Inspiring words

Below I have pasted two pieces of creative writing from Kishor Ghimire, a boy we have been supporting in Nepal since we first visited Kathmandu in 2000. Kishor is now in Year 9 at the Model School in Kathmandu and it is amazing to think that his education opportunities have helped him to produce work like this:

Success

To be a successful person is the main aim of every human. But what does success really mean? Could it be a dream that may occur in the life of every human? Yes, or it may not be. The definition of success varies from person to person. It could simply be prestige, power, money or security for many people. Nobody is born successful or tagged with the destiny towards success, but why then are some successful and others not?

As we look back, history might hold the answer; all highly successful people had a clear vision of what they wanted. All had beliefs and determination in the existence of their infinite intelligence and supreme power.

As a Chinese philosopher once said, “our greatest glory lies not in never falling but rising every time we fall”. One of the best examples of this could be Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the U.S.A. He failed in politics and business. He lost lots of elections totaling dozens, from senate legislature to vice president. But finally he became the president of the U.S.A. at the age of 51. He really was the epitome of the saying that “winners never quit and quitters never win”.

Everyone is born with the seed of greatness with the ability to win, but as a human there is some weakness. This weakness in today's world might be defined as intolerance, greed, jealousy, revenge, suspicion and egotism. To make these weaknesses the positive strength we might make a lot of effort, which is absolutely necessary for obtaining success.

To be a successful person, one must build up positive thoughts. He that moves not forward goes backwards so one must always press onwards to solve problems. A clear vision, positive attitude, talent, ambition and initiative are the things really required to reach the top. So, as my last but not least point, I would like to suggest accomplishing greatness we must not only act but also dream, not only plan but also believe, as we know winners don't do different things but they do things differently.


Global warming

Look at my world it’s burning,
So people are regretting and learning.
She’s getting burnt alive,
People look at her tears and please realise.

She’s informing us to be aware,
'Cause the animals and vegetations are getting rare.
She doesn’t want us tolerating the heat,
So please people think about keeping your world neat.

She’s getting hotter and hotter,
Informing about our life getting shorter.
She’s so hot even her tears have turned into vapour,
So please understand and take care of every single wrapper.

She does not have a drop of water for drinking,
'Cause all the water resources are polluted and stinking.
She’s suffocating due to oxygen’s lack,
Even her colourless oxygen has become colourful and black.


Thanks Kishor, some fantastic thoughts and comments here.

Reasons to celebrate in 2010!

Two days before Christmas we received some fantastic news in Australia – we have finally been approved as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) for gifts and donations. This means that all donations to Mitrataa over AU$2 are now tax deductible.

As many of you will know, reaching this point has been a long journey. We’d like to especially thank Freehills’ Sydney office for their pro bono support along the way.

So how do we celebrate this exciting milestone? Well 2010 also signifies the 10th anniversary of our first trip to Nepal, the trip that inspired the creation of the Foundation, so we have a number of programs planned to celebrate both events. We will also shortly be launching a fundraising competition to give all our supporters an opportunity to get involved. Stay tuned for details on this and a number of other new projects and events coming up. Our DGR status has arrived at the perfect time to help 2010 become our greatest year yet – which is just as well because our partners in Nepal have their creative juices flowing to help with more innovative and exciting new projects to help us achieve our objectives!

Don't throw out your Christmas cards...

Christmas cards make fantastic resources for art and craft classes and we are always on the lookout for these for our schools and Dream Centres in Nepal. So if you are finished with your Christmas cards, instead of throwing them out we would appreciate it if you could send them to us. Please cut off the back side with all the personal stuff on it and just send us the front with the picture/design. You can post the cards to:

PO Box 1765
North Sydney
NSW 2060
AUSTRALIA

or if you are in Singapore email me at adam@mitrataa.org and I will organise to collect the cards from you.

The kids in Nepal will love them!

Thanks and Happy New Year!

Maths Made Easy and Fun

During our very busy November in Kathmandu we were visited by Anne Willmann and her husband Willi. Anne has recently retired as the principal of an IB School in Auckland, New Zealand and she and her husband are both Maths teachers. They were visiting Nepal to do some trekking and to visit their old favourite places as they lived in Kathmandu for 2 years a number of years ago. They generously volunteered their time to help with some teacher training at Riviera, our Model School.

We were very keen to accept this offer as many of the teacher training workshops we have conducted have focused on English and the Social Sciences. This has simply been the result of the expertise of the volunteers we have had in the past. Whilst the Maths teachers at Riviera have attended all these workshops they find it more difficult to apply the skills they learnt to the Maths classroom. This is compounded by the fact that many school students in Nepal struggle with Maths because unlike many other subjects, you can not do well by simple rote learning. Maths requires that you understand the concepts in order to be able to solve problems. As a result, Maths is an unpopular subject and one that teachers find very challenging to make fun. Let’s face it – this is not only an issue faced in Nepal! How many of you had fun in Maths classes when you were growing up?

