining degrees in circus skills. Jane was naturally very interested in our work. I am hoping that she may be able to come and spend some time with our Kathmandu girls later on this year during the course of a sabbatical. If nothing else it would be great for the our girls - for whom having been a performer in a circus represents a stigma - to meet one of their own sex who is such an enthusiast for the art form.

I digress to write that the venue for this meeting was St Barnabas House, just off Soho Square. It is a little known gem of a building dating from around 1750. Up until quite recently it was a hostel for battered women and was not open to the general public. It still isn't but Ian, who is a Trustee of its associated charity, took me to see the rooms that have well preserved features including original gold silk wall hangings and ornate plaster ceilings. But best of all were the fabulous nineteenth century mosaics behind the altar in the chapel. On the way home I passed through the nearby Tottenham Court Road underground station which is famous for its own collection of mosaics. Modern in style, but as impressive in their own way.

The final meeting came yesterday when I met Ian again, this time to have lunch with Kate Baldwin, Director of regular funder The Sylvia Adams Charitable Trust (http://www.sylvia-adams.org.uk/) to see if she might be willing for Adams to consider seed funding to the tune of £50k for the purchase and conversion of our arts rehabilitation centre in Kathmandu. The overall working budget is £250k and we would hope to cover this through five blocks of £50k. Our request was as politely received as ever, but Kate will of course need to consult with Trustees and hear more of our plans in due course.

Today I advertised in two British art magazines for replacement volunteer art teachers for our Kathmandu workshops. I hope some suitable candidates step forward otherwise we'll have to scrape the barrel and I may have to revert to the role of teacher....

Our volunteer sculptor's letter from Nepal

Rebecca Hawkins is a professional sculptor who is coordinating the second of my Trust's Child Trafficking Victims Art Workshops, designed to offer creative art therapy and vocational training to children and young women we rescue from bonded labour in India’s circuses.

She has already made a great impact with the children – many of whom have been mentally, physically and sexually abused over a sustained period of time. Here, in this report I received today, Rebecca describes her experience so far...

"When I arrived here, I had never taught before – and for those of you who haven’t either, I would like to share something with you: teaching is exhausting! I feel compelled to apologise to my teachers for any times I caused them to wish that they’d pursued a different career path. It’s not that I was a particularly troublesome pupil - in fact, I was a relatively quiet girl - but Art was the only thing I was ever really interested in, so teachers of other subjects had to work extra hard to keep my attention.

Three weeks into my 3-month placement here, I already realise how challenging teaching can be. The worst thing is that I know for a fact that as extremely privileged public school girls, we were 100% more problematic than the eager (if a little self doubting) girls I am lucky enough and honoured to be teaching.

Art is not everyone’s cup of tea and positioning myself as the teacher trying to impart my knowledge of the subject to students has certainly taught me how much I take for granted my ability to draw or form something three dimensional without much effort. It has always been that way for me, but for these girls who five months ago were more practiced on a tightrope or a unicycle, being forced to draw a still life and get to grips with the finer points of perspective and form must be totally bemusing and baffling. Especially when the person teaching them is trying to explain it in very poor pigeon Nepali!

What we put our teachers through makes me shudder to remember, and I feel an immense shame at how ungrateful we were for the education we received when I consider by comparison just how much these girls have been through, and see every day how willingly these victims of a very poor society are tackling every challenge I throw at them with a smile - and I have thrown them plenty!

I should point out at this juncture that the main reason for being here is to teach sculpture, but I strongly believe that if you can understand form and perspective by drawing it, then it will benefit everything you turn your hand to. I decided from the start that the only way to work out what they could and could not handle was to chuck them in the deep end and see if they swam.

Not really realising that most of them had never actually drawn before - every child I know grows up doodling and drawing something - I set up a complicated still life consisting of lots of fruit, mugs and a big brass water container. Knowing the culture for copying here, I made sure every angle presented a different picture and that plenty of the fruit overlapped so that they would be forced to actually look at what was in front of them instead of just drawing how they perceived it to be.

After an initial nervousness from both parties (did I mention I had never taught before?), the girls settled down to draw, only to rub out every small line they made. I decided to remove all rubbers, only to discover that a couple of them had their own and were passing them around underneath the table!

An hour into the session, I was so exhausted that I had to send them off for a 10 minute break – I was also aware that they were taking in a lot of new information. However, if by lunchtime they were paddling, then by the end of the day they were well and truly swimming and tackling the art of shading. I was exhausted but totally amazed by them.

