Rebuilding Nepal

I would have loved to haven seen Nepal before the earthquake in 2015. At that point, "new" Nepal had just emerged after a long civil war that ended with the murder of the king and his family in 2008. Ever since, Nepal is a democracy, which has been young and complicated in the 6 years before and ever since the earthquake. At one point there was a Maoist insurgency, food shortages, droughts, floods... Think about humanitarian crises, Nepal's got them all.

In 20 seconds an earthquake that honestly couldn't really have struck much more vulnerable people, postponed their development of roads, houses, schools, and hospitals to years later.

With a government that is improving though still far from stable, it has been NGO's that have been the engine behind rebuilding Nepal. No other country has as many, and they've been so involved in bringing mostly education and health facilities to Nepal that they sometimes look like a government replacement.

As a volunteer, I've spent the last three months in this NGO world of trying to help sustainably, and where it matters the most.

The entire field of trying to bring development to the most marginalized is incredibly grey. Depending on where you are and which community you are working with, and to what extent you're determined to empower them, the method can change completely. I learned this from meeting a lot of NGO workers that are doing a REALLY good job, I'll tell you how.

Of course, I've seen the most in Sikharapur community learning center (SCLC), the project I work in. Remarkably engaged with so many of the Pharping (our Village) locals, it merges many different projects all designed to serve the ones "forgotten" in society.

SCLC supports the local school, makes sure it allows for as much social mobility as possible (training in entrepreneurship and IT, scholarships, non-formal education). And has created the women schools, for mothers wanting to learn how to read and write and the "Open school" for school dropouts getting a second chance at passing their grade 12 exam.

SCLC also works in agriculture, the project itself is on a farm named bottle house because most of its buildings are made from recycled glass bottles. All year round farmers from low-income families work and learn how to cultivate their land more efficiently and sustainably.

Most of all, SCLC works for people with few opportunities to escape poverty, through grants and a residential project currently home to 15 students from rural Nepal, SCLC hopes to be a gateway towards a life with more dignity and economic independence.

As trainees, we have 13 boys and 2 girls. The focus is on boys here, because in their communities that are among the most likely to be lured into the business of human trafficking to Gulf countries. Currently, thousands of young Nepalis are employed as construction workers under slave-like conditions in Dubai and Qatar mostly. Recruiters of these companies target boys who have families to support and little means to be something else than a farmer, these young men take out huge loans for the plane ticket and a passport, which is taken from them the moment they arrive in the gulf with nothing but a plastic bag as luggage. Sometimes, their families don't see them again for years, if they do, they're happy because at least their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers haven't died. I know some people who have their brothers in Qatar, and they don't hear from them often.

But that's by far not the only human trafficking that Nepalis in remote areas are likely to experience. There's also the trafficking of children from the Villages to the cities in order to exploit them in the orphanage business. Traffickers separate young children from their parents by promising them that they will get a better education in the city. Often that's a complete lie, and the children, regarded ass less worthy of education due to their caste and origin, are kept as miserably as possible, so that anyone, mostly clueless tourists visiting the "Orphanage Home" will donate as much as possible.

But trafficking doesn't even end there, there is also the trafficking of young girls from the poorest backgrounds that "disappear" and end up having to be forced prostitutes in India. Sometimes a girl is able to return, often with STDs or HIV, and it happens that the families don’t accept their daughters back because they've "disowned" them.

Nepal is horrible in terms of trafficking, but still not nearly bad enough to make it to the list of countries with the most human trafficking.

3 Weeks ago, the project coordinator from the Luxembourgish NGO, the ONGD-FNEL, was in Nepal to meet the partners, have some meetings and field visits. For one week, Cathy (the other Luxembourgish volunteer) and I followed the project coordinators’ work and learned a great deal about everything that's important in order to support people sustainably.

There's an NGO supported by the ONGD-FNEL, the "Umbrella Organisation" that works to fight child human trafficking, and helps victims of it find their families again. Whenever possible the children are sent back to their families. Because the organization’s director and a beneficiary where visiting Luxembourg while I was working in the ONGD-FNEL, I've gotten to know their work and admire it greatly. Julie (the ONGD person) had some paperwork and report stuff to go over and I was glad to come along to visit the Kathmandu office and also learn more about how the partnership among NGOs work.

After that, we went to visit another Partner named SETU. It's an NGO focussed on woman, mostly mothers, that are HIV+. All of their stories are really though, some have been kidnapped into circuses, others have been forced to be beggars, almost all of them have been rejected by their families. The stigma around the virus is so huge that even doctors are reluctant to treat these patients. SETU has taken in 10 children whose parents are all affected, most of them are also carriers of the virus.

Here again, a short visit will quickly show that this NGO's work is very remarkable.

Finding their beneficiaries is a difficult task already, convincing them to participate, really talk to them and make them believe they're deserving of getting out of their situation is very very hard. The project head is doing an incredible job in caring for the children, in times where a lot of children are facing neglect in Nepali children homes, it was great to see that this lady cared so deeply about making the children feel like they have a family. Only a few people put a priority on mental health in the child development sector, therefore: to the people of SETU: thank you for putting an example.

The next day we did the first of three field visits: the SCLC project plans to expand agricultural education in the area. And hopes to give 3 agricultural colleges the opportunity to practice more hands-on on their own farms.

Access to school in the area remains difficult, and there's little awareness of long-term prospects of sustainability in agriculture yet. Improved training could help change mainstream agriculture for the better, also by increasing the resilience of small farmers to harsher climate conditions. We drove to Makwanpur, had some lunch, and visited the school where they were just having a non-formal training on how to develop a seed nursery. There were high school students, grandmothers, young mothers with children and old farmers too, great to see that they were all motivated to do more than what's normal in order to become more sustainable farmers.

