Esther Benjamins Trust - Canada

During this visit to UK I have been delighted to learn that the Canadian Revenue Agency has approved the establishment of an affiliated Trust in Canada (Esther Benjamins Trust - Canada) backdated to 1 January 2008. This new Trust will allow tax efficient donations from Canadian citizens and it is the initiative of Paul Richards, with whom I have been in correspondence for several years. Paul introduces himself:

I am a commissioned officer and Inspector with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have been involved in Esther Benjamins Trust after working in Kosovo with Gurkhas and having a desire to help the people of Nepal. I worked again briefly with the Gurkhas in Afghanistan. The more I learned of EBT, the more I wanted to establish a Canadian Branch of the organization to assist the children as you outlined in your [my] message. My participation with EBT included purchasing commissioned art from one of the young people in Nepal.To establish EBTC under Canadian international charities law, I sought to establish EBTC as a way to provide educational scholarships and bursaries to children under EBT care. I think this is the best way to"pay forward" as they say, to the lives of these young children. Education can heal the past and create opportunities for fulfillment and growth. In this sense, the objective will be to raise money for scholarships/bursaries for candidates nominated by EBT and partner agencies in Nepal. After two to three years of working on getting approval, we are in the final stages and have been informed that we will receive charitable status under Canadian law and officially begin the work of EBTC. Once completed, we hope to report on successful fund raising in Canada and allocation of educational bursaries in Nepal to help the wonderful children and young people in their quest to re-establish themselves.

It's taken a couple of years of perserverance and vision to get this off the ground but as we know a Mountie is famous for always getting his man in the end. Well done Paul.

Kirkcaldy Church

Each year I make this annual pilgrimage to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's home town in Kirkcaldy, Fife. This is not out of deference to Gordon, but rather to the tiny congregation at West End Congregational Church which has been supporting The Esther Benjamins Trust right from the very start. Every Sunday there is a plate by the door which collects small change in favour of the charity and after a year that builds up to anything between £1500 and £2000. That's quite amazing given the size of the congregation and its declining numbers but they seem to be motivated by one of the congregation's number, Ann Watters, its minister, Willie McNaughton and by the talk that I deliver before receiving the annual cheque. It's of course great to see everyone again, but it's also a challenge for me to keep the content of my talk interesting and fresh. This year I'll be drawing heavily on the material that I have spent the last few months building up on the EBT channel on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/philipinnepal

I hope that I manage to have them all on the edge of the pews later on this morning.

Tikli Bottom

I spent last evening in the very agreable company of Martin Howard, former Royal Navy officer, conversationalist and now owner of a splendid guest house at Tikli, near Gurgaon, Delhi. Martin and his wife Annie built their dream home over three years between 1996 and 1999, to their own design but in the style of a Lutyens bungalow. Then they decided to give it a very English rural touch by humourously adding "Bottom" to the house name. With their hospitality, its friendly Nepali staff and cool ambience it's an ideal spot to unwind after arriving at or before embarking from Delhi airport which is just 45 minutes drive away. It's a regular venue for filming of TV and Bollywood dramas; there was a shoot underway during my visit.

Martin and Annie enjoy good company very much but they are certainly not self indulgent, and are putting something back to society through their building of a private school for village children within a stone's throw of their home at Garatpur Baas. This will be no ordinary run of the mill Indian school that achieves results of a sort through rote learning underpinned with liberal use of the cane. Their vision is to truly educate the children, who will be the community leaders of tomorrow through positive, imaginative instruction by motivated teachers.

The school is being supported by their locally-registered trust, The Baas Educational Trust (BETS), which receives donations in turn (mainly from Tikli Bottom visitors) channelled tax efficiently through The Esther Benjamins Trust. The project has all the essential ingredients to merit my Trust's modest support - a person with vision and commitment on the ground and tangible, quality outcomes for children.

I hope the children are taught the use of straightforward English. On the flight home with Jet Airways I heard the announcement "Due to the non-availability of landing cards we will not be issuing the same".

A clean sweep

This morning I drove past a Standard Chartered Bank signboard praising "Magnficent, Mystical Nepal". Now another "M" can be added to that; Maoist. For the Maoist party has enjoyed a landslide success following Thursday's polls. Through the ballot box they have won a battle that they were incapable of winning militarily - the conquest of Kathmandu valley. The scale of the Maoist victory has surprised everyone, probably even the Maoists themselves. There isn't the slightest question of vote rigging and there was a remarkably good turn out considering the logistical difficulties of getting to election booths in Nepal. So what has happened? My suspicion is that this has been in large part a protest vote against the mainstream parties who have done so little for the electorate in the past. Now another party is being given a chance to deliver on promises and at least while the Maoists are in power there will be no return to violence for the war-weary population.

Maoist Chairman Prachanda is already sending out reassurances to potentially unsettled foreign stakeholders that the Maoists will follow a constructive path and I really hope they can. At the end of the day we are all (development organisations included) aiming to make society a better place and to help the downtrodden, although our methods have differed somewhat in the past. There is such a need for social reform in Nepal that it can only really be fully addressed by action from central government. Organisations like mine can only nibble at the edges of issues like the trafficking problem and child labour, hoping that through our advocacy and example others more powerful will intervene. Now the Maoists can do something that really would be revolutionary in Nepal.


This afternoon I took a little trip out to Dwarika's Shangri La Resort in Dhulikhel, about one hour's drive out of Kathmandu. It was great to escape the filth of town for a few hours and to see in the Nepalese new year with a drink, a dal bhat (lentils and rice) and the sound of the cuckoo.

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.

The working donkeys of Kathmandu

I met my friend and portrait artist Jan Salter at an art exhibition the other evening. She is the founder of Kathmandu Animal Treatment Centre (http://www.katcentre.org.np/) which is now a registered charity in the UK. Over a glass of red she told me that she was now looking into the circumstances of working donkeys in Kathmandu, as if she hadn't enough on her plate with the city's stray dog population to sort out.

On the way back from my Godawari arts centre this lunchtime I passed a donkey grazing by the roadside, clearly with an open sore on its bank. On returning home I opened this e mail and adjacent pictures from another animal welfare activitist:

"I took these pics at a brick factory site in Siddhipur. The donkeys carry unfired bricks from the place where bricks are made from mud to the factory and back. According to the staff (many of whom are children) the boss hardly cares for the donkeys. So many have died already. One donkey's ears were cut off when it was young, no idea why. Half of the donkeys have open sores which go untreated."

I am now looking at how I might extend my children's charity work beyond the immediate facilities we operate and out into the community that straddles the Godawari road that runs southeast out of Kathmandu. Whilst our expenditure of course will continue to have to go on children and young people, sights and messages like this make me think of what we might do for young people that can offer some parallel advantages to domestic animals and wildlife. And one day soon I am going to have a look at the brick kilns and their child labour for myself.

Sometimes it feels like one is living in a kind of mediaeval hell hole over here and no one seems to care that much.

Tuesday

Tuesday is the best day of the week in this part of Kathmandu. The reason for this is that during the dry season we endure 40 hours of scheduled power cuts (load shedding) per week but on Tuesdays we are given some relief with electricity all day. The simple pleasures that one takes for granted elsewhere can really be enjoyed on a Tuesday - including watching television, feeble as the available channels may be. As the monsoon season approaches next month there is the prospect of the reservoirs being replenished and the annual lifting of the restrictions. This may even come a little sooner than normal as we have been having a great deal of unseasonal rain over the past week or two. Habula, our elderly domestic security guard, attributes this latest reflection of climate change to the Nepali people having been "bad". I expect he's probably right.