December 2010-November 2011

Welcome to our new logo! I think it does a better job at encapsulating what we are about than our old text-only version. I hope you agree.

IN MEMORIAM

This newsletter is dedicated to Tony Abrahams, who died this April. My first overseas teaching job took place in Morocco from 1976 to1978, under the auspices of the Centre for British Teachers (now shortened to CfBT). I lost touch with “The Centre” for many years after that, so was very surprised when an email plopped into my in-tray three years ago from Tony Abrahams, The Centre’s larger-than-life founder with a  soft spot for the Gurkhas. He had tracked me down via the Internet, and became, in the last three years, a generous supporter of HELP, with sponsorships and donations. My wife, Yami, and I attended a touching commemoration of his life at his old school, Bedford College.

After the event, we were delighted to receive a cheque for £15,000 from CfBT, in Tony’s memory, which will be used to construct a new school building for the Vidyar Sagar Gyanpeeth school in western Sikkim. (See photo at the bottom of the page)

The school is currently housed in a picturesque, but totally inadequate wooden building that is now too small, gets flooded in the monsoon and which has been damaged in the recent earthquake.

With the help of our donors, including a very generous £700 from St. Aloyisius' College in Glasgow, Scotland, where one of our past volunteers, Judith Scott, works as a nurse, the foundations of a new school building have been laid.The £15,000 from CfBT will provide the funds needed to build on these foundations, and there will be some left over to plough into other projects in the future.

OTHER PROJECTS

Teacher training

This is, to my mind, the most important thing we do, because it will have an impact on teaching standards long after we leave the scene. This year Barbara Porter, our trainer, ran two two-week seminars, one in Pokhara, Nepal, in January, and the other in Leh, Ladakh in September (read more…). It's always good to get positive feedback. This is what the principal of the Lamdon Model Senior Secondary School in Leh wrote:

In March 2012 I will be visiting Bhutan with a view to setting up a teacher training seminar in Thimpu later in the year. But it isn't just the formal teacher training seminars that count. Our volunteers also play their part. This is what Henrike Elter, who went to a small school in western Nepal, reports:

The Tamang family

I often ask friends and acquaintances to do things for HELP when they are visiting Nepal. An old friend of mine took some pictures of a family in Kathmandu that are receiving sponsorship money from our sponsors, one of them being the afore-mentioned Tony Abrahams. Tony was upset by the conditions in which the family were living, and made a donation of £500 to ease their plight. The nameless friend who took the photos contributed another £500, and the money has been spent on some solar powered lights (to enable the children to do their homework at night) and a couple of cows to help their mother earn a living.

The Gyan Jyoti school, Kalimpong

The children of Highfields school in Newark, England, have continued their generous support of the Gyan Jyoti school, just outside Kalimpong. This year we received a cheque for £446 which will cover the cost of two sponsorships, initiated by Mairi McGivern when she was a volunteer there, and a generator, and there will be some left over for other projects that we will support in future.

The JN memorial primary school, Kalimpong

We have sent £1,200 to the JN Memorial school to enable them to complete the second storey of their small school building.  This project is now complete. Many thanks again  to Anne Tallentire and her family and friends for all their help in getting us there.

St. Paul School, Namthang, South Sikkim

In our last newsletter, we reported on the need for a landslide wall for this, the first school in our portfolio. For various reasons, partly to do with the need to wait for work to be completed on the road below the school, progress has been slow, but a large part has now been built. Here is a picture of progress so far.

Bee Pooley, who volunteered at St. Paul’s this year, made a personal donation of £150 to the school so that they could build a decent toilet for the boys.

Volunteer donations

Bob and Ann Summers, both HELP volunteers, who taught at the Lamdon Model Senior school in 2009, and in Nepal in 2010, sent 400 books to the school this year. This is always a bit risky, since parcels frequently get lost in the post, but they duly arrived, and Barbara Porter took pictures of them being being devoured! We have also received a number of smaller donations from people who have been instructed by Bob to pay us for the private maths coaching that he does for their children. He also sent us £110 that he was supposed to spend on a birthday present for himself. Many thanks Bob, and to all our volunteers who continue supporting our work!

The Hope Family Trust, Kalimpong

Earlier this year we sent £500 to a small local NGO in Kalimpong, called the Hope Family Trust, for uniforms for 50 pupils. Schools will not accept children without uniforms, so this small donation has enabled 50 children to have a schooling! This has been followed up recently, with a £1000 gift for computers for their orphanage and repairs to houses damaged in the recent earthquake.

 EARTHQUAKE

Last year was marked by floods in Ladakh and Uttarkhand. This year West Bengal and Sikkim were hit by a severe earthquake. In both cases the consequences for the population is the same: death (over 100), injury, and the destruction of homes. I have recently seen a photograph of a landslide near Darjeeling that has carried the road completely away, and has left the train track that serves the little Himalayan railway dangling in thin air! Although HELP is an educational charity, our ‘objects’ include a general commitment to the relief of poverty, and so we have sent £1,000 to the Hope Family Trust in Kalimpong, some of which will be earmarked for  house repairs.

INSPECTION VISITS

We did not run any inspection visits this year, but will be visiting West Bengal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal for a month in March and April 2012. I will be doing the Annapurna Sanctuary trek from 31 March to 10th April, give or take a day either end. One or two others have expressed an interest. Let me know if you would like to join us!

VOLUNTEERS

Thirteen volunteers signed up this year. Apart from one unfortunate  volunteer who couldn't reach her school because of a political strike (read more…), and a cancellation due to illness, all the rest reached their destinations. It's funny how interest in different regions differs from year to year. Until this year, we  had difficulty finding volunteers wanting to go to Himachal Pradesh in India and also the remote schools in the Western Region of Nepal. This year, for the first time, two volunteers went to schools in the Annapurna conservation area (click here to see Henrike Elter's fascinating account of her stay at the Sree Sarada Primary School in Phalate), and two to the Gamru village school near Dharamsala, where the Tibetan government in exile is based.

Special mention goes to Ananda Hall (see picture) who introduced music lessons to the JN Memorial school, near Kalimpong, and stayed on during the school's summer break to run extra music lessons for the children. (Click here to see her pictures).

 SPONSORSHIPS

We have been running our sponsorship programme for eight years now, so naturally we are beginning to see some of the younger children coming to the end of their schooling, and no longer requiring our support. And, of course, there are always one or two who drop out for one reason or another (including an elopement!), which is disappointing. Very occasionally, it’s our sponsors who have to withdraw.. Luckily, we have always managed to find a substitute sponsor in these rare cases.

