The slums of Butwal

Last month our volunteer photographer Jonny Cochrane recorded a visit by some of our Bhairahawa refuge children to their home area in the slums of Butwal, which is half an hour's drive away. It proved to be a very bleak visit and I have now uploaded Jonny's pictures to Flickr.

We are now researching how we might provide support to the children who are in the midst of this urban poverty which is every bit as grim at the rural poverty of Makwanpur District. We're aiming to launch a new project in Butwal in the middle of this year.

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.

Jonny Cochrane

Photographer Jonny Cochrane (http://www.jonnycochrane.com/) joined the team yesterday, after volunteering his photographic services for the coming 2-3 weeks. I took him up to the Godawari refuge this morning where we challenged his photographic skills through inviting him to snap our two resident gymnasts, Aman and Bijay. Both these boys learned some of their gymnastics inside the circus. After we rescued them they continued to develop their techniques through training at the National Stadium in Kathmandu. They attend the Stadium every morning before school. Pictured right is Aman in flight.

Hopefully Jonny's images can be incorporated not only into our literature but also into exhibitions that we'll run later on this year. Tomorrow he heads to Bhairahawa, then Hetauda and then will undertake an assignment for us in India.

Further to my post of 11th November - "Not so vital statistics" - I reckoned it was time today for another weigh-in. I am now down to 76.7 kg and a 96 cm waist which gives me a BMI of 25.33 (only just in the "overweight" category) and a waist/hip ratio of 0.96 which is still above the desired ratio of .90. But I am getting there...