Sarah and D finish on a high!

The final 3 days of Sarah and D’s program in Nepal involved visits to a couple of drop in centres operated by CWISH, and culminated in an outing and picnic for the kids from these centres.

On Tuesday we visited the centre in Basundhara, just off the ring road at the northern end of Kathmandu. Most of the kids attending this centre were girls ranging in ages from 8 to 16. They had prepared a small role play/drama for us which involved a number of the girls acting out their home lives – all of the kids who attend these centres are domestic labourers meaning they work for and live with middle to upper class families in Kathmandu. They did a second drama which showed an attempt by local police to convince a family that they should allow their child ‘servant’ to attend school. It was very touching to see these children recreate aspects of their own lives, and made the impact of their realities that much harder.

Sarah and D came well prepared to inject a little bit of fun into the lives of these kids and so they pulled out some mega colouring books, crayons and textas and started handing them out to everyone, even the older kids were desperate for their chance! Of course colouring in can’t be completely enjoyed without biscuits and chips/crisps and the girls had organised some of these as well – the kids were in heaven. Last activity for the day was a basic alphabet quiz in which the kids had to give 3 words in English for each of the letters or the alphabet. They did really well and had loads of fun in the process, especially as every time an animal was named Sarah would proceed to imitate the noise of that animal!

Wednesday saw us carry out a similar program at a drop-in centre at Gyaneshwor, nearby to Kathmandu city centre. There were more boys at this centre (about half) and the age range was again about 8 to 16. We followed a similar program at this centre but also managed to fit in some singing – “heads, shoulders, knees and toes…” and also a game of Simon Says.


The highlight of the week for kids from both centres, and I think the highlight of the whole trip for Sarah and D, was Thursday’s picnic program. We organised a bus to take all of the kids from both centres to Buddhanilkanta to a park area situated at the very northern tip of Kathmandu at the foot of the hills. Sarah and D had brought badminton racquets, mini golf sets, balls, skipping ropes and even a limbo set that played music! The kids went wild and it really was amazing to see them all having so much fun. It really does remind us that kids are fundamentally the same anywhere in the world, they just need to be given the chance to be kids.

Both of the girls were challenging the kids to skipping contests and badminton with varying degrees of success and loads of fun was had by all. After a couple of hours of games lunch arrived. We had arranged to have small packed lunches delivered and they were devoured in no time, fortunately there was enough for anyone who wanted them to have seconds. In the early afternoon storm clouds began to form so we piled back on to the bus and headed home. Soon after it rained heavily which was a welcome chance to cool off.

This truly was a magic day for the kids from these drop-in centres. They all work as domestic helpers and had probably never experienced any kind of outing before in their lives. I am sure it is a day they will remember forever and I have a feeling Sarah and D feel the same.

On that note, we must say a big “thank you” to Sarah and D for taking 3 weeks to come to Nepal and do so many wonderful things with the various groups we work with here. They had brought a lot of resources with them which they kindly donated and they also bought many more things for the kids whilst they were here. Their generosity and passion for what they were doing will be remembered long after they have returned to London and hopefully, they will be able to return again in the not too distant future.

Trip to an orphanage, dogs included!

With all the excitement of last week’s events finally settling down, and after a 10 hour bus ride (due to some mechanical trouble and petrol shortage traffic jams!) to return to Kathmandu from Pokhara, Sarah and D were back at work on Monday.

The day’s program involved working with two groups of orphans at the Bal Mandir orphanage. The first group were toddlers around 2 to 3 years old. Some of the kids had disabilities, this was most likely the reason they were abandoned in the first place. This is one of the harsh realities of life in a country like Nepal and Sarah and D were fantastic in taking it all in their stride.

We arrived just as these kids were getting dressed for the day however upon seeing us they were more interested in playing football than putting their clothes on! So after a game with semi-naked kids running around the halls of the orphanage we managed to get them dressed just in time for their teacher to arrive to start the class. Sarah and D spent the morning with the class helping the teacher do some craft activities with the kids and they also had the chance to help prepare and feed the kids their morning tea as well.

After lunch the girls moved on to the kindergarten class which kept their hands full for the rest of the afternoon. The kids here are between 4 and 6 years old although there is also a boy who is 9. He had recently been abandoned in a village in southern Nepal and had never been to school. He also could not speak Nepali when he came to the orphanage as he spoke the local language of his village. Sarah and D took a particular shine to this boy and by the end of the afternoon they had him counting to 10 in English and also saying some basic words and phrases. It is amazing how quickly kids can learn when given the tiniest bit of care and attention and Sarah and D should be really proud of the impact they have had on this boy’s life.

All of the kids in the class enjoyed the girls reading a story, “Spot Goes To The Farm”, complete with all the noises of typical farmyard animals! Then there were some colouring activities and also some games outside including skipping which managed to incorporate a counting lesson.

Whilst all of this was happening I managed to sneak away to collect Mango and Tara from KAT for the second running of our Pets as Therapy program. You can read more about this program in my post for the first day we ran a few weeks ago. When I arrived in the kids’ room with the two dogs there were some tears again but this time many of the kids had remembered their previous experience and were thrilled to see their new friends return. We spent well over 2 hours playing with the kids and the dogs and this time the favourite activity was feeding Mango treats which he was content to eat all afternoon. Nearly all of the kids were brave enough to hand feed Mango although some of them were more interested in trying the biscuits for themselves!

Sarah and D arrived just in time to help us finish up with the dogs and take a few photos before bidding farewell to the little ones once more. So overall it was a big day at Bal Mandir with all kinds of programs happening for the kids. The rest of the girls’ time is going to spent working at drop-in centres with kids who work as domestic labourers. This promises to be a challenging and touching experience for Sarah and D as some of these children’s stories are horrific. I will post an update on this in the coming days.

I have posted some photos of the first visit to Bal Mandir with the dogs on our website, and I will post some more from the second visit soon.

Photos are up, and some thanks

There are two purposes for today’s post, the first is to let you know that we have just added a photos section to our website. There are already plenty of great photos there from all of our projects in Nepal and we will keep adding more. You can see the photos by going to our website (http://www.mitrataa.org) and then clicking on the “Photos” button on the menu bar.

Thanks as always must go to Christine Shim, a director of the Foundation and also our chief website and graphic design expert. Christine does a fantastic job of keeping the website up to date and looking fantastic – so “thanks Christine”!

Whilst on the subject of thanks, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of our partners in Nepal who have worked particularly hard in the past couple of months to make Thulo April 2008 such a massive success. We honestly could not have run all of the programs so successfully without their tireless commitment to making it happen. More important though is their contribution to the Foundation’s work on an ongoing basis including email updates on girls with scholarships, managing new scholarship applications, putting together new project proposals and handling all of the logistics to bring programs to fruition.


In particular we want to thank:

- Rabindra Puri and his staff
- Milan Dharel and the staff at CWISH
- Madan Siwakoti and the staff at Riviera International Academy
- Bal Krishna Dangol and the staff at Nepal Children’s Organization, Bal Mandir

There are many others who have helped us get to where we are today and for this we are extremely grateful. Top of this list includes all of the many donors, some have been contributing regularly since we began almost 8 years ago! Thanks also to the many volunteers who have traveled to Nepal this year to help run programs and make huge contributions to our work.

To everyone mentioned above, and anyone else who has been involved in some way, we say “thanks!” as we look forward to making even more of an impact in the future!

Bec & Adam