Currently, we have 36 sponsors sponsoring 56 young people, a couple of whom are in college training to be a radiographer and nurse respectively (read more…)

FUND RAISING

It will be no surprise to you that we are always on the look-out for money , and it would be remiss of me to let this opportunity to pass without reminding you of this fact! We even have an exciting new way for you to give your spare pennies! But before I reveal all, let me remind all of you who give or would like to give money to HELP that virtually all your money is used to fund our projects or sponsorships (the only deductions are to pay international bank transfer charges). How do we pull off this remarkable trick? Surely we have expenses? Fees to pay? Fares? We do indeed, but our running and fixed costs are paid for out of the administration fee/deposit, paid to us by our volunteers in return for their placements. So rest assured that virtually 100% of your money goes towards our projects and children. There are not many charities that could give you this assurance.

 JustTextGiving

Now, here is the exciting new way of giving, if you use a British-based mobile phone service. It’s called JustTextGiving. It’s so simple and fun that I know you will all want to give it a go! All you have to do is to text EHLP19, plus the amount you want to donate, to 70070. So, for example, if you want to donate £10, all you do is to text EHLP19 £10 to 70070, and £10 will wing its way to HELP. If everyone receiving this newsletter texted £10, we would receive £3,300! 

(Please note that JustTextGiving only accepts 6 amounts from donors. These are £1, £2, £3, £4, £5, and £10. A donation of £4.50, £7 or £20 for example will not go through.)

And don't forget, wherever you live,  you can send us a donation any time by going to our donations page.

 Everyclick

Readers of past newsletters will be aware that if they use Everyclick as their search engine, HELP receives a small payment, at no cost to them. It all adds up. So far we have raised £65 through your clicks, of which £33.76 has been raised by just one indefatigable anonymous clicker. We could do a lot better if I could persuade a lot more of you to make Everyclick your default search engine! Here’s where to start: www.everyclick.com/himalayaneducationlifelineprogramme . But if you would prefer to use a more familiar name to do your Internet searches, then Yahoo now run a scheme called Affilyon.

 Affilyon

To raise money for HELP using Yahoo's search engine, please visit: sites.affilyon.co.uk/Himalayaneducation

Keeping in touch

Facebook and LinkedIn

HELP is now networking via its pages in Facebook and LinkedIn. Keep in touch and help to raise our profile by joining us!

The HELP blog 

And don’t forget to visit our blog, where you can keep up-to-date with HELP news, and news about the communities we operate in.

Well, that's it for this year. Many thanks for all your support and good wishes.

Merry Christmas to all of you, and a happy new year!

Jim Coleman

Executive Director

NEWSLETTER No. 8

December 2009 - November 2010

The year in a nutshell

This has been a year of floods and cloudbursts causing chaos and deaths in the regions HELP operates in. We were able to see with our own eyes how precarious life is for so many people in the Himalayas. The monsoons are vital but they bring death in their wake. In the aftermath of a severe monsoon, houses are swept away and road travel becomes extremely hazardous. Normally, Ladakh does not get monsoon rain, but this August suffered an unprecedented cloud-burst. Fortunately, the schools we support were not badly affected. Alexander Sanders reported that rain got through the roof of the Phyang monastery school, resulting in muddy carpets. Hanna Fisher, who was about to start teaching at the Lamdon Model Senior Secondary school, sent this report just after the cloud-burst:

Sadly, it turned out that the teacher and his family did not survive the floods.

One of our ex-volunteers, Irena Arambasic, has raised £550 specifically for flood relief, and I have sent another £500 from our general reserves to the Serve and Share Association in Dehradun to purchase emergency tarpaulins for villagers who have lost their roofs.

Apart from this, the theme of the year has been ‘steady as she goes’. The big disappointment has been the fall in volunteer applications, but there are signs that we will be back to normal next year.

Inspection visit

Doing homework under tarpaulin (Uttarakhand)

Monsoon damage in Uttarakhand

Our inspection visit this year took us to the Indian states of the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir (the Ladakh region) and Uttarakhand. These were both areas that suffered badly in the heavy and prolonged monsoon this year, and we were able to see some of the disastrous consequences. An unprecedented cloudburst in Ladakh left hundreds dead and homeless, and we had a glimpse of the impact the heavy rains had on a village an hour’s drive from Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand, with children doing their homework under temporary shelters of tarpaulin. Our own progress through these regions was greatly hampered by innumerable landslides, some still taking place as we travelled along. On one occasion our taxi dodged stones that were flying down a scree slope onto our road. At least we were in a car. Some foolhardy pedestrians ran across dodging the stones that were whizzing past their heads. You take risks in India that you wouldn’t be allowed to take in Europe or the States. Some of the rocks lying on the roads were as big as the cars and buses trying to manoeuvre around them. We wouldn’t have stood a chance if we’d been stood a chance if we had been driving along when they came down.

The aftermath of the cloudburst in Ladakh

Demolishing a damaged house in Choklamsar, Ladakh

While my wife, Yami, stayed in the beautiful hill resort of Nainital, Alan, our eldest son, joined me on a week’s trek in Uttarakhand. Think of the Himalayas, and you don’t naturally think of the state of Uttarakhand. Western tourists generally head for Nepal or, increasingly, Ladakh and Sikkim. And yet Uttarakhand is a spectacularly beautiful place with everything its better-known rivals have in the way of mountain scenery, and some unique sites of its own, including the Hindu pilgrimage towns of Haridwar and Rishikesh on the banks of the Ganges. Alan and I trekked through villages completely cut off from roads, and ended up in Auli, India’s premier ski resort. Thanks to those of you who sponsored us. Your money will go into the HELP general donations fund. It’s a pity none of you were able to join us. Trekking in the Himalayas is undoubtedly hard work, but it is a wonderful, life-enhancing experience. Next time maybe?

Projects

On-going projects

The Himalayas

The following HELP-nominated projects receive financial help from both HELP’s general funds, and donations from HELP’s friends:

St. Paul Primary School

The work on the landslide wall has been delayed by the need to wait for the government to complete the defensive work on the road below the school, and also by this year’s monsoon. The landslide wall is now half finished, and will be completed in the next few months.

JN Memorial Public English School

The first storey of the new concrete building was completed a couple of years ago. As reported in the past two newsletters, Anne Tallentire and Alison Stephens, with the help of family and friends, have raised nearly all the money needed not only to build the ground floor classrooms, but also to construct a second floor. Over the last three years they have raised a total of £7,900 for the school, which is a great achievement. Construction of the second floor has been delayed by this year’s monsoon, but will start this December.

Gyan Jyoti Primary School

Anne McGivern and the staff and children of Highfields school in Newark have raised £1,820 over the past three financial years, in support of the Gyan Jyoti school and its children. This money has been used for sponsorship of children at the school, and to build new classrooms. Many thanks to them all for their efforts.