The next morning they were horrified to discover that they had a totally new still life. I deliberately placed the girls who had excelled on a side of the table where the challenge was harder, with the task made a little simpler on the other side for the girls who had struggled. Again the girls exceeded my expectations, lapping up my instructions and advice - Nepali phrasebook in one hand and sketch pad to draw examples in the other - leaving me at the end of the day proud and humbled by their achievements and determination.

In the ensuing 2 weeks I have introduced them to relief sculpture, which they are modelling in clay and then casting in plaster. It is a serious challenge for them, and one they are proving that they are more than up to, despite not always believing it themselves! The aim of this is to help them understand 3-dimensional form but without the stresses of gravity. It also introduces them to materials, skills and methods that can be used in conjunction with mosaic and may one day be useful if commissions for bathrooms, gardens and general interiors are undertaken.

Teaching in a foreign language has challenges of its own and there are moments when I feel totally bemused by my inability to express myself. For their patience in these times, as I scrabble through my phrasebook for the closest words to explain myself, I am truly grateful.

My time here so far has been without a doubt the most humbling and rewarding of my life. The enthusiasm and determination with which the girls have battled to understand what I am trying to teach them continues to surprise me every day and I am in no doubt that they will continue to do so for the remainder of my stay. My only hope is that their patience with my lack of Nepali can match the total awe and amazement in which I hold them."

Freddie Starr

One of the things that I miss about living in Nepal is UK television. Or so I thought until last evening when I caught the start of "Celebrity Wife Swap".

This showed "comedian" Freddie Starr (who is quite mad) swapping his wife for a week with former pin up girl Samantha Fox. Starr has a fourteen month old baby and before I switched off I was horrified to see Fox arriving and announcing to the child that she would be her new mum for the coming week. Starr's wife is clearly as mad as he is. What adults choose to involve themselves in in the interests of television entertainment is entirely up to them. But inflicting things like this upon babies is really grim and the series producers should be ashamed of themselves.

Hatti Trading

Just over three years ago we had a tremendous volunteer in Nepal called Emma Triplett. Emma had seen an interview with me in The Kathmandu Post and immediately volunteered her services to help with trafficking victims that we had retrieved from the Indian circuses. In a life changing experience she went to work at our "Kathmandu Training Centre" teaching English to girls in between their learning cutting and stitching skills. After a few months she went back to UK and decided to set up "Hatti Trading" (http://www.hattitrading.co.uk/), providing an outlet for bags and designer items that were being made by the girls she left behind in Kathmandu. Emma is a great leader and the business took off, with her selling her merchandise through party agents. The initiative is now providing work to 18 former circus girls in Kathmandu; this is what the trafficking survivors most need - jobs.

Yesterday I addressed her 25 agents and told them how they were actually in the frontline with us in the fight against human trafficking. Unless there is something for the girls to return to our circus rescue programme can fail very badly and out of sheer desperation girls may return to the circus. The talk went very well, even though my PowerPoint presentation wouldn't open and I had to present for one hour unscripted and without imagery.

There is currently an epidemic of "winter vomiting virus" sweeping the UK:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=TT1A1IOQXOAMTQFIQMFSFFWAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2008/01/04/nnoro604.xml

This morning at 8 a.m. I joined the victims. Explosively so.

Girl trafficker's travels over

The female trafficking agent who was sent to us by ChildLine India at the start of this week has had charges registered against her in spite of her threats against all and sundry. She is not eligible for bail so can now expect to remain behind bars for up to a year until the case comes to court. So that should keep her out of further mischief. If she is convicted she'll face a sentence of up to 20 years and a fine of up to 200,000 rupees (£1600).

We are already looking after the children of imprisoned traffickers (as part of our programme for help to prisoners' children). It would be ironic if through our determined efforts to get this woman convicted we end up caring for her children, if she has any.

Phew...

The protests that matured into a full strike today ended abruptly this afternoon following agreement not to increase fuel costs. That comes as a huge relief, also personally, as had it continued we'd have been unable to get to the airport tomorrow and the start of a long overdue month's holiday in the UK. But I wonder how the Government will sort this mess out?

I gather that a UN land cruiser was stoned by a mob yesterday; normally these blue plate vehicles are immune from domestic protests. However these gas-guzzling four wheel drive jeeps with things like "Human Rights" and "World Food Programme" emblazoned on their sides have attracted a great deal of resentment in recent months as they drive past long queues at the petrol stations. I am surprised they weren't targetted before. The UN needs to sort its branding out.

