Scenes From Nepal-Bringing Books to Phulkharta

The Long Road To Literacy-Part 2

The Day of Our Grand Opening-The First Library in Phulkharta

Finally, we arrived with boxes of books, tired, dusty and muddy from riding the jeep trails out to this very remote Himalayan village in the Ganesh Himals. A few words about village culture and this region of Nepal. Many people have spent their entire lives in these villages, some have never seen Western people like us, and many have never had books, most don't know how to read, and few have traveled extensively enough to understand the great picture of their world. I feel greatly honored to have had the opportunity to participate in bringing a concept such as a library to this area of the world. The villagers work hard daily, from hand to mouth, to put food on their table, and live one of the most organic lives I've witnessed. They toil long hours on steep hillsides which are all terraced by hand to grow their seasonal crops, their livestock and animals live with the families in intimate contact, everyone in a harmonious balance with the other. Children do chores from a very early age and work as hard as the adults, often side by side in fields, or in the home, where the cycle of making food, eating, cleaning, taking care of animals, cutting fodder, hauling water, gathering wood or dung for fuel is a never ending sequence of work. School is a luxury, and only a recent addition to the village life in the greater evolution of their existence. Everyone I've met in the villages support and love the bringing of education for their children.

Knowing how limited their live can be outside the village (we gave a ride out to Kathmandu the day we left to a teenage girl who has never been out of the village, inside a jeep or seen Kathmandu before) I searched for books not just for the children but for the adults as well, picture books with photos and maps of the area around them and beyond, even the oceans, deserts and rainforests of lands far, far away. I also found cookbooks, sewing books, child care books and books on the Himalayas. Kathmandu has many shoulder-wide bookshops that cater to school material, and it is easy enough to buy notebooks, grammar books and math books, but it takes a bit of searching to find books for pleasure reading, and especially those books written in Nepali.

I have now become accustomed to the traditional village greeting and inquiring stares as I come into a village, presenting our books, gladly accepting their many "Namastes" in gratitude for the work we westerners are doing for them. Despite their limited experience with life outside their remote hamlets up in the Himalayan foothills, they seem to understand that for a better life and brighter future for their next generation, their children need to know how to read, write and speak in more than one language. They get it that English is the key to the learning about the outside world, but also embrace the learning about their own history and other cultures around them. Nepali is a country composed by a colorful quilt of different ethnic groups, each with their own language and traditions. It is one of the most multi-ehtnic and cultural countries I have every traveled in, and also one of the most tolerant of each other's beliefs and customs.

One of the highlights of this trip was meeting and talking to a variety of other people from various countries who have also found their joy and purpose in life by bringing education and hope to the children of Nepal. Australian Mark from Logged On Foundation is doing his best to bring computers and the internet to Nepal villages, and we discussed future partnerships between his org and HANDS in Nepal to do the same for Phulkharta and other more remote areas. I truly feel, like Mark, that opening the world up to villagers and the next generation will help them understand how to overcome some of the difficulties of their life, and help educate them in other darker parts of Nepal's problems, such as child slavery. Astrid Beseler, from Belgium, who has started the Audrey Foundation in honor of her daughter, has just rented a home in Kathmandu to start a school for under-privileged children with her own money. Our Nepali friends who help us make contact with the villages, Bhupendra Adhikari and Rajan Shimkahada are always our most important contacts for our work, and a constant source of inspiration and help as we seek to learn more and more about the best way to help Nepal's children in the most remotest regions.

This effort to bring the first library into the village of Phulkharta was the result of many people supporting and donating money to HANDS in Nepal. The Dworak family, who so generously gave a significant amount of the money to build the school in Phulkharta, and then enthusiastically supported our dream of bringing a library next, plus a number of other supporters who heralded our efforts to share our love of reading and books. I just want to extend my deep thankfulness and gratitude for being given the opportunity to travel "out there" to the hills of Nepal, to be among these amazing, hard-working, and resourceful people who live in one of the poorest and most beautiful countries in the world. What an amazing experience it is, one I will gladly share with anyone willing to travel there with me or any of us in HANDS of Nepal.

