Coming Home

We have now been back home in Kathmandu for 3 weeks. Having settled back in to school and life here, we now have a two week Easter holiday! This has been a gentle introduction, but also exciting as two big developments have come to the fore on our return.

The basketball court is dismantled in January

Firstly, a new site for KISC. Currently, the school is spread across 4 rented properties, but before Christmas it was five. Then we were asked to vacate our sports site. This has meant we have lost the basketball court and 5-a-side football pitch. We have been able to share use of others not far from the school for things like clubs and some PE lessons, but it’s not the same.

We had identified a potential new site for the school a while ago and while things are far from certain there has been a lot of positive progress in recent weeks and we are hopeful that in the next month or so we might be able to sign a rental agreement for this new site. While it is rental, we hope to sign a long term lease and then to build custom made school buildings on the land (as well as a new basketball court and football pitch). The site is a little way from the current KISC and outside the ring road, a plus for pollution and negative for access.

The second development is with Pokhara Primary Study Centre (aka PSC). PSC is a KISC like small primary school in Pokhara which is primarily for mission worker children like KISC. PSC was possibly going to have to close this summer, but the organisation running it, INF, asked KISC if it could help last year. After some discussions and visits to PSC, KISC agreed to consult and support PSC so that it was able to keep running beyond this summer. Last week, Dan and Angus (another KISC Director) went down to Pokhara to visit the school, meet with parents and the principal and discuss and make plans for the future. As KISC hopes to help, and play a role in continuing the work of PSC and Dan plays a key role in this, it’s exciting times.

The leprosarium built in 1952

As part of our visit to PSC, we were taken for a tour around the Green Pastures site, where the school is located. This is a large 52 acre, site which has been part of the the INF work since it started in Nepal in 1952. There is currently a leprosy hospital and an Ear, Nose and Throat hospital on the site as well as a farm designed to help rehabilitate leprosy patients. In the middle of the site is a small hut. This is the first leprosarium, where the first Christian doctors who arrived in Nepal in 1952, just after the country was opened up, treated the first leprosy patients. It was exciting to visit this innocuous looking hut, knowing its significant position in the history of God’s work in this country.