My colleague with The Esther Benjamins Trust in London, Chris Kendrick, arrives in Nepal on Thursday for his six monthly operational attachment. His main remit in UK is to fundraise and such field visits keep him in touch with our activities at the coal face. Chris has a background in implementing HIV related projects in Malawi, so for this trip I have asked him to begin a needs analysis on HIV and its impact upon Nepalese children. The situation already looks very bleak. See this overview by Surya Prasai, written just last week. I feel that the Trust has to play a role in fighting the infection and its consequences and Chris's research will start us off down that path.
Following my comments in yesterday's post, it is interesting to read Mr Prasai's sobering comment:
"The actual truth expressed by Nepal´s prominent AIDS activists in various world AIDS blog sites point to the fact that a massive diversion of attention of health resources has gone towards organizing expensive seminars and foreign travel jaunts for Nepali civil servants than focusing on the crises, thus adding injury to insult among those infected and affected."