The price of fuel

There has been serious unrest in Kathmandu both yesterday and today. This follows the Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) increasing the price of diesel and kerosene by 10%. There was a similar increase about a month ago and the public has this time responded with street protests, burning tyres and traffic paralysis. For this is not just a problem of fuel costs as the whole cost of living will increase dramatically as well, while incomes remain the same. In the past the NOC/Government have backed down following similar protests and I expect these will now continue until that happens. Otherwise the general public has too much to lose.

The underlying issue is the fact that Nepal has been importing fuel from India and selling this at a loss to the NOC. The Government doesn't have the means to clear the NOC's debts or to subsidise fuel costs in the future. And since NOC has been running up a debt with its Indian counterpart, the Indians have not unreasonably suspended fuel exports from time to time leading to chronic fuel shortages and long queues at petrol stations. So the NOC has no alternative but to increase prices but even with these last two price hikes the Corporation will still be running at a huge loss.

Hanuman Dokha Police Station

I have spent most of today "watching the paint dry" in this central Kathmandu police station, but it has been time well spent.

On Sunday we received a call from our Indian partner, ChildLine India, that a girl trafficking agent, two other adults and three girls had been picked up by them at the railway station in the northern Indian border town of Gorakhpur. The group, all Nepalis, were on their way to Mumbai, from where the girls would be sent on to the sex trade in Kuwait. We agreed to their call for help immediately and last evening Shailaja CM, Director of our Nepal partner organisation, Esther Benjamins Memorial Foundation, took a flight to the border crossing near Bhairahawa. There she linked up with the ChildLine co-workers and the trafficking party to begin a seven hour road journey home. They got back to Kathmandu at 2 a.m. The adults went straight to the jail at Hanuman Dokha Police Station while the girls went to our Godawari refuge.

It appears that the two adults in the group were a father of one of the girls and a husband of another. They were accessories to the work of the female agent, who is notorious for operating out of the southwestern Rupendehi District. She protects herself with threats of violence from the Maoists, with whom she claims to be associated. We felt that if we tried to register a case against her in her home district it would most likely fall between the floorboards as relatives - or possibly local Maoists - might intimidate the police into not pressing charges. The key would be to get the case registered in Kathmandu first (away from threats) and then transferred back to Rupendehi District for prosecution. The case would then be followed up from Kathmandu in due course. Today we seem to have been successful in our aim and the group will appear before a Kathmandu Judge tomorrow morning before being sent back to Bhairahawa.

It is actions like this that make the greatest impact against trafficking. I suspect that there are quite few major agents responsible for the trade in human lives and taking them out of circulation would turn off the flow almost overnight.

I look forward to the outcome of the hearing tomorrow. Chances are that the individuals who were due to send their beloved daughter and wife off into the sex trade will get off eventually but I can just about cope with the reality of that if the agent is put away for life.

Relief sculpture

I popped into the Arts Rehabilitation Centre this afternoon to see how our volunteer sculptor, Rebecca Hawkins, was getting along. I had always thought of sculpture in terms of figurative items, statues and busts. But there's also relief sculpture and for the first time in Nepal it's being taught to (very enthusiastic) students. And more exciting is that the students are all trafficking victims, girls that we have rescued from the Indian circuses.

I am so proud of the quality of our work and that includes a huge admiration for students and tutors alike.

Saturday Morning Fever

January is school holidays month for the Kathmandu refuge children in the care of The Esther Benjamins Trust. Every effort is made to keep the children fully occupied and it's a prime time to obtain the good services of visiting volunteers. This morning Dutch volunteer Els Horst and British volunteer Jo Lee looked on as the kids went through their moves in a dance competition that they've been rehearsing for during the past week.

It's always said that children should be given every opportunity to express themselves, and you can't argue with the wisdom of that. Especially when the children, like these, come from traumatic suppressive backgrounds. But from what I have seen at similar occasions in Nepal so often these events are laid on for the amusement of non-participatory adults, who sit there like stuffed shirts. This isn't the case with our activities. The children insisted on the staff joining in and this video shows staff members Anita and Anju (themselves girls who were once trafficked to the circuses) complying with the children's demands.

Visitors

One of my more pleasant tasks here is to receive visitors and introduce them to our high quality project work, a role that I have to try to balance with desk work. So far so good...

