Wintertime means being at home, and working on fund-raising for our upcoming HANDS projects. Half way around the world, two schools sit competed and being used in two separate and equally remote villages in the Ganesh Himalayas-all due to HANDS in Nepal fund-raising efforts, and you, our kind and generous supporters.
Now the new project for 2012-a library in the village of Phulkharta, or sometimes spelled "Fulkharta"-where school number two was just completed. I am very excited about this new library project-it will be a trial in how necessary and useful libraries are in this remote corner of the world. It is something I've dreamed about for the past few years since involving myself with my son's NGO, and something I feel very strongly about.
Libraries have played an important role in my life-from the time I was small and my mother would park my sister and I there as a convenient and (back then) safe haven while she ran errands (being a single Mom she was always in need of such aids!). I discovered so much about the world in those musty shelves of our little hometown library. There were the children fiction books, but equally fascinating were the adult nonfiction, the rows of neatly arranged National Geographics, and the table with the "3-D" panoramic viewfinder View Masters! (you can actually still buy these on Amazon, and I plan to purchase quite a few to take to Nepal with me) The world seemed big back then, and full of intrigue! I wasn't a big reader at that small age but I became one because I wanted to learn what these books had to tell me about the world. I began with easy readers like Dr. Seuss and his play on words and worked my way up to Walter Farley's Black Stallion series and on to classics. I haven't stopped.
Much of my travel in Nepal is aided by my "Tibetan" son, Kelsang Lodue, a refugee we met some years back who has since become a trusted and dear friend while we are finding our way around Kathmandu's crazy streets and outskirts. He is a translator and helper in negotiating taxis and bus rides to the villages. Once he took me from Kathmandu to Delhi, India, a 3-day trip on a government bus that would have nearly killed me had he not been along. But one thing Kelsang cannot do is read. He has had to work his whole life and has never been to school.
We bring him and our other non-reading friends picture books and postcards and talk endlessly about the world outside their known borders. It has confirmed my belief in libraries-a place where one can sit and look and learn and browse and slowly ease into the literate world, picture book by magazine by panoramic View Master! It can be a place of refuge from the hard life of working in fields, cooking and endless chores, to go for a peek into what a villager cannot even imagine, but would love to see and learn of. Our talks of the "modern" world are endlessly fascinating, and while you may think those who hear these fantastical stories feel blue hearing of what they have not, it has been my experience that they are entertained, their minds broadened a bit, and a feeling more of being connected and having many things in common with modern world people-love of children, desire for a better life, health care, better schools and a quest to know the order and meaning of things.
So we are going to build a library! The villagers of Phulkharta are excited and so are we at HANDS in Nepal. I will keep a running blog account here of how it goes, and seek to inform those readers of how it happens. We will post it also on our HANDS website: www.handsinnepal.org-and encourage anyone to write comments or ask questions. That in turn helps us to learn and keeps us asking ourselves the right questions as we take one careful step at a time on the Nepali NGO path!
Namaste and Happy New Year to All! Amma Jan
