First ever inter-Dream Centre Quiz Contest!

On Friday, 8th July, all the girls from our 4 Dream Centres descended on Bal Mandir for our first ever inter-Dream Centre Trivia Quiz Competition. Each Centre selected 4 competitors to represent them. With Diwakar (facilitator in Baneshwor Centre) and Kamal (facilitator in our Wiley Dream Centre) playing Quiz Masters for the day and Bipana from the new Gyaneshwor Wiley Women’s Dream Centre playing the role of score keeper, the day got off to a great start. Cheered on by their fellow Dream Centre girls, the teams battled it out on questions ranging from Nepali history to child rights.

After a close competition, the MLC Dream Centre won followed by the Gyaneshwor Wiley Women’s Dream Centre team. Well done to all the girls! They all played very well.

It was great to get all the girls from the 4 centres together to swap stories and to meet new friends. We hope to make this a regular event. Thanks to Diwakar for taking the lead on this and to all the facilitators for their organisation and participation. A great example of the power of strong team work! 

Time to get your walking shoes on ...

After such fantastic support last year I have once again signed up to do the City2Surf in the name of Mitrataa.

However this year, rather than running on my own, I invite all of you to join me in walking the course, raising funds for our work at Bal Mandir at the same time.

You need to register to do the work by going to the City2Surf website. You then need to go to our team page - Mitrataa Meanderers - and follow the link to join the team. The password to join the team is ajrdo1. Once you have done this and created your own fundraising page, simply email it to all your friends asking for their support. You will be amazed how quickly the support adds up! (In case the above link doesn't work, our team page can be found at http://www.fundraise.city2surf.com.au/mitrataa_meanderers )

We want to get a good-sized group together to enjoy the walk and a well-earned bite to eat afterwards so please join us.

Of course you can simply sponsor me to complete the course too. My fundraising page for this year's event can be found by clicking here or going to http://www.fundraise.city2surf.com.au/adam_ordish_2011 .

Thanks in advance and hope to see many of you on August 14th!!!

Mitrataa Shop Now Online

Mitrataa's online store is now up and running. You can see the shop by clicking here or visiting http://www.mitrataa.org/mitrataa/shop/.

The shop sells a range of products including greeting cards containing photos taken by the girls in Project Snow Leopard, and a range of items designed to support the children living in the children's home at Bal Mandir.

Happy shopping!

Bal Mandir Revisited – Be careful what you wish for!

As many of you know, we had to cancel our planned project to take over the management of Bal Mandir Children’s Home late last year and we were very disappointed as it was a fantastic opportunity for both Mitrataa and for the children and staff at Bal Mandir, as well as for the head organisation, Nepal Children’s Organisation. We continued to work closely with the 40 Dream Catchers’ girls at Bal Mandir, the Project Snow Leopard girls and the Mitrataa Rising Stars Child Club, including on their recent Nepali New Years Eve Party to support them as best we could.

Well, very unexpectedly but excitingly, NCO approached us in late April with a revised proposal which overcame our major concerns when we walked away from the project earlier. So officially from 1 May 2011, Mitrataa took over the management of Bal Mandir, Naxal Children’s Home, with 250 children (aged from 15 days to 16 years) for 5 years with the view to set up a sustainable model and a world class children’s home.

We are under no illusion that this will be a challenging project but we are very excited about the possibilities. Rather than feeling despair at the challenges and lack of progress for the children, we are now able to really focus on the possibilities and the opportunities ahead to create real, sustainable change, not just for the current 250 children and 35 staff but for future generations as well as for the children in NCO’s 10 other homes and potentially for the 600 other children’s homes in Nepal. The opportunity is fantastic and we are honoured and humbled to be able to take on this challenge.

The project is a very strong fit with Mitrataa’s core values of creating sustainable models to development through a train-the-trainer approach. We will also be able to use our learnings from our existing projects such as our Dream Centres project – we will be setting up a Dream Centre within Bal Mandir – our Daisy Chains program which we will be running for the house mothers and our model school approach where we will be using our experience and trainers to help train tutors and other teachers at Bal Mandir.


Since the handover on 1 May, we have been busy with a number of exciting initiatives:

·         Clean Up Day! - As any of you who have visited Bal Mandir know, it needs a bit of love and attention! It is housed in a beautiful old Rana Palace and is an incredible building. But it has been left uncared for for a very long time and it is very run down. So we had a huge clean up day on which we scrubbed the place from top to bottom – every inch has been scrubbed, debugged and disinfected. The campaign was led by the Child Club, in particular by Asbini who was boss for the day. Asbini, Saraswoti and Sabitri Thapa in particular showed amazing leadership skills in organising everyone. The kids all got involved and were already well into the clean up when we arrived having been up since the crack of dawn! The house mothers were all cleaning madly too. We definitely have a long way to go with getting the place clean and tidy but the best thing was that the kids and the house mothers all got in and were so excited to be taking pride in their home. The day created a real sense of community and we were so grateful that some of our core supporters attended – Dinesh from Creating Possibilities (supported by Bruce and Susan Keenan’s Himalayan Children’s Charities) sent his team of children who had all lived at Bal Mandir at one stage, the girls from NGCC who all grew up at Bal Mandir and moved to NGCC when they finished school came, and Arun, a wonderful woman who was adopted from Bal Mandir 20 years ago and who is back at the moment visiting and providing support to Bal Mandir came with a crowd of people. We also had a couple of Aussies who joined us as well as our great volunteer, Fleur (more on her later!). It was a fantastic day, the energy was amazing and I was so proud of everyone. We had a party in the evening with lots of dancing and singing and celebrations too. We have a long way to go with the cleaning but it’s a start!