And most of all, a deep bow and endless respect for my truly amazing son Danny Chaffin, without whom none of us would have this experience, for it was his first trip to Kathmandu many years ago, as a young and somewhat naive lad looking for a way to honor his brother, practice his belief in helping others, and finding a deeper purpose in life that took him to the land of the Himalayas and laid the groundwork for what was to become HANDS in Nepal, Humanitarian Acts in Nepal Developing Schools. I truly find endless inspiration from my son Danny.

Our future work is to now to do workshops in our library, which has two rooms, one will house the books, one will have nice rugs to sit on and read and do workshops-from english tutoring to community and village health education. Danny's fiance, Bree Huggins, who has a degree in Peace and Women's Studies, has started interviewing village women on their needs and desires to improve their living conditions. I look forward to helping Bree as she gathers more interviews and information from the amazing, strong women of the village.

Yeah! Way to go everyone! Tu de Shay, Namaste and Dhanyabad to all of you!

Greetings From Nepal, 2069- Part One

The new year has arrived and it is now officially the year 2069. I am not sure why Nepal is ahead of the rest of the year in this regard, my Nepali friends I ask don't seem to know why, but wonder at the rest of the world being behind. Despite the difference in years, Nepal is an amazing mix of ancient and old! As experienced from this recent trip and my experience staying with a Nepali family in their traditional Nepali style farmhouse sleeping over the livestock in the loft , sharing my simple wood plank floored room with hundreds of potatoes spread around the floor in storage. That was easy enough to do, the harder part of village life is walking up and down steep pathways, and watching your dinner go from walking around the yard to next being beheaded and ending up in the pot, but talk about fresh food.
It took a nearly all day jeep ride to go from Kathmandu to the village of Phulkharta, this was the end of a long week for me traveling to Nepal, finding my bearings, changing currency to rupees and then finding enough bookstores that had the right type of books for our library. Our library project was started earlier this year in January, a dream we have had for awhile to bring a library to the village where we built a school, finding a serious lack of books for pleasure reading, and just a serious lack of books in general. As with our school, our trusty friend in Nepal Bhupendra guided us through all the stages of building and acquiring material for the library, and added his input into our original design of a simple one room building. We raised enough funds to increase it to two rooms, thanks to the Dwork family who helped fund our school here, and other donations, one larger than the other for community meetings,workshops and maybe even someday computers.
In fact one of my first meetings in Nepal was with a young enterprising Australian named Mark who started an org called Logged On, and is now putting computers into remote village areas, although unlike ours, his villages have electricity. We talked of how to bring a power source such as solar to Phulkharta so they too may get logged on with the world someday.
The next three days of my stay in Nepal was a mix of meetings with other people running orgs similar to ours, finding out how we can combine resources and information, and shopping for books. With my trusty side-kick Kelsang, we walked many of the tight and crowded streets of Kathmandu hunting for books in Nepali and English. Because it is so expensive to ship books over here, it was decided before I left to do the book buying here, and it was worth the effort, because for as little as one dollar ( by the time I convert the money to Rubees) I was able to buy a child's reading book, and sometimes after purchasing several, the owner would begin to pitch in books gathering dust on their tiny shop shelves, especially when I told them what we were doing. The money went far, and after three days time I had boxes piled in our friend Bhupendras office, awaiting our trip to the village.
Rain was coming daily now in Kathmandu, and that spells big trouble for travel on dirt roads that wind up and down the Himalayan foothills. Bhupendra said we wouldn't make it without a jeep, and that meant renting one so we could take our books and keep them inside the jeep, protected from rain. It was very reasonable to hire a driver with a good Nissan jeep for the two day trip, he would also have to stay in the village with us, and then be responsible for breakdowns and jeep care himself ( this is always an occurrence on these rugged and insanely difficult jeep trails). Fortunate for us, Bhupendra found a cheerful Nepali with a great attitude who calmed my fears at each mud hole, and was able to negotiate hair-pin turns in slimy mud, with our jeep fish tailing madly and all of us hanging on for dear life trying to not look over the edge of the mountain.