The Social Public School

We have sent £500 to this state school in Pokhara, Nepal, to buy books for their library.

Vidya Sagar Gyanpeeth School

Flooding in the old building

Laying the foundations for the new classrooms

This is a remote primary school in western Sikkim. It is currently housed in an old wooden building, with dark classrooms that are prone to flooding. We are using our funds to help them build new classrooms that will provide a better environment for the children, and create more space to allow for growth in pupil numbers. The estimated cost of the project was £5,000, and, with the generous help of Judith Scott, a recent volunteer in Nepal, and the children of St Aloysius Junior School who have given us £746, we have been able to send the school £4,500. The foundations have been built already, and the construction of the classrooms will start this December.

Teacher Training

Teacher training workshop

Barbara Porter returned to Kalimpong and Gangtok in January/February 2010 to run more of her much appreciated seminars. You can read a condensed version of Barbara’s report in our blog. These seminars are less glamorous than school building projects, but, by improving what goes on inside the buildings, they are the best thing HELP does.

I have invited Barbara to join our board of Directors. Her experience as a HELP volunteer and subsequent experience as our teacher trainer makes her well-qualified to help us to evaluate what we are doing and plan for the future when I will need to hand over the position of Executive Director.

New projects

Phyang monastery school

After completing his HELP assignment at the Spituk monastery school last year, one of our volunteers, Maurice Dixon, visited the monastery school in Phyang, Ladakh, and spent a couple of weeks teaching there. On his recommendation, we decided to add this school to our portfolio of projects, and the first volunteer going there under our auspices was Alexander Sanders. Yami and I visited the school on our inspection visit, and were impressed by the monks there and also by the spectacular setting of the monastery situated at the head of a valley.

Monastery school students

Phyang monastery

Volunteers

Flood relief in Uttarakhand In September we donated £500 to provide temporary relief for five families in Uttarakhand whose houses were damaged in the recent floods, and have just sent another £1,500 as a contribution towards the cost of re-building their damaged houses. Teacher training in Nepal and Uttarakhand Barbara Porter will be running two one-week seminars in Pokhara, Nepal in January 2011, one for primary teachers and the other for secondary teachers. The host school will be the Social Public School, where several of our volunteers have taught over the years. Also in January 2011, the Serve and Share Association wants to provide teacher training for local teachers in and around Dehradun. The course will be run by local teacher trainers. We have sent them £1,000 to facilitate this. Untied donations In addition to the donors already mentioned in the previous section, we get donations not tied to the above-mentioned projects. Many thanks to all these donors, including: HELP volunteer Alexander Sanders at work Our volunteers who, in addition to the fees that they dutifully pay (in effect, a compulsory donation), often continue to raise money for their schools after they have returned home. For example, Melissa Aaron and Kevin Trainer established a library at the Algarah primary school in West Bengal, when they were volunteering there, and have recently sent a large consignment of books to the school. Sometimes our volunteers are able to persuade their friends and relations and work colleagues to sponsor them. I would like to thank all those of you, in Germany, who sent us donations amounting to £1,884 (of which £1,300 was donated by Irini Rohrbach) in support of Alexander Sanders’s volunteering assignment in Ladakh. Other notable donors since the last newsletter include a very generous gift of £2,500 from the R.G. Hills Charitable Trust, and The Rotary Club of Canterbury Sunrise which raised £160 at a dinner in Canterbury to which I was invited, and at which I gave an account of the work HELP undertakes. Many thanks to both charities for their generosity.

Going to school in Uttarakhand

This has been a disapppointing year for volunteer recruitment. We only recruited eight volunteers (compared with 18 last year), one of whom is still on her assignment at the time of writing. This makes 2010 by far the worst year for volunteer recruitment since HELP was founded. No doubt the harsh economic climate has had its effect. Fortunately, prospects for next year look better. We already have two who have signed up for 2011 (including Mark Coddington who volunteered this year in Ladakh and now plans to teach in Nepal at the beginning of 2011), and one who is planning to volunteer in Nepal in 2012. This is promising since recruitment is always quiet at this time of year.

Of the eight volunteers we recruited, only six were able to undertake their assignments. I am happy to say that these six have done well, making a useful contribution to their schools (or women’s co-operative in one case) and enjoying the challenge of living and working in a Himalayan community. Most volunteer assignments last a couple of months (the usual minimum period), but one, Claire Hollingbery, is giving her school, the Bright Life Academy, a generous five months of her time. She will be leaving Kalimpong just before Christmas.

It’s always good to hear about volunteers staying in touch with their schools, and even making return visits. Gill Williams returned to the Lily Garden school in February, to do some more teaching. And after finishing her teacher training seminars in Kalimpong and Gangtok in February, Barbara Porter went to her old school in Namthang, Sikkim, at her own expense, and ran an informal teacher training seminar for the teachers there.

Whenever I hear that any of you, whether you are volunteers, sponsors or donors, are going out to the region, I almost always ask you to undertake tasks for me, such as taking photos of sponsored children, passing on messages, updating information on the schools, or, in one case, checking up on a hospitalized volunteer. Many thanks to those of you who agreed to take these tasks on.

The HELP sponsorship programme

Currently, 53 children are being sponsored by 36 sponsors. The total value of these sponsorships was £6,101 in the last financial year. The money you send us for the Indian children is sent to India in November or December, while the money for the Nepalese children is sent in March. The aim is to get your money to the child in time for them to buy clothes and books before the new school year. A few sponsorships have ended, either because the child has finished his or her schooling, or because they have moved without their guardians informing us, and most of these dropped sponsorships have been transferred to other children who have been added to the list. Many thanks to those sponsors for agreeing to this arrangement.

From time to time I ask you to let me know if you are getting letters from your child, and only a couple of you this year said you were not receiving any information. Since the letters are sent directly to you, I would ask you to alert me if you are not getting any. If you look at the living conditions of the Tamang family below, you will not be surprised that letter writing is not an easy task for the children. Few of our sponsorships are arranged through the schools, so it is not a simple matter of getting a school to organise letter writing twice a year. In our case, each child has to be tracked down by the local HELP rep, writing paper and envelopes have to be procured, the letter has to be written in English, stamps have to be bought, and then the letter has to take its chance within the postal system, so I hope you will remain your usual tolerant selves if the letters do not come precisely on time!

