Everest Trek achieves 100% success

A bit like a blockbuster movie, it was 12 months in the making, involved a cast of '000s, made a huge profit and was an all-round mega success!
Five dedicated supporters of NSA led by the Trustee Chairman finally reached Gorak Shep, the end of the Everest trail, on 18th October ready to launch themselves further along the moraine to Base Camp or higher still to the top of Kala Pataar, or both! One day later all objectives had been met and six very satisfied people began the long journey back to Lukla and a flight to Kathmandu.


This short blog cannot do justice to the efforts of these five people who raised over £13,000 for our schools development programme. They prepared for a full year to get to the right levels of fitness required for such a harsh environment. They fundraised in a wide variety of ways to meet personal targets. During the trek they drank up to 6 litres of fluids a day to ward off the dehydration effects of altitude, they stuck to the schedule of altitude gain each day, they readily accepted the cold, the low standards of hygiene, the basic foods, the dust. They kept going on some big hills and some long days, without complaint. (Well, almost!)
They are quite simply the best trekking group I have had the privilege to lead in 10 years. Thank you Gary, Joanna, John, Kate, Marion.

We are delighted to announce the appointment of a further Education Consultant joining our team in Kathmandu. Rashmi Kafle is an experienced teacher trainer having run her own training consultancy, Stepping Stone, and delivered a large programme of training for UNHABITAT in Nepal over a 3 year period.

One area of speciality for Rashmi is human values based education and it was this that she specifically applied to training teachers in how to deliver a programme of Water, Hygiene & Sanitation in over 50 Primary Schools.

Rashmi has a B.Ed., and a Masters in Sociology with her current thoughts aimed at possibly doing a PhD.

However maybe the most impressive thing about Rashmi is that she has founded a small school for 50 "street children" who live in a squatters camp close to a rubbish dump. If you have seen the film Slumdog Millionaire you will understand the term "rag-picker, which is what these children are. From her Stepping Stone fees she has rented a building, furnished offices and three classrooms, pays the salaries of 4 teachers, and ................ gives the children one meal a day! Our initial plan is for Rashmi to work with Babita in marketing and delivering the early new Academy programmes to allow her to learn all our content, processes and techniques. In addition Babita will establish an NSA Office at Rashmi's school so they can work together and in return we will help to create a model/best practice learning resources centre at the school.

I hope everyone will welcome Rashmi to our NSA family and can see the huge potential and mutual benefit of our working together. 

Quality Education: Defined, trained, increased, evidenced!

It is proving to be awfully difficult not to appear smug or say "we told you so" following the results of some repeat tests we have carried out on some 300 children in our seven supported schools. 

Our regular followers will know that in April just before the schools began implementing the training we had delivered we tested a cohort of 300 children across seven schools using the Myself As A Learner Scale and the Quality Education Questionnaire. I will not repeat here the description of these tests, suffice to say they are inventories of self perception and school/education perception by the child and NOT ability tests. What the latter is certainly measuring is the child's view of the education they are receiving in terms of things like involvement, interest, use of resources, teaching style, teacher support etc. All the things you would expect in a child centred learning environment.
The results are summarised below and a simple interpretation would go something like this:

1. In general the children's perception of the "quality of education" (NSA's definition) has increased since we conducted a major training programme in April. This is likely due to changes in teacher behaviour.
2. In general the children's perception of themselves as learners (as much influenced by home life and background) has NOT changed, and would probably take longer and with different interventions to achieve.

On yer bike for Nepal Schools Aid!

When you run a charity and spend all your waking hours wondering where your next donation is coming from it is tempting to only focus on the big fish so to speak, the grants, the corporate donations etc and to lose sight of all the ordinary people in Britain who have a "giving" nature.

Then something happens to shake you up a bit and bring you down to earth such as the sponsored cycle ride done by 17 year old Daniel Richardson who cycled around Kielder Water and raised around £100 for us. We've never met him, he doesn't know us personally, he just wanted to help.

In his own words:

"When I first heard of Nepal Schools Aid, I immediately saw the charity as an excellent way to ensure money donated to disadvantaged individuals in the country actually got to them, rather than it being lost in an assortment of various administrative fees. Since a sum of money normally seen as modest at best in England could do so much good in Nepal, I decided that I should try to raise as much as possible to help out by doing a sponsored bike ride. I talked to almost everyone I knew about doing it, and all of them were more than willing to put their name down to sponsor me. Once I had a good number of sponsors committed, I organised a date for the ride, went out and did it. The ride was around 26 miles, following the shore of Kielder Lake in Northumberland. After a few hours of getting lost repeatedly on very undulating terrain, I had cycled the entirety of the route. It was a very worthwhile effort, which I enjoyed, and I'm glad it raised so much money for Nepal Schools Aid." 

Thanks Daniel, do you know any more like you?