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."
Showing posts with label HIV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HIV. Show all posts
Monday, 12 May 2008
Friday, 9 May 2008
Establishing identity
One of the first projects that we give new arrivals at the Esther Benj
amins Trust art workshop in Kathmandu is for them to make their own names in mosaic. After having been rejected and sold by their families to subsequently spend years as non-persons inside the Indian circuses this is an important opportunity for the girls to re-assert their identity. This week I extended the idea by encouraging the workshop girls to visit the 24 residents (or as they are termed by their carers the "inmates") of the nearby Karuna Bhawan hostel for HIV infected infants and women (see my post of 11th April), establish relationships and make them name plates as well. The girls h
ave enjoyed this immensely and it has the added benefit of giving real purpose to their training. This afternoon I visited the workshop and photographed the students, touchingly absorbed with their task. The next project will be to make a mosaic of a flower as a follow on gift. I spent some time yesterday photographing flowers in my garden to provide sufficient inspiration to ensure that each of the 24 mosaics will be different, again allowing an expression of individuality. I will publish some of the results on this blog next week.
On the way home I called in to see our refuge children in Godawari. I was thrilled to see seven year old Juna Titung again for the first time in two years, she being one of the four children that I mentioned in my post of 5th May. She was practically wriggling with delight at seeing me again and I felt strangely flattered, an emotion that I don't experience that often or for that matter have any time for. But after that I felt a lot better with myself for having taken the decision to reunite her and her siblings with their family two years ago, inadvertently causing them such hardship and distress.
amins Trust art workshop in Kathmandu is for them to make their own names in mosaic. After having been rejected and sold by their families to subsequently spend years as non-persons inside the Indian circuses this is an important opportunity for the girls to re-assert their identity. This week I extended the idea by encouraging the workshop girls to visit the 24 residents (or as they are termed by their carers the "inmates") of the nearby Karuna Bhawan hostel for HIV infected infants and women (see my post of 11th April), establish relationships and make them name plates as well. The girls h
ave enjoyed this immensely and it has the added benefit of giving real purpose to their training. This afternoon I visited the workshop and photographed the students, touchingly absorbed with their task. The next project will be to make a mosaic of a flower as a follow on gift. I spent some time yesterday photographing flowers in my garden to provide sufficient inspiration to ensure that each of the 24 mosaics will be different, again allowing an expression of individuality. I will publish some of the results on this blog next week.On the way home I called in to see our refuge children in Godawari. I was thrilled to see seven year old Juna Titung again for the first time in two years, she being one of the four children that I mentioned in my post of 5th May. She was practically wriggling with delight at seeing me again and I felt strangely flattered, an emotion that I don't experience that often or for that matter have any time for. But after that I felt a lot better with myself for having taken the decision to reunite her and her siblings with their family two years ago, inadvertently causing them such hardship and distress.
Friday, 11 April 2008
Home of Compassion
My last post was rounded off by saying that at times it felt like life here resembled that of "some kind of mediaeval hell hole". In my experience of recent years it's just when one begins to despair in this manner something happens to redress the balance and restore belief. That's what happened today when I visited "Karuna Bhawan" ("Home of Compassion") in Godawari and stumbled upon a beacon of the faith, hope and love that is referred to in Corinthians.
I learned of the facility's existence through a visit to our Godawari arts centre two days ago by a British man, Geoff Pugh, who had been volunteering there as an English teacher. From the arts centre's balcony he had pointed out to me the buildings where he had been working, these including an HIV/AIDS home that he said had 23 residents. This was the first that I knew of its existence, not surprisingly given the stigma that is associated with HIV (along with so many other things) in Nepal.
This afternoon I paid a visit to this home and was shown around by the nun who seems to be looking after the 10 women and 13 children well nigh single-handedly. She is such a remarkable, inspirational lady, who seems to have the delightful trait of rounding off everything she says, no matter how unhumourous, with a jolly laugh. "Here's the vegetable patch, hohoho" and such like. But she's doing a wonderful job and the children there were tiny and oh so sweet with their innocent smiles, pig tails and ruddy cheeks. The facility is newly built and in pristine condition, its only drawback (to my eye at least) being the over abundance of bare walls. I have now offered to make mosaics for the rooms, mosaics that can be sponsored by supporters overseas. Father Pius, who runs the centre, may not take up my offer but I'd love to have this as a project for later on this year. Whatever his decision I already have agreement to our sending up some of our older refuge children, suitably equipped with guitars and toys, to interact with the children and brighten up their lives.
Wonderful stuff.
I learned of the facility's existence through a visit to our Godawari arts centre two days ago by a British man, Geoff Pugh, who had been volunteering there as an English teacher. From the arts centre's balcony he had pointed out to me the buildings where he had been working, these including an HIV/AIDS home that he said had 23 residents. This was the first that I knew of its existence, not surprisingly given the stigma that is associated with HIV (along with so many other things) in Nepal.
This afternoon I paid a visit to this home and was shown around by the nun who seems to be looking after the 10 women and 13 children well nigh single-handedly. She is such a remarkable, inspirational lady, who seems to have the delightful trait of rounding off everything she says, no matter how unhumourous, with a jolly laugh. "Here's the vegetable patch, hohoho" and such like. But she's doing a wonderful job and the children there were tiny and oh so sweet with their innocent smiles, pig tails and ruddy cheeks. The facility is newly built and in pristine condition, its only drawback (to my eye at least) being the over abundance of bare walls. I have now offered to make mosaics for the rooms, mosaics that can be sponsored by supporters overseas. Father Pius, who runs the centre, may not take up my offer but I'd love to have this as a project for later on this year. Whatever his decision I already have agreement to our sending up some of our older refuge children, suitably equipped with guitars and toys, to interact with the children and brighten up their lives.
Wonderful stuff.
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Qualified support
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
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
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