Today we had two very different visitors. The first of the day was Ivan Broadhead, journalist with Hong Kong's largest English daily, The South China Morning Post. Ivan has been researching cross border trafficking from Nepal into India and his enquiries inevitably led to us. I took him to see the arts centre which is now the main focus of our rehabilitation work with circus returnees. He seemed impressed and I was equally impressed with the sensitivity with which he interviewed a couple of the girls. My mind did go back though to a similar visit from The South China Morning Post in March 2000 that led to cover story in its Sunday magazine the following May. That in turn was syndicated to the UK's Daily Telegraph (see "My interview with the Daily Telegraph" in the link below) and it was that article that more than anything else launched the charity. One never knows what can become of good - and sensitive - journalism.

The second visitor was Carla Bachechi, a political and economic officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu. Timely, as this week I have been working on an application for U.S. State Department grant funding for our arts centre for a three year period starting in September. The application, which includes an element towards purchasing the premises, comes to just over US$300,000, and the deadline is tomorrow. That is when the application has to fall on, er, Carla's desk. But before one gets too excited at funding prospects, it should be noted that a similar application last year was turned down and once more we had to rely on the good old general public to keep our heads above water. So if anyone out there has a few spare dollars, do let us know.

A UK sculptor teaching Nepalese girl trafficking victims

This afternoon Bev and I went to visit our latest British volunteer, sculptor Rebecca Hawkins (www.rebeccahawkinssculpture.co.uk/currentProjects/projects.php) who has just last week joined the art workshop for former circus girls. While men outside the building continued constructing a kiln, we found Rebecca introducing the girls to the basics of form, through teaching still life techniques. The girls were all sitting around a central display so that each had a different perspective and could therefore not copy one another - copying being a Nepali trait.

Rebecca will be with us until April and during that time we hope to overlap mosaic and sculpture techniques - literally adding another dimension to our work!

Organ theft

This time last year along with ChildLine India we conducted a rescue operation at The New Raj Kamal Circus in Uttar Pradesh, north India. Twenty girls were freed from modern day slavery and sexual abuse (see the film on my post of 11th December). At the time another Indian NGO rather hijacked the legal action against the circus owner, Lakhan Chaudhary, who allegedly was himself raping the girls. It all went quiet and the NGO refused to reply to our enquiries about progress of the case. At the end of last year it emerged that nothing had been done and Chaudhary was still a free man.

Working with ChildLine we are now going to attempt to prosecute Chaudhary and 14 of the girls that we freed are willing to give evidence against him. These witnesses are much more relaxed and confident than they were a year ago and for the first time have just revealed a further tragedy to add to the catalogue of horrors from that circus. A seven year old Nepali girl performer allegedly had a kidney removed from her and she died shortly afterwards. Apparently her parents were summoned to the circus and paid off in return for their silence.

If proven, this will be the first case of organ theft that we have come across in relation to child trafficking to the circuses.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

The girls that we rescue from the circuses are at risk of going from one form of exploitation to another. In the circuses the owners who buy them off the agents see them as being a mere commodity whose sole value is their exotic looks and performance in scant clothing that attracts less than discerning audiences. And I have written previously about the extremes of abuse that they have to endure within the circus. The trouble is that the families who sold them off are as predatory as the circuses and only tolerate their presence post-rescue if they can get some early financial return back off them. The girls are caught in the middle and to a certain extent, so are we as we try to help and rehabilitate them.

An illustration of this happened two evenings ago when a father of one of the girls who has been on our art workshop turned up at our premises and kicked up a very public rumpus. He began shouting about how his daughter, Laxmi, was old enough to work and why was she not earning money? After a bitter exchange with our local staff he left, taking the girl with him (the father’s say is final in Nepalese culture). Very sadly Laxmi had been the top student on the course and if the idiot had left her be she’d have been earning a great deal of money within a couple of months.

So often the decision-making of these parents is fuelled by alcohol abuse. It is the need for the money that supports their dependence that often inspires them to send the girls to the circus in the first place. And when they’re back they’d rather see them earn a pittance working in the fields if it pays for a bottle or two of cheap spirits.

It is very likely that this incident could be repeated in the near future as two other girls from Laxmi’s village are on the course and their fathers may well follow suit. We are sending our field workers to see if we can reason with the parents. At the same time we will now merge the training of the workshop with the pre-existing workplace of “Himalayan Mosaics” so that the trainee girls boost the training allowance that we had been paying with earnings based upon sales of mosaics. It is sobering to reflect that our decision has indirectly been prompted by a drunken parent.