It really seemed like these programs are educating broadly and are benefitting the "learners" greatly. I think the ONGD will start by giving some funds for a greenhouse that will be a training ground for practical learning, and if that goes well, the school could get the means to develop a program like Bottle house: a mixture of boarding school, training center, and farm.

When we came, we were kind of a big deal without wanting to at all. Everything stopped until we got tikka (red dot on the forehead) and a flower necklace. I forgot that I had the tikka, and rubbed it all over my face, of course, no one told me haha

Back in Bottlehouse, we discussed how to organize the visit of ONGD board members in April and the scouts camp in September, where 40 youth will be coming to Pharping to learn about social development and agriculture.

After all the office Things settled, stuff got much more real when we traveled to the south of Nepal, 1 hour from the Indian border, to Janakpur. This is one working area of SAATH (where Cathy works). Here, SAATH provides Tailoring Mithila art training to women from backgrounds poorer than I could've imagined, to say the least of it. Literacy rates are about 50% for women in Nepal, but they drop to less than 5% in this community, young men are among the most vulnerable for the trafficking to the gulf countries, child marriage is done in most cases (by lying about the age, which is easy because no one knows they're birthday anyway), A LOT OF alcoholism (all of the women said their husband drink daily), also explaining the violence everywhere. The community is called Musahar and sadly the explanation for their situation is simply their caste, among Dalit (untouchable caste) they're among the lowest, so low actually that the women are considered too dirty to wear anything but a cotton sari, and that the water they touch is poisoned, Musahara translates to "Rateater".

Needless to say, few NGOs partner up with local initiatives to engage with people in this unglamorous poverty. SAATH is among the only ones having a longterm project here (training 40 women a year, for 5 years), and that only because they've found good trainers and local people to help them. Alone, they said, they wouldn't have been able to reach the women at all, miles away from convincing them to take steps towards their empowerment. Still now, it remains a challenge for trainers to help the trainees believe that they have the ability to improve their situation.

They're learning to read and write, calculate and measure. Of course, the aim is that they can start a business or find employment, a thing that was previously unthinkable to the mothers of three who had never earned any money in their life. At the moment, the first batch of 20 women is about to complete training, and then we'll see how much support they will need to stay on the path towards more independence. I can tell some of the ladies were actually girls, probably younger than me, two kids, and they had their name tattooed on their arm and that was their identity card. I'll put some pictures here, you'll see their saris are beautiful and not dirty like their children’s clothes. And it's all difficult to understand and very uncomfortable to see when you're there.

Was I "seeing" it right? Am I doing insensitive things without realizing it?

I don't know.

I know though that privilege can be invisible to itself but that I've never more confronted with mine in my life.

We went around the houses, and all the women showed us around. Once we entered one and walked right into a wedding, the bride was most likely something around fifteen. None of us, not even the Nepali people from Kathmandu knew how to react. We just looked and left. And were all really quiet while doing that.

In total, we visited three Musahar communities, about 25 households. It was Valentine’s day coincidently, and while there was really nothing romantic in the day we did take a moment to celebrate love at the street corner.

What a day, needless to say, I fell into bed: exhausted from "seeing".

Before leaving the next day we visited Janaki temple, dedicated to women and one of the biggest pilgrimage sites in Nepal. Now what time was that when people built a temple for women in Janakpur instead of getting them married at 15 and hitting them?

Altogether, Janakpur was a lot to take. But grounding, and it was really something I could've never experienced if I hadn't the connexion to the connexion to these local people.

After Janakpur, we continued our road trip or much rather offroad trip to Palpa District, a completely different scenery.

In Tampur, the road was good, almost all houses in cement and we passed a very nice-looking school. Here another partner of the ONGD-FNEL, "Forward-Looking" supports physically disabled people in their livelihood and education. With a program they've been applying in Gorkha region (Mountains) for years, FL is piloting with a similar approach in the lowlands. In this program, 23 beneficiaries are selected, who will receive training in the area they would like to work in or where they can make money while they're deciding. I'll give you some examples: one man was disabled after an accident while working in Dubai, he came back a struggled greatly to support his family, he got a 3-month electrician training, and now has his own business.

A 16-year-old girl that had her leg amputated is currently in a 1-year training to become a beautician.

2 women who were disabled as a consequence of Polio got tailoring training and have their own shop now.

The father of a young boy in a wheelchair got a poultry farm training plus chickens in order to care for his family.

2 girls in high school got goats in order to have some income while they're studying and to broaden their opportunities after their graduation.

The local project manager is also disabled, and very very engaged. With no legs, he still drove his adapted 3wheel scooter to all of the houses like it was a Bentley, we could barely keep up with the jeep.. Where he mostly knew everyone by name. Respect man!

FL is organizing the training and also a support group where everyone meets once a month. This is important because there is no therapy available for many. Though the area is relatively developed, it remains a tough place to live for disabled people. 15 years ago there was a lack of iodine in the water, and the people only realized when hundreds of young children started becoming deaf. Now the region has a relatively high number of disabled people, and that overwhelms the government which is now not so happy to gove out disability cards. About the whole project, I can say it seems very very well organized and shows how a little can go a long way. And it is true that one simple training can change their lives. Nice job FL!

2 office meetings, 3 field visits. What a week! You can read more about it on a post on the ONGDs Facebook.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1190049777832323&id=138037109700267&anchor_composer=false&ref=content_filter

I have so much respect for all social workers, its a remarkable part of themselves that they each dedicate to others. In Nepal, they're the one tackling massive problems at their roots, and I admire them for not being overwhelmed by the problems, but motivated. A little goes a long way.

In Friendship,

Tilly Schaaf