The wild Far West

We have recently returned from 8 days in the Far West where I was monitoring schools and meeting with partner staff and Roger was finding out at first hand what  effect climate change is having  on poor farmers in this vulnerable region just south of the Himalayas

Machapuchre and the Annapurnas as seen from the plane

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one of our computer labs in a remote school

We flew to Dhangadi airport in the extreme South West of the country and were rewarded with the most spectacular views of the entire Himalayan range from Khathmandu to the extreme west of Nepal. Tibet is just the other side of the mountains , which are so high that our little plane was well below the summits. On arrival we travelled by jeep for several hours to reach our first school. travelling with us was the generous donor who was funding our TAP computer labs and also the Nepal Director of a well known computer company who was providing all the software for the schools.
As well as monitoring how the students were learning computer skills, I also had a chance to talk with teachers about the impact of the trainings they have had on child friendly learning. It was good to see the younger students sitting on carpet instead of concrete floors, with posters on the walls and children being taught more actively, rather than just be rote learning. However, in these remote government schools there is so much to do and the pace of school improvement seems very slow. The key to sustainability is the involvement of the whole community, including the school management committee. The parents in these communities do not have the means to send their children to the private schools so they have a keen interest in improving their local school, even when resources are so scarce.

Children getting a snack in the street after school

We had great welcomes in the schools with Malas( necklaces ) of marigold flowers and speeches. The head teachers were keen to have feedback on how their school was progressing and I was able to give the teachers some help with  teaching and learning , but the best part was talking with the students. Students of all ages are keen to learn here and their parents, many of whom can only writ etheir name , value education highly.

young students in child friendly classroom

The terain in Bhajang district in the far west is towering hills and deep valleys with few roads. To reach one school we had to walk for four hours straight up hill with a three hour walk back in the afternoon. We also met with farmers groups who told us about the effect the changing climaate was having on their lives. It was well worth the effort and we slept well that night!

Walking to a remote school

Life here is still very  traditional

We stayed in different local hotels but my favourite was a traditional stone  and thatch guesthouse with no electricity or running water. it was an hour each day round trip to fetch water but we had excellent food and the landlady was so welcoming. One solar panel on the thatched roof provided lighting and to my suprise we slept really well.. 

The air was so clean compared with the city and at night the stars were amazing, recalling Psalm 8 .

The kitchen at the guesthouse-the young goats are left behind when their mothers are out feeding in the forest

Overall the Far West seems similar to our life in Pokhara 20 years ago, with friendly people, and a very  traditional way of life. However the constant striving of the ordinary people for a better life for themselves and their  children is something that we can all empathise with.

Tihar-the festival of lights

We have just returned to work after the  4 day Tihar festival holiday. In India this hindu festival is known as diwali and is second only to dasain in importance in the hindu calandar.

Tihar market in the street on the way to work

 The first day is Kaag tikka when crows and other birds are worshipped by having food left out for them.

Kaag (crow ) food left out for the birds

Ladies making marigold malas

This is followed by kukur tikka, the day when dogs throughout Nepal are worshipped with good food, malas( flower garlands around the neck) and tikka ( coloured powder on the forehead). The dogs are worshipped so they will continue to guard homes in the coming year. We saw many dogs like this one  so full of food that they were just lying in the sun dozing all the afternoon of kukur tika.

A very full dog who cannot finish all his tihar meal

The third day of tihar is gai tikka when all cows, are worshipped with extra food, malla and tikka . Cows are sacred here, hindus believe them to be an incarnation of the goddess laxmi ( the goddess of wealth and prosperity). The cows wander freely about although they are supposed to be restricted to outside the ring road. Often they can be found lying down in the road as busy traffic swerves to avoid them. The penalties for killing a cow are severe and their meat is  forbidden food for a hindu.

Happy cow with mala and tikka on her special day!

In the evening of gai tika there is great excitement as homes are decorated with multiple candles, and sometimes with electric lights.This diwali when a trail of footprints is drawn from outside in the street into the house to show the goddess laxmi the way in. Mandelas (circular patterns of coloured powder ) are painstakingly drawn outside the houses , with flowers and candles for worship (puja). A trail of red mud mixed with cow dung ( rato mato ) is laid into the house since the cow is sacred. devout hindus also sprinkle cows urine in their homes. Firecrackers and fireworks are let off in the streets and groups of girls go singing and dancing from door to door.
There is special puja ( worship) in the temples for Tihar.
Many churches also have special Christian programmes at this time since everyone gets at least 4 days of holiday. It is a happy festival with families reunited and lots of feasting.