Fat and thin

Last year one of the Trust’s volunteers at the start of a return stint in Nepal was told by one of the children how she looked much better than on her previous visit, adding that she was now “so much fatter”. The subject of a lady’s weight is not a taboo subject over here and no one, even a stranger, seems to be inhibited about broaching the subject. A friend once told me how she had been asked at a Kathmandu police vehicle checkpoint how she could be so fat while her husband (who was behind the wheel) was so thin. Similar intrusive comments are reported in an article in this month’s edition of the locally-published UN Women’s Organisation in Nepal journal “The Mirror”. A Nepali lady, who has spent a great deal of time abroad, tells how she was once asked “kasto dublo, jugako ausahdi khannoopurryo?” (you are so thin, have you tried de-worming?). She added that fat people can expect comments like “Alee kum khanee gurra, sungur jasto motayero phootnoo aateeyow” which translates as “better start eating less, you are fat like a pig, you might just burst”.

This all could be construed as being merely an amusing, quaint lack of subtlety. But worryingly from a childcare provider’s point of view, I feel it also reflects a huge lack of sensitivity in this pass-remarkable, unsophisticated society. Our goal of integrating disabled children and young people with mainstream society and reintegrating the survivors of trafficking and sexual abuse becomes all the more challenging in this milieu. At the end of the day, there’s only so much that we can do.

The Fourth of January

Today is the ninth anniversary of my first wife Esther's tragic death. Although I always tell myself that it's "just another day" it does always still loom ahead of me over the Christmas and New Year celebrations that are going on all around.

It would probably come as no surprise if I were to state that it felt like it had happened just yesterday. And if I do sit down and write about the subject (as I did for the link article below "The Esther Benjamins Trust in my own words") then it suddenly does become very raw and the tears can readily flow. However if truth be told it seems like it occurred ages ago most likely because so very much has happened in the meantime. I didn't pause for much reflection in the immediate aftermath of Esther's suicide, choosing instead to take on a huge challenge in her memory. A challenge that has kept me fully occupied ever since. This has given me a great deal of peace and a badly-needed sense of purpose. With hindsight it was exactly the right way to proceed.

Vive la France

I am in the process of moving home at the moment from Godawari (which is 20km outside Kathmandu) to the town centre. My former home is being transformed into the basis of a rehabilitation centre which in the short term will host our art workshops. Ultimately I'd like my Trust to be able to purchase and extend the premises so that we can cater for up to 100 girl victims of trafficking as opposed to the current 50 or so. That will be an expensive prospect; property prices in Kathmandu have doubled in the last three years and I wouldn't be surprised if the final capital project cost doesn't run to £250k. We'll have to raise that from scratch.

I drove out to the house this morning and en route passed through a village called Harisiddhi. In the middle of this traditional Newar village a large red banner proclaimed "Long live Nepal France friendship". Presumably they've just had a French donor, or potential donor, visting and the locals like to have an opportunity to indulge in a bit of this kind of shallow flattery. It is a rather ironic slogan though considering that the French government has just recently refused the nominated (Maoist) Nepalese Ambassador to France.

From time to time Nepal sees a mass release of prisoners to mark a special occasion - like for example the former King's birthday. Personally I would prefer to see a celebration taking the form of a good party, but each to their own. Yesterday the papers said that they'd be freeing early no less than 800 prisoners from jail, just because the prisons are overcrowded. However prisoners from nine special categories would not be eligible. These include serious offences like rape and human trafficking, but I was bemused to read that the others include corruption and spying on the government. I can't imagine that anyone inside or outside hasn't been guilty of the former while I am surprised that anyone would be remotely interested in committing the latter crime. One other of the special categories was "helping prisoners to escape"; this seems to be a particularly pointless crime in the light of these regular amnesties. All you have to do is sit and wait rather than to embark upon digging tunnels.

We've run out of money!

Happy New Year.

Nepal has now added a dearth of bank notes to the other recent shortages - petrol, cooking gas etc - that we've had to work around. I went to four ATM machines in central Kathmandu today to try to withdraw cash before finding one that would allow me to extract local currency to a value that was worth more than a few pounds. And my Standard Chartered Bank card was cancelled in the process, presumably because of my temerity in persisting.

The things one takes for granted...