The Tamang family To give you some idea of the typical living conditions of our sponsored children, I thought I would share with you some observations made by a good friend of mine on a visit he made to the family home of three of our sponsored children: two brothers, Kul Bahadur, Heera, and their sister Nani Tamang. The three children live in a one-room shack situated in a small plot in the Kathmandu valley a few km from the city. Access is gained from an unsurfaced country track via a hole in the hedge. Kul Bahadur and Heera and on the bed, and studying by candlelight, the only illumination in the house. The dimensions of the accommodation are approximately 15ft x 10ft and the room is split into two roughly equal halves (but with no divider), and in this space six people live (that is, cook, eat and sleep, and store provisions) : Kul, Heera, Nani and another sister and their mother. (Their father was murdered by the Maoists during the troubles a few years ago.) At one end of the room is a bed where the daughters sleep. Kul and Heera sleep on another bed in the other part of the room; a chicken is kept at night in a box near their bed. The mother provides for all these people by selling vegetables, which she grows on land owned by her neighbours, and milk; a cow is kept in a shelter tacked on to the end of the shack. There’s no electricity or running water. Nani Tamang Kul, Bahadur and Heera Homework by candlelight The kitchen corner

An appeal

Gokarna Pathak

As reported last year, I am currently focusing my efforts on trying to find sponsors for young adults to enable them to finish the last two years of school and go on to college. As reported last year, one of our sponsors is supporting a young Nepalese man through a radiology course in Kathmandu. This is not cheap, costing around £700 a year, but medical courses are far more expensive. Most of you will have read my recent appeal for co-sponsors to share the sponsorship of Gokarna Pathak, who wants to go to medical school. Fees at medical colleges in Nepal are very high, and there are very few scholarships available. In effect, this means that only students from rich families can contemplate a medical career. We would like to help Gokarna realise his dream of being a doctor. Without our help he hasn’t a chance, and yet he made good academic progress at school, and we believe he has a good chance of being able to undertake medical studies successfully.

Students from wealthy families resist working outside the main urban areas, and many emigrate to work overseas. A doctor from Gokarna’s socio-economic background is more likely to stay in Nepal and accept assignments in poor areas, to the benefit of communities that have little access to medical help.

Many thanks to those of you who have responded positively to my appeal. At present we have provisional commitments amounting to over £3,000 a year, which means we can finance all but the first year of a six year course. The challenge now is to find sufficient funds for the first year, in which most of the fees are loaded. We will need to find another £11,000 before we can give Gokarna the green light to submit an application to a suitable college. If you would like to help him, then all you need to do at this stage is to give me a ball-park figure that you could commit to, provided that we reach the target figure and Gokarna is accepted into a medical school. No payments are needed at this stage.

JustGiving

Alan and Jim Coleman on trek!

I was recently approached, out of the blue, by Wasim Haque who saw our website and offered to raise money for us via JustGiving, a charity that specialises in helping other charities, such as ourselves, to raise funds. Wasim is planning to run the Brighton half-marathon on 20th February 2011 and is inviting his friends and the readership of this newsletter to sponsor him. I have now registered HELP with JustGiving to make it possible for him to create a sponsorship page with our details on. He hopes to raise £1,000 for us. You can visit Wasim’s sponsorship page by clicking on this link.

I have followed Wasim’s example by creating my own JustGiving page, and there are more pictures of our recent trek there. Of course, I should have done this before the trek, but it’s never too late! JustGiving claim that 20% of sponsorships are made after the event. Why not prove them right by going to www.justgiving.com/jcoleman, enjoying the photographs and, if they bring a smile to your face, putting a few pennies in my proverbial hat!

You too can follow suit and help HELP by creating your own sponsorship page with JustGiving. If you are thinking of doing something that challenges you, whether it’s a marathon, or parachute jump, or, indeed, a trek, or anything else you would like to do, then why not use it to raise funds for HELP? JustGiving makes it easy to set this up. Just go to this page to set up an account linked to the Himalayan Education Lifeline Programme.

Thanks

These newsletters do not do justice to the work of our local supporters without whose help I couldn’t run HELP. So a heartfelt thanks to the following people for giving up so much of their valuable time: Norong Namchyo, Zion Namchyo, Jayanti Lama, and Rabin Acharya who help me run the sponsorship programme, and make themselves available for the volunteers in case they need advice or help; Senir Nair who helps me with some sponsorships in Kathmandu; and Eshey Tondup, the principal of the Lamdon Model Senior Secondary school in Leh, for helping me with the volunteer programme in Ladakh, and, in spite of his heavy work-load, for giving us so much of his time personally ferrying us around the various schools on our recent visit.

The Blog

If you would like to keep up-to-date with what is going on throughout the year, visit our blog!

Well, that’s it for this year. Many thanks for all your support and good wishes.

Merry Christmas to all of you, and a happy new year!

Jim Coleman
Director
Himalayan Education Lifeline Programme

A very hazy Lake Phewa, Pokhara

NEWSLETTER No. 7

Welcome to our 7th annual newsletter. It seems like only yesterday that I sent out the very first of these newsletters. I’m glad to report that HELP continues to thrive!

The year in a nutshell

This has been a year of consolidation, with just two new projects added to our portfolio. HELP has, in my opinion, reached its optimum size, and I have no plans to expand its scope any further. Further growth would mean taking on staff and finding office premises, turning HELP into a different kind of beast. Indeed, the sponsorship programme has probably grown larger than is practical, and from now on our support will focus on a small number of college-age students in place of the existing long-term programme for young children, which will be allowed to run down over the coming years.

Somewhat surprisingly, the economic recession did not seem to have an impact on the numbers of people applying to volunteer. An interesting phenomenon this year was the number of volunteers wanting to work in Nepal as opposed to the Indian Himalayas. Until this year, it has been difficult to get enough volunteers for the Nepalese schools. This year, there were not enough volunteers wanting to go to India. This may be something to do with the improved security situation in Nepal and the more unsettled situation in West Bengal. In fact, the situation in Nepal is now worsening again, while the Gorkhaland agitation in Darjeeling and Kalimpong has calmed down. Events are outpacing people’s awareness of them.

Inspection visit

Yami, my wife, and I visited Nepal and Dharamsala in March, and, as always, visited as many of the schools we support as we could, and we managed to see one of our volunteers at his school (see below for the full story of the can of worms our visit opened up). We also made a point of meeting as many of the sponsored children in Pokhara and Kathmandu as we could, and took photographs to send on to their sponsors on our return to the UK.

The political situation in Kathmandu and Pokhara was generally quiet during our visit, so we were untroubled by demonstrations and strikes there, but we had to abandon our attempt to visit a school in Chitwan, south of Pokhara, because of disturbances there.

We spent a few days in Pokhara, which, with its beautiful lake, is a lot more relaxing than Kathmandu. Unfortunately, smoke from forest fires created a permanent haze over the town which meant we could not see the iconic ‘fish-tail’ mountain, called Machapuchere in Nepali, that stands over Pokhara.