Fortunately Anne and Willi were experts in this area, and their energy and enthusiasm immediately had the teachers at ease and eager to learn. As part of Riviera's Model School program, we invited 3 teachers from nearby government schools to benefit from the workshops as well.

Two workshops were conducted over two days and included an array of games, magic tricks and other activities all designed to make learning Maths easier and also fun. The teachers were having so much fun doing the activities I'm not sure they wanted to go back to teaching! It was also fantastic to see teachers from different schools working and learning together, sharing their ideas and experiences. One of the comments from the teachers was that they had so much fun that they didn't realise they were learning Maths! In one activity, the students would have done hundreds of calculations without being aware of how much they’d learned because they were racing to complete a competition against other teams. That’s exactly how learning should be – fun and relatively pain free!

At the end of the two workshops Anne and Willi donated copies of all of the exercises and activities they had worked through with the teachers meaning we will be able to share the concepts with other schools in our network. For this as well as for their time and effort, we want to say a huge 'thanks' to Anne and Willi. In the weeks since the workshops we have seen a great improvement in the moral of Riviera's Maths teachers and many of the students are now looking forward to going to Maths class - we can't ask for more than that!

Merry Christmas

Just a quick post to wish everyone a fantastic Christmas. We also want to take this opportunity to thank all our friends and supporters who contributed to making 2009 another amazing year for Mitrataa - so thanks! A big thank you must also go to Chetana and all of our partners in Nepal who work tirelessly to change the lives of our women and girls there. Plans for loads of exciting new projects in Nepal as well as events in Australia and Singapore are coming together so keep a look out...
Bec, Adam and the Mitrataa board

Inspirations National Children's Award

On Saturday, 28th November, we hosted in conjunction with Riviera (the Model School) the inaugural award ceremony for the Inspirations National Children's Award. This is a new program we have launched to promote creativity in the school children of Nepal. It is part of our broader program of introducing different methods of teaching and styles of learning into Nepal's schools. It follows on from many of our other projects including Libby Hathorn's 100 Views, various teacher training workshops, and visits from volunteers including teachers and students from MLC School, Sydney.

This year's award consisted of three categories:

1. Art competition for classes 1 to 3 on the theme 'My Happy Time'
2. Story writing competition for classes 4 to 6 on the theme 'Peace for Children'
3. Poetry writing competition for classes 7 to 9 on the theme 'Peace for Children'

We received over 300 entries from schools across Nepal, both government and private. The overall standard of entries was very impressive. As always, we were surprised and amazed by the insights and different viewpoints children can bring to any subject. This really was an inspiration.

Prizes were awarded for first, second, third and consolation in each category and the top ten finalists in each category also received a certificate. The awards were presented by the Vice-Chancellor of Tribhuvan University, a very well respected academic in Nepal.

The award ceremony was a wonderful celebration of the energy and enthusiasm of children with a variety of dance and song performances, story and poetry readings and even some dramas. A particular highlight from our perspective was a drama performed by the first graduates of our Dream Centre program. They were specially invited to the ceremony to perform a drama they had created on the importance of friendship and including others with differences. Considering the overall theme for this year's award was 'peace' this drama fitted perfectly and the girls' performance was outstanding.

We plan to host this event every year and expect it to grow each time, continually encouraging Nepal's school children to dream and be inspired.

Creative Writing for Kids in Kathmandu

On our recent trip to Nepal we were joined by our good friend, Australian children's author Libby Hathorn. This was Libby's second visit to Nepal after her wonderfully successful 100 Views Kathmandu program run at our model school in 2008.

This time Libby ran a one day creative writing workshop for class 7 and 8 girls living in the orphanage at Bal Mandir. The program was also joined by 4 specially selected students from the model school, 3 of our Dream Centre facilitators, and two children's authors working with Room-to-Read.

Libby started the workshop talking about different types of creative writing and had plenty of her own work on hand to show as examples. The children were so excited to be sitting in the same room as a published author! She next delved into poetry and had everyone standing and jumping around to act out the words in some poems. Continuing with the focus on words the students were divided into groups and had to work on describing two contrasting feelings/emotions using other similar words. This really got the students thinking and once this was finished, they then had to devise and perform a short drama illustrating the feelings described. Most of the groups chose to mime their dramas and ask the class to guess the feelings being conveyed which led to some hilarious results!

After some quick lunch the final work for the day saw the children begin to write their own poems. Libby shared a number of different techniques for structuring poetry with the class and the results were fantastic! Many of the students really managed to capture some strong feelings and descriptions in their short piece of writing. The class was left with a homework assignment of writing a short story of about two pages in length which they were all eager to begin immediately.

We must once again thank Libby for sharing her wealth of knowledge and experience with us and really making a wonderful day for the students. I'm sure it gave our Dream Centre facilitators and the Room-to-Read writers lots of great new ideas too! Thanks also to Libby and Room-to-Read who both donated books for the children at Bal Mandir to enjoy.