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.