·         Listening and Learning – We didn’t want to make too many changes to start but we wanted to really listen and learn from the staff, the children and other stakeholders first. So we have been spending time one-on-one with all of the house mothers and other staff. This has been a fantastic opportunity and we are very grateful that they have been so supportive and open to Mitrataa’s management of the home. As we finish these meetings, we will be preparing our strategic plan to move things forward.

·         Establishing the Management Committee – As this project is a 5 year plan and sustainability is at its core, it is very important that we work closely with NCO. So we have established a Management Committee with 2 NCO members and 3 Mitrataa members to help us share experiences and to guide the overall strategy of the project. The day to day management, responsibility and costs of the home rest with Mitrataa. We are really pleased with NCO’s willingness to listen and learn in the initial stages of the project and we are confident of being able to deliver our objectives with the support of the NCO board.

·         Schools – The new school session started in Nepal in April and due to lack of funds, many of the kids were not enrolled in school or didn’t have their uniforms and books so weren’t attending school. We have now resolved this and all the kids are happily in school and studying hard! We are putting in place a tutoring/homework system to ensure they get the support they need to really achieve their goals in their studies.

·         Nutrition – Milk, eggs, meat and fruit had been removed from the menu for the last several months due to funding issues. The first thing we did was reinstate these very important items onto the menu as the kids need these to grow big and strong! I have never seen 250 kids so excited as when they found they had an egg for breakfast last week! Their smiles were enormous!

So it’s exciting times ahead! To all of you who offered to help us fundraise for this huge project last year, thank you. We now really need you! Feeding and educating and housing 250 kids and 35 staff costs a lot of money and we are about to kick off a huge fundraising drive. So please get involved and support us as we begin to really change the lives of these kids. There will soon be a fundraising info pack available on our website which will have a bit more information for you and how your money will be spent.

On behalf of the wonderful kids at Bal Mandir, thank you so much in advance for your support and we look forward to updating you on our progress! 

St Cath's models leadership and motivation in the Dream Centres

From Bec in Kathmandu:


Our friends from St Catherine’s in Waverley sent another wonderful group of 12 girls from years 10 and 11 to spend a week in our Dream Centres recently. The girls were accompanied by teachers Sarah Hatch (who was returning for the second year) and Julie Park (who was on her first trip) and by Mitrataa board member, Sarah Bartram. After a few days trekking, the girls went straight to work attending our Dream Centre Picnic for all our recent and past Dream Centre graduate girls. We had almost 100 girls on the day which got off to a great start with lots of games organised by the St Cath’s girls. We then had a slight mishap as a huge storm rolled in and we sheltered under the marquee. The girls engaged in some singing games as the mud rolled down the hill and through our sheltering place. As the roof collapsed for the second time, we decided it was time to move everyone to the buses where we continued with some singing including the teaching of Home Among the Gum Trees and some Nepali classics. After our improvised bus party, the rain cleared and we all headed back for some well-deserved lunch followed by an afternoon of ball games. At 3pm everyone loaded onto the buses exhausted but having made some great new friends and had lots of fun. These picnics, as well as being a great opportunity for our girls to interact with the Australian volunteers and practise their English, are a rare day for the girls to just be kids and run around and enjoy themselves. Many of the girls in our Dream Centres are domestic workers who do not often get a chance to relax and enjoy themselves like this.

The team from St Cath’s then ran a workshop on leadership in each of our 3 Dream Centres. This is one of the most difficult life skills for the girls to grasp so it was fantastic for them to have some interesting and varied new activities to practise with. The girls started with a game of “Guess the Leader” before brainstorming leadership qualities and examples of great leaders. They then identified their own strengths and leadership qualities to share with the group.  They then settled in for some reading aloud before finishing with a game of Human Knots which is always popular.

On the Saturday, we held a combined session for all our most recent graduates from the 3 Centres at the Wiley Dream Centre in Chandol on the very important topic of Motivation, another one of our crucial life skills. Watching both the St Cath’s girls and our Dream Centre girls grow in their confidence over the week together was inspiring and is what I love the most about these programs. Some fantastic friendships were made and there were some tears as the groups farewelled each other.

For their last day, St Cath’s group hosted a trivia competition for classes 1-10 at Riviera, our Model School, to free the teachers for a training session (more on this shortly). It was a good opportunity for the volunteers to see a different type of school where students’ English and general knowledge is far better than those in the Dream Centres who are studying in government schools which teach in Nepali. Their energy on this last challenging day was fantastic.

