A tale of two schools

Our final two school visits today before flying home for a well earned rest. One was more pleasant than the other and involved Bal Bigyan school. The visit to Sramik school was altogether different and included a bit of laying down the law about school hygiene and cleanliness as well as wanting to see a bit more effort on THEIR part to bring about school improvements. Unless we see some tangible efforts it could be curtains for further support from us.
The Bal Bigyan visit was to give them a start with their new library via a gift of around 75 books, mostly reading books for the children but also a small number of reference books for the teachers. The photo shows Champa handing over a selection to Parashu Baral the Head Teacher.
Once that had been done I managed to get myself persuaded to run a class for a while, my fame is spreading after the science lesson I gave last week! This time it was about the UK and I had a class discussion about the differences between the UK and Nepal, physical, cultural, religion etc. All in English thankfully.

Something for us, something for you.

Well that's just about the end of our month's work here and we are leaving with a new partner in ECCA, a better understanding of our schools and their needs, and with each school now understanding Nepal Schools Aid's focus and approach. We have had numerous meetings with Head Teachers, Staff, Management Committees, mostly amiable, sometimes "inter-planetary"!
Our next visit will be in April 2010, hopefully with some UK teachers running some skills workshops over several days. In anticipation of these visits we are leaving each school with some specific improvement objectives we would like them to work on. All are action based rather than outcome based so they are all within the means of each school provided they motivate themselves, which is quite a problem in Nepal anyway.
Firstly each school has two common objectives, first to develop a working relationship with ECCA as a means to influence their local communities to support and contribute to any improvement plans, and second to create a Nature Club within the school as part of the Water, Hygiene & Sanitation curriculum.In addition each school has some objectives specific to that school such as Bal Bigyan and Bal Kalyan creating a UK studies syllabus and space for a library which we will fund. If anyone would like to know more details then please email us.
In summary the schools know that we are now entering a phase of self development where we expect to see signs of self improvement as a condition of continuing and growing support from ourselves.

Nepal continues to suffer

Image by izahorsky via Flickr

In the middle of all our scurrying around schools and offices it's easy to forget that Nepal is still in the throes of a political crisis. Without boring everyone to death with the full background our regular readers will remember that the country is ruled by a 21 party coalition which currently excludes the Maoists who are the largest party with 30% + of the vote. Last April the Maoists were in power but a constitutional crisis led to their resignation from government and our leaving the country quickly in the face of a possible military coup.
Since then the Maoists have been a thorn in the side of government with daily blockages of parliament. Now they have announced a 12 day programme of protests using their youth organisation the Young Communist League (YCL). Starting on November 1st through to November 12th they have organised a schedule involving a torchlight procession, blockage of parliament, street protests, rallies, blockage of municipal offices and a blockade of the airport on 10th November, one day before we travel home!
Marvellous!

Videos and visions

Just back from another visit to Bal Bigyan school, initially as part of our plan to make a number of educational videos for some schools in the UK. The plan includes four specific videos related to Buddhism, Shopping, Schools and Kathmandu Central. Today's video included a "tour" around the school and a specific maths class taken by Bashu our sponsored teacher.
In addition we had an informal more relaxed chat with the Headmaster about his vision and plans for the school. He has been teaching at the school for 20 years now and cares passionately about it's performance. Specifically he has a vision to make the school the best in the district to which the permanent population will send their children and this includes:
1. Increasing the number of children attending, a big issue in Nepal
2. Enhancing the quality of education with a shift to child centred teaching as opposed to teacher centred
3. Building a new extension to the current school on their existing land which would allow them to include classes up to year 10 therefore becoming a secondary school.
In the case of this latter element the initial costings for the two storey extension are for about £20,000 of which they currently have found £3000.

 

When a PhD in chemistry comes in handy .....

Yesterday paid a short visit to our fifth supported school, Himalaya Secondary School in the centre of Kathmandu. This school is different from our others in that we support only 65 children out of the full 300 since these are the poorest with little or no personal support from anywhere else. The Head of the school takes in this many impoverished children in additional to those from the permanent community.
During our visit we entered a science class, Year 8, and I just couldn't resist having a go. These kids all spoke good English which was the medium used for their science lessons, which now includes a session on the periodic table of the elements from Dr B! (Sorry about the blurry picture, it was taken by the regular teacher who was presumably having a good laugh!)