Mandela, candles and rato mato path  leading into a house 

The final day of tihar is Bhai tikka when sisters worship their brothers with tikka and malla and gifts of dried fruit and nuts are traditionally given. Some siblings travel long distances ot meet up and feast on this day.I would be happier if the sisters also got worshipped by their brothers but this is not the case in such a male dominated society. I read recently that 11.5% of Nepali women were married before they were 14 and 21% have been  deprived of education due to their early marriage when they would have preferred to continue their schooling. Of course, early marriage ,and child labour, happened in the UK too, only a couple of hundred years ago but it does not make it right.

It is good that the government has now raised the legal age for marriage to 20 years and has good policies in place to stop child labour. However, 41% f the nepali population are children below 16 years and 34% of all nepali children are engaged in some kind of work on a regular basis. As always here, there is a considerable gap between the policies and the reality.
Our project work on improving girls enrollment and attendance at school is part of a move here to give girls better life chances by keeping them in school to continue their education.for longer. Incidentally, girls who marry young (and give birth between 15 and 20 years) are twice as likely to die in childbirth compared with those who do not marry until age 20. Poor nutrition and rudimentary health care make childbirth a very hazardous event in many remote areas. Allowing a girl to continue her education for longer can therefore sometimes even save her life!

Child Clubs

One of the tried and tested ways to improve schools and ensure that more children stay in school is to establish child clubs. These are attached to schools or they can be community based also. Mentored by a teacher and a designated community member, child clubs usually meet once a month. They discuss issues such as sports and library provision  for younger children or child marriage and child labour for older children. They have their own committee and a small budget, partly supported by NGO,'s such as ours, and partly by the community and the government. Sometimes they organise door to door visits to promote a particular issue.
When a new child club is formed, their facilitators help them to formulate an action plan for the year.At the end of every year they then do a self assessment and see which important issues still need more promotion in the school or the community. In a school this could involve the whole school in project work on a particularly important local issue, such as child marriage. This allows the student themselves to influence the school curriculum, something that UK schools could learn from!

A lovely true story to illustrate the importance of child club formation particularly in deprived areas of the country is of  13 year old boy who wanted to stay in school but had to leave and work on a construction site due to family pressure for him to earn much needed money.
The boy had been a member of a school child club and his fellow members reported that he had had to leave school early to the community child safety committee. They visited his family home but were told he was over 16 and so could legally work. His friends in the child club did not believe this and they went to the district education office and obtained his birth date. After that his family met with community leaders and agreed that he could return to school. This is just one example of how child clubs can be a force for positive change.

Dasain festival

Throughout Nepal cities have emptied, buses and vehicles have been crammed with people and the great Dasain exodus to the villages has begun. The hindu equivalent of Christmas lasts 10 days ( das  meaning 10 in Nepali) and everyone returns to their family home to celebrate. New clothes are bought, presents are exchanged and barley grains are germinated at the start of the festival to be used for puja ( worship) on the final two days. For those who cannot get to a temple to worship, there are tents in the streets of the cities with large statues of the gods and priests to give tikka (blob of red powder between the eyes)to those devotees who donate money. The most visible sign of dasain on the outskirts of Kathmandu are the herds of goat and water buffalo which are brought in for sacrifice to idols and then to provide meat for the feasting. They are dispatched with huge kukries( nepali curved blades) and the meat is then divided up. Despite the festivities there is a dark side to this festival. Many churches also put on programmes at this time since it is a national holiday.
Only the hindus worship idols with sacrifices, take tikka and puja their homes and vehicles with the remnants of the sacrifices in order to get blessings from their gods for journeys in the coming year ( see photos)
Roger and I chose to stay in the city for Dasain and have enjoyed exploring around the valley on our motorbike without  having to negotiate the heavy traffic.

ganesh idol worshipped with flowers, rice and coloured powder

goats waiting to be purchased for dasain

tableaux of gods and goddesses to be worshipped in the city streets

weighing a goat before purchase

vehicles being pujad  with goat remains , flowers and rice

Buying chickens for the feast

Dividing up buffalo meat after a sacrifice

young couple in their dasain best

festivities in street with dasain bamboo swing in the background

School visit's in Rukum

It was another 8 hour jeep ride to reach the first school we saw and the roads were just dirt tracks around the hillside:

