One Year on

Kathmandu Durbur Square

Tomorrow is one year since the the 7.8 earthquake hit the Gorkha district in Nepal and sent shockwaves across the country. We will be marking the occasion with a special whole school assembly at KISC in the morning to remember those who have gone and their families who mourn. To acknowledge those still living in temporary shelter waiting for help, and to give thanks for the Lords faithfulness to us over this past year.

We know that God has been walking through this past year with us, giving us the strength to cope with the stress, the exhaustion and the fear of those first few days, helping us and equipping us to make the decisions that needed to be made quickly, and giving us the courage to stay afterwards so that we could walk through this year alongside the KISC community.

We are grateful for the support we have received over this year from friends near and far which has helped us to continue in our work and life here and return to a new kind of normal. Aftershocks continue, rumours of a huge one still to come persist, but for us and for Nepalis across the country life continues. In a country with a large disparity between rich and poor the disparity continues. The rich have already rebuilt, many of the poor continue to wait for finances to enable them to rebuild. The inflation of prices, noticeable to us, is huge to those who live on the equivalent of just a few pounds each day.

The blockade added to the pressure on the economy. Inflation has hit the country hard, although officially it is around 10% as it has been for several years. The prices at the market have increased closer to 30%.

Last week was Nepali New Year, the hope among everyone in this nation is that 2073 will be a better year than 2072.

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.

4435 miles

Photo from Yuchi Kosio on Flickr with CC licence

4435 is the number of miles we have racked up in our car this home assignment. Incidentally
this almost exactly the distance from our base here in Oxfordshire to Kathmandu (Google says 4460 if you're interested). Tonight we fly back home to Kathmandu. Our bags are packed and we are ready to go.

During this home assignment we have been all over the UK, from Liverpool, Leeds, and Bradford in the north; Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex in the East; Derby, Nottingham, Birmingham and Leicester in the Midlands; and Wiltshire, Surrey, London and Sussex down south.

We have spent time with family, caught up with friends, including some we hadn't seen for several years and filled many Sundays visiting different churches and sharing of our work in Nepal and the role that KISC is playing in all God is doing there.

We have appreciated seeing everyone we've seen and sorry we didn't quite get to see everyone we wanted to. It is always an encouragement and a blessing to travel around the country and meet up with people who are backing us on our journey. Thank you.

See you in Kathmandu!

Blockade over?

The border blockade (photo from Nepal Times)

After nearly 5 months the border blockade was finally lifted last week and trucks and goods have been moving smoothly over the border this past week. We read today that fuel will now be available at almost normal supply at the pumps next week and that gas is coming into the city. This is of course great news for the country and its people who have suffered so much. We have seen articles suggesting 400,000 jobs may have been lost as a result of the blockade.

Articles are already being written on how long it will take for Nepal to recover and what will be the long term impact on the country from this. Suffice to say it will certainly take some time.

We have sat out the last 2 months of the blockade watching afar from the UK. We have been here as part of our regular Home Assignment and have certainly appreciated the break after a tough year, while always feeling torn that our friends, both Nepalis and ex-pats, remain, living through the ongoing shortages.

What has been very noticeable as we have travelled around churches and spoken to many people in the UK is the fact that very few people here are aware of it, and those that are have nearly all relied almost exclusively on our updates for information.

This was the part that has saddened us the most about this whole situation. While it was certainly not the worlds fault, the world has pretty much ignored the situation and done precious little to make any difference. The media have kept quiet and governments have kept quiet. Nepal, is evidently too small and inconsequential on the global scale for them to care. 

Maybe next time we’ll have to get onto Joanna Lumley and see if she can help again. 

Happy Christmas

We write this short blog entry from England after arriving over the weekend. We are looking forward to Christmas, time with family, and starting our 2 month home assignment in January where we will be visiting many of you and talking about our work in Nepal.

We wanted to wish you all a Happy Christmas and share this song, that we feel sums up the awesomeness of Christmas. We've copied the words below.

Happy Christmas.

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy would one day walk on water?

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy would save our sons and daughters?

Did you know
that your Baby Boy has come to make you new?
This Child that you delivered will soon deliver you.

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy will give sight to a blind man?

Mary, did you know
that your baby boy will calm the storm with His hand?

Did you know
that your Baby Boy has walked where angels trod?
When you kiss your little Baby you kissed the face of God?

Mary did you know.. Mary did you know

The blind will see.
The deaf will hear.
The dead will live again.
The lame will leap.
The dumb will speak
The praises of The Lamb.

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy is Lord of all creation?

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy would one day rule the nations?

Did you know
that your Baby Boy is heaven's perfect Lamb?
The sleeping Child you're holding is the Great, I Am.

Waiting for Gas

We are now in the third month of this blockade. We wrote at the end of September about how the Nepali border with India had been closed. Nepal is landlocked and so depends very heavily on India for pretty much all its imports.

Queuing for kerosene...