McleodGanj, Dharamsala

We also visited Dharamsala, which is where the Dalai Lama has his Indian headquarters. My son, Alan, had visited the area three years ago, and identified the schools that we currently advertise on our website. It was good to have a chance of seeing part of India we had not seen before, and to visit the schools for the first time. The picture is of the curiously named McleodGanj (those Scots get everywhere!) which is located just above Dharamsala and just below the village of Bhag Sunag, where we support a school.

New Projects

The Chetana Women Skill Development project workshop

During our visit to Pokhara we met a formidable Tamang woman in Kathmandu who runs a training and resource centre in Patan (one of the three ancient cities of the Kathmandu valley) for the benefit of unemployed housewives, who return to their villages to run pre-primary activities for children in marginalised communities in various parts of Nepal. A HELP volunteer will have joined this project by the time you read this newsletter.

We also came across a women’s cooperative run by an impressive Brahmin woman. The women make woven articles such as bags and pencil cases for the tourist trade. I promised to try to help them by looking for volunteers with small business or handicraft skills. More details can be found on the HELP website, and they also have a website of their own.

On-going projects

The following HELP-nominated projects receive financial help from both HELP’s general funds, and donations from HELP’s friends:

St. Paul Primary School

As reported in the last newsletter, the school is built, and provides a much better environment for the children than the dilapidated rented building they were in when we first visited the school. However, as with almost everything in Sikkim, it is built on the side of a mountain, and so faces the hazard of landslides during the monsoon. I have agreed to fund the building of a landslide wall to safeguard our very substantial investment in the school, and have already sent nearly £2,000. I will be sending up to another £2,000 in due course.

The Community of the Presentation in Canterbury kindly donated £500 this year for this project. My special thanks to Alicia Pentin for supporting our application for a grant. This is the second time in three years that this charity has given our programme financial support.

JN Memorial Public English School

The first storey of the new concrete building was completed last year. Anne Tallentire, step-mother of Rebecca Scott who volunteered at the JN Memorial School school in 2006, and Alison Stephens, have so far raised a total of £5,995 for the school over the last two financial years. In this they were helped by the staff and pupils of Hilmarton primary school in Wiltshire, which Alison’s son attends, the regulars of The Victoria pub in Easleach, Richard Scott (Anne’s son), and Rebecca herself. So thanks to all and sundry.

Anne and Alison visited the school earlier this year and were treated as royalty. Yami and I had the pleasure of meeting them in London shortly after their visit and were regaled with their experiences.

I have recently sent the school £1, 950 so work on the second storey can now commence.

ICT Telecentre in Changu Narayan

We have donated £1,000 to help the Nyacho Pauwa primary school establish an ICT centre in the village. The computers will be used by the school children during school hours, and by the village as a whole after hours.

Gyan Jhoti Primary School

Anne McGivern and the staff and children of Highfields school in Newark have raised almost £1,000 over the past two financial years, in support of the Gyan Jhoti school and its children. Two new classrooms are being built with their financial help. Anne is the mother of Mairi, who was a volunteer at the school a couple of years ago.

Teacher Training

Seminar participants hard at work	Barbara Porter and ‘the Scottish project’

Following on from her successful seminars in Kalimpong and Gangtok in 2007, Barbara Porter (Senior Administrator at the Institute of Applied Language Studies, Moray House, Edinburgh and one of our ex-volunteers) went to Ladakh this September to run two seminars for primary and then secondary school teachers. These also went extremely well, and you can read extracts from her report on the HELP blog, including the participants’ evaluations.

It’s always good when we get positive feedback from the people we are helping. Here is what the principal of the Lamdon Senior Secondary School (who hosted Barbara’s seminar) had to say:

“Barbara Porter has left after the two weeks very successful workshop. She is a wonderful trainer who really makes the training very interesting, enjoyable and lively by using all kind of techniques. Myself and all my teachers are highly impressed with her devotion and love with her profession. Our teachers are highly benefited and learnt a lot of new teaching technique from her. I am sure that after the training all the teachers shall make complete new approach in dealing the students and teaching the taught in a very different way. I am personally very grateful for arranging the workshop with such a wonderful teacher.

All my teachers approached me with the request to have similar training in future for a longer period if possible. I can only convey their feelings and request to you for consideration in future also….Thank you very very much for your support to us and looking forward to have more volunteers and trainers from your organisation.”

Barbara is returning to Kalimpong and Gangtok in January/February 2010 to run more seminars. I am interested in using our money to provide services of this kind, and want to give greater priority to helping untrained local teachers to raise the standard of their teaching It’s less glamorous than building schools, but it has far greater long-term benefits.

Untied donations

In addition to the donors already mentioned in the previous section, we get donations not tied to the above-mentioned projects. Many thanks to all these donors, including:

• Deloitte LLP for their £410 which has doubled the money donated by their staff by way of sponsorship for the heroic trek that my son Alan and I undertook in Sikkim in October 2008.
• My ever generous brother Andy, and sister-in-law, Margaret, for having donated over £1,000 since I set up HELP in 2003.
• Our volunteers who, in addition to the fees that they dutifully pay (in effect, a compulsory donation), often continue to raise money for their schools after they have returned home. For example, Ann and Bob Summers, who have volunteered for us twice now, once in Ladakh two years ago and this year in Nepal, sent about 400 books to St. Pauls in Sikkim earlier this year. Melissa Aaron and Kevin Trainer have constructed a library at the Algarah primary school and are now devising fund-raising events to purchase books for it.
• The children of Newlaithes Junior School in Carlisle, where Ann Summers works, who raised the money to cover the postage for the books Ann donated to St. Paul’s. What’s more, they have sent us a donation of £238 to be used as we think fit.
• Last but not least, The Inland Revenue! You didn’t expect that did you? But they have sent me £4,500 under the GiftAid scheme for the last two financial years. This represents 28p for every £1 donated by those of you who are British tax-payers. So, well done you British taxpayers, who are, of course, the real heroes!

Volunteers

We recruited 18 volunteers this year (compared with 19 last year), three of whom are still on their assignments at the time of writing. And we already have three lined up for next year.

Unfortunately, this is not to say that 18 volunteers actually undertook their assignments. If last year was the year of visa problems and political unrest, this year was one of second thoughts! One of our recruits cancelled or at least postponed, and another disappeared without a word before going out to her assignment. Both were fully paid up. Home-sickness and love-sickness led to the premature abandonment of two more assignments.

Of those that actually made it to the end of their assignments, I am happy to say that the great majority had a wonderful experience, and HELP got some very flattering testimonials, which you can see in the blog. They not only thought well of us, but also had great personal experiences:

• Brilliant. Would do it again but hopefully for longer next time.
• We gained a real insight into how people in the area live, we made many new friends and learnt so many new things. Some parts were challenging, some upsetting and some truly amazing, but we wouldn’t change any of them for anything and we couldn’t recommend a placement at Lily Garden enough!
• Every moment is a challenge, but the experience is amazing!
• I had just a beautiful experience. Every which way you look at it!