Our route into the hills

A break to take photos

Te kitchen of our inn

In the doorway of our room

The road usually had a sheer drop on one side and there were no road signs or barriers at all.
We stayed in a friendly local inn wher eI got my first ever bed bug bites!
We visited two secondary and one primary school and it ws so good to be talking with students in the classroom again, even if their first language was Magar and so they did not always understand my Nepali. Our INGO, UMN is providing computer labs with 20 computers to 50 several needy rural schools in our working areas. This is in partnership with TAP and Microsoft. I was there to monitor the use of these facilities and to help the local teachers to use more child centred learning techniques. It was good to see how the whole community supported the govenment school and I also met with the school management committees to encourage the whole community to learn to use this resource. Poor children have no choice but ot use the government schools and we are part of a national drive to improve teaching and learning in them.
Talking to the students, it was clear that ,most of them had never even seen a real computer before the lab was installed, they had only seen pictures in books!
Despite the heart rending poverty It was clear that the students were really keen to learn and several of the teachers were teaching  in an interactive way. In the primary school they had addressed the water shortage and the extreme poverty of some of the pupils by providing a wash stand so they could clean themselves on arrival at school.

learning to use excel spreadsheets

Discussing the importance of computers in education

Using multilingual text books in nepali and mugar

wash stand for the primary school children

They also provided porridge at lunch time since  half of the children had to climb up a hillside for at least 30 minutes to get to the school from their village. Overall I was mpressed with the determination of these communities, with a high proportion of illieracy, to improve the education and therefore the life chances of their children.

Journey into the western hills

We have just returned from a field trip to Rukum, in the high hills of the mid west of Nepal. Roger and I travelled together but his focus was on climate change issues and mine on education.
We flew out of Kathmandu on a small  plane with only one propeller each side, which always un-nerves me but I did a lot of praying on take-off and landing and all was well. The best bit was that we had picked the side nearest the Himalayas and although it was raining on take-off, the sky cleared and we had some lovely views of the tops of the snow capped peaks with the clouds forming a carpet below them.


view of the Himalayas from the plane

 

 

 



Once we arrived in Nepalgung, a town right on the border with India in the flat terai region in the south,  we were met by a member of our field staff and shown to our Jeep.   We travelled for eight hours along roads that snaked around the hills with sheer drops on one side for most of the way. We forded small rivers and passed too many cleared landslides to count. The most alarming one was so recent that a digger was still clearing it and our driver drove as fast as he could since a tree was leaning at an alarming angle right above the road.

waiting for a landslide to be cleared

 We stopped for delicious dahl bhat with local meat and vegetables and then pressed on until we reached a big river. Here we left our jeep to walk over a swing bridge and up a hill to meet our second jeep. We were bringing multilingual educational text books  written in nepali and also in the local language, Mugar, to our partner schools in Rukum, Therefore these had to be carried by porters up by porters together with our own small cases. In the dry season the jeeps can ford this particular river but it was too high for our vehicle to cross.
The day we travelle dwas Teej, the annual womens festival when women and girls put n their best clothes, do their hair and the married women return to their mothers house. It was lovely to see them dancing in the villages as we passed.

Women gathered to dance and celebrate Teej

In one village we also saw this particularly well constructed festive swing.

Some of the men also enjoyed the Teej holiday

 Eventually we reached Rukum and gratefully settled into our guest house. The food was all cooked over a wood stove and the accommodation was clean but the best bit was the stunning views out over the hills and down the valley to the river.

arrival at Rukum

Pokhara networking visit

Last week, Roger and I travelled 7 hours by bus from Kathmandu to Pokhara ( where we lived when the children were small).This was a work trip and we had separate programmes arranged which took 5 days. The monsoon is still causing heavy rain and thunderstorms and in Pokhara the rain was torrential, but usually in the evenings so we got some good views of the Himalayas early in the morning.

I visited Amer Singh school, the only government one in the country with a specialist unit for blind and partially sighted students . The students come long distances and board in the hostel from the ages of about 6 until their secondary education is complete. Those from remote regions only return home once a year in the long vacation. On arrival they are taught braille and mobility and once they mastered these they enter the main school at whichever grade is appropriate for their ability. The students have 1:1 support in class, help from a teacher after school for homework and read both English and Nepali braille. Exams are sat with the help of a reader. Computer provision requires improvement and I hope to be able to mobilise some support for

this in the future.

A 14 year old student demonstrating his Braille reading skills

Gandaki boarding school was founded by UMN in collaboration with the King and the Nepali Government 50 years ago. The aim was to provide a western style education to students who would then work in the burgeoning tourist industry around Pokhara. From modest beginnings as  a small boys boarding school, it is now the top performing school in Nepal, Ten years ago, in line with its government agreements, UMN handed it over to a Nepali management board and it is now a not for profit organisation. It has a dedicated scholarship department providing school fees and all clothes, food, accomodation and equipment to 25 exceptionally able boys and girls each year from extremely poor backgounds. I had the privilege of talking to some of the scholarship A level students and there stories, achievements and aspirations were inspirational.