A lot of people have now run out of cooking gas and so are cooking on wood fires – the air is noticeably smoggier.

Petrol is being sold in very limited amounts. What petrol there is being prioritised to schools, hospitals, buses and government agencies.

Shop shelves are looking sparse as all imported goods start to run out.

Electricity is erratic as those who can afford it have bought electric induction plates and other similar things for cooking and are stretching the system. From tomorrow our regularly scheduled power cuts will increase to 8 and 9 hours a day due to the increased electric usage. Although the fuel shortage has meant a number of business have shut down, reducing some power usage, so it could be worse.

The black market is doing a roaring trade though. Roads are not as quiet as we thought they would be, so some petrol is getting through, but is reportedly costing 3 or 4 times the normal price and gas bottles are about 5 times the normal price.

... on our route to school.

The government has allowed gas distributors to sell half full bottles – but transporting them is the next challenge. Our local store apparently has half full gas bottles about 2 hours outside Kathmandu, but the distributors won’t deliver them due to petrol shortages and fears for their own safety.  

We heard of one local organisation that had a supply of partly used gas bottles ready for their heaters this winter, but decided to “raffle” them off to staff who had none for cooking. There was apparently much dancing and celebrating from those who won! KISC has made the decision to not use any gas to heat this year and just keep what we’ve got to keep cooking lunches for staff and students.

So as the weather turns cold here most people are preparing themselves for a cold and grim winter with no fuel, but the bigger danger now is that there is also a big shortage of medicines and vaccines putting many at risk if they have an accident or become ill. This does not count those who lost everything in the April and May earthquakes here and haven’t received the aid they need to get them through the winter – much of it is in country, but can’t be delivered to rural areas due to fuel shortages.

The Nepali people are tough and they are resilient, but they have had a tough year and they deserve a break. People are suffering, people who have already survived two massive earthquakes and hundreds of terrifying aftershocks, people who have buried their loved ones, who have lost homes and possessions.

It is so frustrating to be here in Nepal and feel completely helpless. Please join us in praying that a resolution will be found to this situation quickly.

Outward Bound

Going up hill through paddy fields.

Last week was KISC’s annual activity week. We have blogged about this before, here and here.

This year, I (Dan) got to complete my full set. I have now been involved in Primary Activity Week (last year), Year 8 (Chitwan jungle in 2008), Year 9 (House building in 2010), Year 10 (Outward Bound resort in 2011), Year 11 (Work Experience visits in 2012), Year 13 (International trip to Thailand in 2009) and now, the full set: Trekking with Year 7.

Despite the ongoing full crisis (see previous blogs here and here), we were able to carry on as normal and our students spread out around the country. I boarded the bus with nineteen Year 7 students, three Year 12 junior leaders and four other teachers at 6am last Monday and we journeyed for 8 hours west to beyond Pokhara. We actually stopped in Pokhara to pickup our trekking team and all the gear. Alongside the 27 of us from KISC we had a support team of 36! 20 Porters to carry our main bags, tents and other camp resources, 7 sherpas/guides plus one head guide and 7 kitchen assistants (who doubled as porters for all the kitchen stuff and most of the food for the week) and head cook.

Trying to be a porter, for 1 minute

Our initial reaction was this seemed like an awful lot of people, but we realised what a blessing this was. With the earthquakes earlier in the year and ongoing fuel situation both impacting tourism significantly we were providing an income to these guys. I got chatting to one of the porters one day and he was telling me his story. He was a cook at a hotel in Pokhara but due to the lack of gas to cook with he hadn’t had work and had to take this work as a porter, this was his first trek. His home had been significantly damaged in the earthquake and he has had to rebuild this year, no doubt taking loans to help, and now the lack of work. We shared photos of our children and wives on our phones and he took plenty of selfies with his new friend.

The ‘support team’ did a great job. Each morning we were woken from our tents with tea at 6am, then a bowl of warm water to wash with, followed by breakfast. As we ate breakfast the porters were loading up the bags and packing up the tents (each porter took 3-4 teachers and students bags). We then headed off each day for our trek. Usually after about 30 minutes or so the porters with the dinning tent and tables and the kitchen crew with all their gear stormed past us, usually in flip flops.

Camp

We walked

for between 4 and 7 hours each day. Stopping for a cooked lunch as we caught up with the kitchen crew around the middle of the day. Tuesday was a tough day due to overnight rain and an abundance of leeches and slippery steps. On Wednesday a smaller group of five year 7 students, one year 12, three teachers and two guides broke off to reach the summit of Panchese at 2,500 metres, while the rest took the flatter route to lunch.  The summit just about gave us good views as the clouds shifted around us, but we got fabulous views from our campsite on the last day.

Friday morning view from our campsite

Friday we returned to Kathmandu on another 8 hour bus ride. Tired, but with a great sense of achievement for both us teachers, but mostly for the young students who knew what they had achieved and overcome during a great week.