Fortunately, the political agitation for an autonomous Gorkhaland that I reported on last year did not affect our volunteers this year. It still rumbles on though, and so we can expect more strikes and demonstrations.

It’s always good to hear about volunteers staying in touch with their schools, and even making return visits. Gill Williams is returning to the Lily Garden school this coming February, to do some more some more teaching. And after finishing her teacher training duties in Kalimpong and Gangtok in February, Barbara Porter will go to St. Paul’s at her own expense, and run an informal teacher training seminar for the teachers there.

The HELP sponsorship programme

Milan Tamang, Kathmandu

The sponsorship programme has reached a turning point this year. Until now we have been adding children of all ages to our list and finding sponsors for them. This year, for the first time, some of the children are leaving, or have left, the programme, either because they have reached the end of their schooling, or because they have left the district. In one case, a young girl has run away to get married. In a couple of cases, the children have passed their school leaving certificate, and want to go on to college. I am hoping to persuade their sponsors to extend their support to cover their higher education.

It is not just children that are dropping out. Occasionally sponsors do too, either for economic reasons, or because they have simply disappeared. In both cases, you, the readership of this newsletter, have responded quickly and generously, so that none of the children who have lost a sponsor have been abandoned. Many thanks to those of you who picked up the dropped batons.

Two sponsors met their sponsored children while in the region. If any other sponsor would like to visit the Himalayas and meet the child they are sponsoring, I will be pleased to help you make contact with the child’s guardian.

So where are we now? At the time of writing, we have thirty-six sponsors sponsoring fifty students. Five students dropped out of the programme during the year.

Volunteer initiated sponsorships

	We had the honour of having tea in the home of two of our sponsored children in Pokhara. The whole family, mother and three girls, sleep on one bed, and when their brother returns from Kathmandu, he also sleeps there.
The Paneru family

The total amount of money sent to India and Nepal in support of these sponsorship programmes amounted to £7,253 in our last financial year.

Odd jobs

Whenever I hear that any of you, whether you are volunteers, sponsors or donors, are going out to the region, I almost always ask you to undertake tasks for me, such as taking photos of sponsored children, passing on messages, updating information on the schools, or, in one case, checking up on a hospitalized volunteer. Many thanks to those of you who agreed to take these tasks on.

Fund-raising

My two attempts to raise money by arranging treks for people have come to naught. The trek advertised for this October elicited just one enquiry, but no takers at all. I won’t try again.

However, there is no reason why a personal charity challenge shouldn’t work if initiated by you. If you are thinking of doing something that challenges you, whether it’s a marathon, or parachute jump, or, indeed, a trek, then why not use it to raise funds for HELP? Alan and I raised a healthy sum in October 2008 by approaching friends and colleagues to sponsor us on our trek in Sikkim. All you need to do is to refer your friends and colleagues to the ‘donations’ page of our website (www.help-education.org/donations) to make their payment.

Everyclick.com

Every time you use Everyclick.com as your search engine, you can raise money for your favourite charity - like HELP for example! I calculated that if everyone on the mailing list used Everyclick instead of their current search engine, you would, between you, raise more than £1,000 for HELP. In fact, we have raised £40 by this method over the past two years! Thanks to the gallant band who helped us get there (including me!), but we could do so much better if many more of you got clicking. My experience suggests that 90% of my search needs can be met using Everyclick.com. I use Google for the rest. So why not make Everyclick your default search engine and help raise funds without any cost to you?

This is where to start: http://charities.everyclick.com/using-everyclick/search.xml

The Blog

If you would like to keep up-to-date with what is going on throughout the year, feel free to go to our blog!

Well, that’s it for this year. Many thanks for all your support and good wishes.

Merry Christmas to all of you, and a happy new year!

Jim Coleman
Director
Himalayan Education Lifeline Programme ]]> http://www.help-education.org/blog/newsletter-no-7-december-2008-november-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.help-education.org/blog/newsletter-no-6-2008/ http://www.help-education.org/blog/newsletter-no-6-2008/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:59:42 +0000 Jim Coleman http://www.help-education.org/blog/?p=106

Himalayan dawn

I’ll begin with the event that is freshest in my memory!

Charity trek in Sikkim (October-November 2008)

Good morning?

Knackered

As most of you know, no-one signed up to join me on this trek which I had thought would be a great way of raising funds for HELP. Well, as it turned out I wasn’t so wrong. Firstly, my eldest son Alan decided to join me, which was a boost to my rather deflated morale. Even better, we managed, between us, to raise £1280 thanks to the generosity of friends, relations and work colleagues. There may even be one or two more payments in the pipeline. Indeed, there was one mad friend, who shall remain nameless, who donated £500! Thanks Charles! And thanks to everyone else who helped me make this charity trek a success.

You wouldn’t have thought I was keen on trekking if you had been able to observe me. I found it hard going with lots of long, steep climbs, some bitterly cold nights, and, my nemesis, high altitude. There were times when we both swore we would never do such a trek again. But the scenery was fantastic, and neither of us wanted to be the first to give up! In the end, we made it to the bitter end!

The big day started at 3am and went on for another 11 hours. There are two ridges, with good views of Kanchenjunga, before you get to the Goecha La pass proper, and the great majority (more than 90% according to our guide) turn back at one of these points rather than push on to the pass, either because they are too shattered, or because their guides fool them into thinking that they have reached the pass when they haven’t. We’re pretty sure we were the only ones to make the pass that day. A Russian group, whose guide had had to accompany a client down the mountain to recover from altitude sickness, attached themselves to us, but, in spite of the piece of Kendal mint cake I gave them for sustenance, gave up at the first viewing point. So, dear sponsors, rest assured that we achieved our goal, and we suffered for it!

Goecha La pass conquered

I am not sure, at this stage, whether to try the charity trek idea again as a way of raising funds for HELP. Without a sufficent budget to engage in advertising in the national papers, in the manner of larger charities like Scope, I don’t think I can reach enough people to make it work well. However, Alan and I have shown that friends, relations and work colleagues will respond generously if you undertake a charity challenge on behalf of a charity.

If any of you do decide to do something that challenges you (it doesn’t have to be a trek), then please do think of using the opportunity to raise funds for HELP. I will give you as much support as I can. You can refer your supporters directly to our donations page, rather than to a specialist intermediary organisation which will deduct a fee for their services.