 The Principal, Mr Baral, honoured me by asking me to speak to assembly when all 1400 of his students assembled outside in the bright sunlight . After discussions with the Principal I spoke briefly at a staff meeting on teaching and learning issues and have been invited back to run a staff training day in November. As well as a tour of the school I was delighted to have the chance to talk with the A level students about preparing their university applications. It was an altogether lovely day!

Speaking at assembly

On another day It was fascinating to talk with Plan-International staff in Pokhara about their extensive and pioneering new education project designed, like UMN's ediucation work, to improve the standards of teaching and learning in government schools. Working closely with the District education Officers, they hope to make improvements in early years literacy that can then be replicated nationally. Particularly interesting were their strategies to engage illiterate parents in helping their children learn to read and write.  The children from very poor families are usually expected to come home from school and just continue with their household or agricultural work. On a positive note, primary school enrollment is now much improved, up to 100% in some areas. Retention and achievement measures are not so encouraging. Because any Nepali families who can afford it, send their children, especially their boys, to private schools, improvements in the government schools help the poorest children in the country.

On a much smaller scale, I visited a small project run by some Nepali friends who help 150 very poor children to access education by providing books, equipment and uniforms for them. They also run a hostel where children from remote regions can stay so they can attend good government secondary schools.I wanted to know the actual cost of educating  a child in the government schools where tuition and  text books are now free. I discovered that many schools  charge enrollment fees, computer use fees, fees for sporting activities, exam fees and even sometimes for "furniture".This is, of course, undermining the Government commitment to provide free education for all students. 

Learning about the actual cost of "free" schooling

Monsoon damage

I always carry my camera with me since there is always something bizarre or interesting to see here. Last Wednesday we had a particularly heavy thunderstorm and as I walked home from work the streets were like rivers so I took a taxi back. The next morning Roger and I were walking to the office as usual and to our astonishment, the white temple on the corner just past the Bagmati bridge had collapsed, pulling down power lines, a metal fence and tumbling bricks into the road. A week later and we still have to walk road the masonry and cables and piles of bricks

collapsed temple

 The temple was badly cracked by the earthquakes and it withstood the 2015 monsoon rains but this monsoon it fell down. Apparently UNESCO are concerned about the rate of progress on restoration of the heritage sites here. We walked to Patan durbar square at the weekend and there are now big fences surrounding and protecting the damaged buildings.It is difficult to see how progress can be speeded up when people have only recently been able to start rebuilding the earthquake damaged houses and schools. These must take priority over monuments
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New fences protecting Patan Durbar square

On a lighter note, here is a young man painting "no parking" stripes on a new road.He took three days to finish but did a really good job

One nice thing about the monsoon is the speed at which plants are growing now that the rain is here. Many trees have started to flower and we keep noticing interesting new plants like this one.

An extraordinary seed pod , just like a green balloon!

The digital divide

One of the problems in this country is the huge gap between the very rich, living in luxury and the very poor and marginalised who we are helping. While every wealthy , westernised nepali youth will have a computer and smart phone, and computers available at school, the poor and those living in remote regions have no access at all to computers or the internet. This " digital divide" means that they cannot access the well paid jobs in the cities and abroad which require digital skills. Therefore many thousands of young men travel to the gulf states to work for several years as labourers to support their families back home. Also, students in  schools without computers are denied access to the wealth of free teaching and learning resources now available on line .
The government is committed to providing a computer in every government school and internet connection within 5 years but implementation of this laudable policy presents many challenges.
Several INGO's , including our own project here, are helping with implementation and teacher training. A generous New Zealand donor ( TAP-technology Alleviating Poverty) is providing 20 laptops each together with teacher training and support for many government schools in remote regions and we are involved in the logistics of getting these "computer labs" set up in some of our partner schools. With electricity supplies so erratic here, solar panels provide power to recharge the computer batteries. The whole community is involved in securing and using these computers so that they become a sustainable resource for all ages to use.
The UK is recognised as a world leader in computer education is schools and I was invited this week to be part of an expert panel discussing this issue at a conference for 150 nepali teachers and lecturers. The conference was organised by a well known American computer company who generously sponsors computer training and software access for developing countries like Nepal. In the afternoon we had group work sessions learning about training grants and sponsorships. One fascinating session showcased the next generation of computers, a pair of goggles that enables the wearer to access multiple screens, holograms and virtual displays using their fingertips . It was bizarre to be looking at such an expensive gadget in Kathmandu when so many rural schools do not even have good buildings after the earthquake damage!

My new office

chatting with Nepali teachers at the conference



with the Director from the ministry of Education

 

 

My colleague (on right)about to give  a speech



Demonstration of computer goggles