We always enjoy having the St Cath’s girls here and this year was no exception. Their energy and enthusiasm for trying new things and dealing with difficult situations not only inspired me but really impacted the Dream Centre girls. Thanks to Sarah Hatch and Julie Park for leading the group and to the girls for their wonderful work. We look forward to continuing to grow our relationship with St Cath’s.


More photos can be found on our facebook page.  

It’s not only our Nepali girls who achieve their dreams!

From Bec in Kathmandu...


Tori McCarten and Amelia Baker from Lithgow, NSW, are true leaders – they were inspired by a challenge I set when I gave a presentation at Women’s College last May. I challenged all the girls present to follow their dreams and to step forward and take action to change the world. By the time Tori and Amelia had reached home on the train, they had made the decision to come to Nepal and recently they took 2 weeks out of their busy Year 12 schedule to come to Nepal and work with Mitrataa and fulfilling that dream. They were accompanied by Jo Reeves. The trio began by attending the Dream Centre graduations where they taught the girls Incy Wincy Spider which was a popular choice! They spent some time with the girls at Bal Mandir teaching them volley ball, they stepped in to help facilitate the Fashion Workshops when our fashion expert fell ill.

Then their true colours shone through when they ran 3 workshops for a mixed group of our girls – 3 girls from each of our Dream Centres, 3 of our Project Snow Leopard girls and around 8 of the girls who are studying at Riviera, our Model School. The workshops were run at Riviera for 3 half days. The first was on “Accepting and Understanding Yourself” and the girls learned about how to respect and like yourself for your star qualities. The next workshop was based around team work and, with a game of basketball and writing of poems, the group really cemented some new friendships. The final workshop was “Creative Story Telling” and the girls wrote some fantastic stories in groups, practising their teamwork skills from the previous workshop. We’ll be publishing some of these stories on our website shortly. All of our Mitrataa girls loves the workshops and came away with new confidence, new inspiration and having had a lot of fun!

I am really proud of Tori and Amelia for following their dream. They definitely faced some challenges in Kathmandu but they really stepped up and I know they had a huge impact on a lot of people during their time over here. Thank you, guys. You were amazing! Keep dreaming big!

 

Dream Centre Graduations Galore!

Posted by Bec from Kathmandu...


I love Graduation Days at the Dream Centres – the excitement of the girls, the sharing of their experiences, their dreams for the future and the celebratory songs and dances never fail to put a smile on my face and this latest batch was no exception. The fifth batch from our Baneshwor Dream Centre graduated on Thursday 31st March. Joined by volunteers Tori, Amelia and Jo, I was inspired by the energy and enthusiasm of the girls. There were 2 highlights for me of this graduation – the drama which the girls did on “Appreciating Differences”, one of the core Life Skills we teach them. It was about a disabled girl who was not in the Dream Centre and was teased by the other children. Some of the girls stood up for her. The girls ended the drama by requesting that Mitrataa ensure that we include disabled girls in our next batch to lead by example. I love this challenge to us! We definitely have some budding Bollywood stars in this batch too. The other highlight was watching the girls teach the volunteers a dance. Their patience and energy was infectious. The Australian girls then taught the girls Incy Wincy Spider with the actions and I was amazed at how quickly they picked it up. Credit to our facilitators for this Centre, Bipana and Diwakar, who have done a wonderful job with this batch.

This was a hard act to follow but the third batch of girls from the Wiley Dream Centre did a wonderful job at their graduation on Friday 1st April. This was the weakest batch of students we have taken into our Centres and our facilitators at this Centre, Ganga and Kamal, did an amazing job with building up the confidence of these girls. Some of the girls who stood and shared their experiences were so shy when they first joined the Centre that it was a while before they spoke at all. Now they stood in front of their family and friends and spoke with a new found belief in themselves and their dreams for the future, sharing the lessons they had learned and the skills they would take forward into their lives. They can now do anything!

The very first batch of graduates from the MLC Dream Centre really went out with a bang at their graduation day on Wednesday 6th April. This group has an amazing energy and passion for their futures and their graduation reflected this with songs, dance and expressions of gratitude – one of the core Life Skills we focus on in the Centres. Ruby and Sabita, our facilitators in this Centre, have had a huge impact on these girls – from teaching them meditation skills to help them get control of their minds, to inspiring one of the girls to sing a solo at the graduation ceremony, the difference in the girls is wonderful. Most of the girls in this Centre are domestic workers and it was lovely to see several of their guardians/employers attend the ceremony, 2 of them sharing their experiences of the changes in the girls’ behaviour and approach to school since they joined the Dream Centre program.

Welcoming these new graduates to the network of Dream Centre Graduates was a pleasure! I look forward to keeping in touch with them as they visit the Centre every month to share their progress towards their dreams. Keep dreaming, girls!

Sincere thanks to Wiley and MLC for sponsoring a Dream Centre. You have changed the lives of so many girls already, with many more to come!

Our next batches of girls will start at the Centres in late April.