Donations

You don’t have to make me suffer before making a donation to HELP! My special thanks to Rosemary Watling, retiring head teacher of the Belle Vue Junior School, who passed on to me the £325 that her colleagues had collected for her retirement present. And indeed, thanks to all of you who made donations throughout the year, not least our volunteers.

Projects

St. Paul Nursery School (Sikkim)

Landslide

After the exertions of the trek, I visited a number of the schools supported by HELP in Sikkim and West Bengal as I could, and was able to see how the building works at St. Paul Nursery School (Sikkim) and the J.N. Memorial Public English were progressing. The former is now complete, and came in under budget. The last updated estimate was £22,000, but only £19,000 was needed in the end. However, there are problems with landslides, and the land between the school and the road below needs shoring up. I will need to find some money to help them do this. Landlsides are a constant damger in the Himalayas, and particularly in Sikkim which has a very heavy monsoon, and hardly any flat ground to build on. The accompanying photo gives you an idea of what can happen (this is not a picture of St. Paul’s by the way!)!

J.N. Memorial Public English school (Kalimpong)

The giving and receiving of gifts, especially money, is the cause of more embarrassment and confusion and mutual misunderstanding between us westerners and our Himalayan friends than any other difference I can think of between our two cultures. The JN Memorial Public English school was housed in a flimsy wooden structure, which was slowly sliding down the mountain. Fund-raising for a new building project was initiated by Anne Tallentire, mother of Becky Scott who volunteered at the school in 2006, and Alison Stephens, with help from the staff and pupils of Hilmarton primary school, which Alison’s son attends (many thanks to all of you!). The school’s website displays pictures and news of the JN Memorial school.

Two into one at the JN Memorial

The target for the building was of £7,000, which was the original estimate for the new structure, and by last summer, they had raised £4,000. I sent the money in instalments, and was very gratified to get a letter of thanks which stated that the work had been completed. Yet, on my recent visit, I saw that the building was far from complete. Each classroom was housing two class levels, as the accompanying pictures show. When I asked them why they had written to say that the building was complete, the answer was that they didn’t want to keep asking for money! We will resume the fund-raising in order to built a second storey on top of the structure already built.

Gyan Jhoti Primary School (Kalimpong)

This is another school that is benefiting from a link with a British school. Ann McGivern, the mother of volunteer Mairi McGivern who taught at the Gyan Jhoti school in 2007 has set up the link with Highfields School in Newark, and the staff and pupils there have been raising money for two new classrooms. Mairi went back to Kalimpong a few months ago, and did some teaching at the school, and took some photographs showing the new land that has been purchased for the proposed new classrooms.

It’s always good to hear about volunteers staying in touch with their schools, and even making return visits. Gill Williams returned this year to the Lily Garden school, where she had taught in 2006, and did some more teaching, and, after finishing her teacher training duties in Kalimpong and Gangtok (see below), Barbara Porter returned to St. Paul’s at her own expense, and ran an informal teacher training seminar for the teachers there.

Teacher Training (Kalimpong and Gangtok)

Barbara Porter’s seminars in Kalimpong and Gangtok last February went well, even if the number of participants was slightly less than she could have coped with, and strikes threatened to disrupt her programme (more of that below under ‘volunteers’), and forced her to abandon her comfortable accommodation for something rather less comfortable. Fortunately, she managed to complete her seminars without further mishap. Extracts from her report are on the HELP blog. I hope to be able to send her to Leh in Ladakh next September to do the same. The £1,200 plus that Alan and I have raised will go a long way towards covering the costs. In addition, it would be good to follow up this year’s seminars in Kalimpong and Gangtok, with a return visit, and I have asked Barbara to pencil in January 2010 for this. I am interested in using our money to provide services of this kind, and I will be giving greater priority to helping untrained local teachers to raise the standard of their teaching than to building works.

Volunteers

Compared to last year, when we were only able to send 11 volunteers, this year was a bumper year, with 19 volunteers going out. All have returned now, except one who is still working in his school in the Pokhara valley but due to leave before Christmas.

However, there have been a couple of problems this year which have detracted from what could have been the best year ever. The first problem is political unrest in the Nepali speaking districts of Darjeeling and Kalimpong, which belong to the Indian state of West Bengal. The recently formed Gorkha Mukti Morcha party has revived a long standing demand for a separate state of Gorkhaland, and this summer asked tourists to leave the district. Our volunteers in Sikkim and Kalimpong felt obliged to leave too since the only road out of the district was being blocked. The previous campaign in the ’80s  led to the setting up of the Gorkha Hill Council, with limited autonomy for the region. Although it is unlikely that the GMM will achieve an independent state, a greater degree of autonomy is a possibility. We’ll have to keep our fingers crossed that the current troubles do not harm our programme next year.

The second problem arose when an attempt by one of our volunteers to extend her Sikkim permit beyond the permitted span of eight weeks alerted the Foreigner Registration Office in Gangtok to the presence of volunteers at the DPCA. Although foreigners are not supposed to work on tourist visas, even if they are volunteering and paying for their upkeep, in practice the authorities have not, until now,  made an issue of the matter. The alternative is cumbersome and, in the case of Sikkim, it can take a few weeks to secure the appropriate visa. From  now on, applicants for Sikkim will need to apply well in advance of their planned visit.

Kanchenjunga from the Goecha La pass

Apart from these upsets, most of the other assignments seemed to go very well, although one family (two adults with their two dependent adolescent children) reported that their time at the Lamdon Senior Secondary School in Leh was adversely affected by medical problems. They also reported that the requirement to prepare students for exams three weeks into their stay meant that they could not make the most of their assignment. Another volunteer felt that the school closed so often for holidays that she felt underemployed.

This kind of feedback is vital to the effective operation of our volunteer programme, and most of our volunteers are very conscientious about returning the online feedback form at the end of their assignments. This helps me fine-tune the programme, and also to provide up-to-date briefing for new volunteers.

DPCA school kitchens

Volunteers remain central to HELP’s activities. The schools and their children benefit greatly from the fresh approaches and enthusiasm of the volunteers (and also, as some principals have told me, from the example they set to the local teachers with regard to time-keeping and attendance). In addition, much of the money that HELP has at its disposal comes from the donations made by the volunteers when they sign up. Indeed, they often undertake tasks beyond the call of duty such as taking photos of sponsored children, monitoring HELP funded projects, inspecting schools that have approached us for assistance and so on. And, as reported above, they can inspire friends and relations to raise funds to benefit the schools they have worked at. Without the volunteers, and their contributions, we would be able to achieve very little.

What effect the current economic crisis has on recruitment next year remains to be seen. January and February are the top recruitment months. With salaried jobs being difficult to find at present, it may be that volunteering becomes an attractive option. VSO reports that their own recruitment is up for this reason.

Sponsorships

We now have 40 sponsors sponsoring 56 children (compared with a total of 20 sponsors sponsoring 28 children last year), so the programme has grown fast; faster than expected. These are sponsorships that HELP is directly managing. In addition, there are five sponsorships initiated and managed by volunteers, with payments being made through us. Many thanks to all our sponsors for the long-term commitment they have made. These payments make a big difference to the families lucky enough to benefit from them.

I always try to meet and take photos of the sponsored children on my visits to India and Nepal, and on this occasion I was able to take photos of many of the children living in or around Kalimpong, and in Sikkim.

A sponsored child

Bhutan

Yami (my wife) and I visited Bhutan for a few days before returning to the UK. I can recommend it to any of you interested in visiting a quiet, untouristy corner of the Himalayas, with a unique architecture and culture. The government restricts tourist numbers by levying a hefty fee per tourist per day, so it isn’t a cheap option!

Everyclick.com

Every time you use Everyclick.com as your search engine, you can raise money for your favourite charity - like HELP for example! In an email I sent out last January, I calculated that if everyone on the mailing list used Everyclick instead of their current search engine, you would, between you, raise more than £1000 for HELP. In fact, we have raised £20 by this method over the past year! Thanks to the gallant band who helped us get there (including me!), but we could do so much better if many more of you got clicking. My experience suggests that 90% of my search needs can be met using Everyclick.com. I use Google for the rest. So why not make Everyclick your default search engine and help raise funds without any cost to you?

This is where to start: http://charities.everyclick.com/using-everyclick/search.xml

The Blog

If you would like to keep up-to-date with what is going on throughout the year, feel free to go to our blog!

Merry Christmas to all of you, and a happy new year!

Jim Coleman
Director
Himalayan Education Lifeline Programme

]]> http://www.help-education.org/blog/newsletter-no-6-2008/feed/ 0 http://www.help-education.org/blog/newsletter-no-5-2007/ http://www.help-education.org/blog/newsletter-no-5-2007/#comments Sun, 02 Dec 2007 13:35:43 +0000 Jim Coleman http://www.help-education.org/blog/?p=6 Charitable status

Irene Beck and pupils

Gaining charitable status was probably the most significant event to take place this year. Until January 2007, when we became registered as a charity, HELP had been run as a not-for-profit company. Gratifyingly, the Charity Commission approved our application without requesting any change in the way we operate. We remain a limited company, but now with charitable status. I am pleased to report that I have recently received a cheque for £1,672 from Inland Revenue under the GiftAid scheme, which represents a tax refund on payments made since 2003 by our taxpaying UK benefactors. That’s got to be good news!

Inspection visits

February 2007: Inspection visits are always the highlight of the year for me, since they give me an excuse to revisit the Himalayas! This time, my wife, Yamima, and I escaped the British winter for a month in January and sunned ourselves in Kerala before going up north for the serious HELP stuff in February, and finding ourselves back in winter and even snow.

Sikkimese boy

First day at school

We visited most of the schools we are supporting in West Bengal and Sikkim, which enabled us to update ourselves on developments at the schools since our last visit, and to remind the schools that I am not just a voice on the telephone, or a name at the bottom of an email.

We also managed to get to Dehra Dun in Uttarkhand (as Uttaranchal is now known), and I was able to meet, for the first time, my contacts there. (My son Alan had made first contact in 2005). We tried to drive up the mountain to the old British hill station of Moussourie, but were driven back by snow on the first attempt! We just made it to the edge of the town on the second day, and had to make our way into the town on foot.

October 2007: Not content with all that, Yami and I also visited Ladakh (which Alan had also first surveyed on his 2005 visit). Fortunately, two HELP volunteers were still in their schools, so I was able to take some photos of them in context. I was very impressed by their commitment, enthusiasm, and love for Ladakh and its people, and also by the high regard their hosts held them in.

Of course I had to take the opportunity to do a trek when I was in Ladakh. I can highly recommend it too those of you who enjoy trekking. For more information about this trip, visit Inspection Visits  in this blog

Charity trekking

Ladakh

Indeed, trekking in the Himalayas seems to be a tourist activity that’s in tune with the spirit of HELP. Many of our volunteers take the opportunity to go on a trek while they are in the Himalayas, but not everyone who wants to trek wants to volunteer. I have therefore teamed up with The Mountain Company to run a trek in Sikkim next October. Hopefully, we will find enough people to join up and make a contribution of £300 to HELP’s donations fund. Needless to say, I shall be joining the group.

The Goecha La trek is a beautiful trek that starts in sub-tropical forests, passes through pasturelands of grazing yaks and reaches the Goecha La pass, at just under 5,000m, opposite the eastern flank of Mt Kanchenjunga. There are many other impressive mountains seen on this trek including Kabru, Rathong and Pandim. The views are stunning. On the way to the start of the trek, the group will also get the chance to stay a night with a Sikkimese family in Kewzing, and visit the village school which is being supported by HELP.

If you would like more information about this trip, and find out how to book, visit The Mountain Company’s website.

Harvest time

Volunteers

Volunteer numbers were well down this year, which was disappointing. Only eleven (one of whom is just about to go out to Nepal) were placed in 2007, compared to 20 in 2006. I am not sure what the reasons for this drop are. I thought it may be due to the falling value of the US dollar, but reducing the fees by £50 didn’t seem to make any impact.

Another disappointing phenomenon this year was the high percentage of paid and signed up volunteers who dropped out before arriving at their school. In all, four pulled out. In one case, the volunteer had to return home for family reasons, which is just one of those things that can’t be helped. One of the others was already resident in India, and decided to stay where she was. The remaining two just decided that they preferred to join other non-HELP projects, informing me just a day or two before the schools were expecting them. This was highly embarrassing, since we had to break our promise to the schools concerned. I suspect that people concerned are not thinking about the consequences of their withdrawal on the credibility of our programme. Why this should have been such a problem this year is a mystery.

Ladakhi boys

The shortage of volunteers meant that majority of the schools we are trying to help did not get a volunteer this year. Fortunately, there are signs that the coming year is going to be much better. There are already three signed up, and more in the pipeline, and this is still very early in the recruitment year.

Once again, Simon Forwood deserves a special mention. It seems that Simon has been volunteering for us continuously ever since we opened up shop in 2003, with just a break in 2005 to get trained as a teacher, and another to get married, a happy event that took place in Nepal this May. He and Manila have had to hang on in Nepal and subsequently in India, since then, pending completion of all the Nepalese paperwork, and they are likely to have to stay in India for another six months until Manila can get her Australian residence permit. However, I can’t say I feel too sorry about these bureaucratic delays, because he and Manila devoted two months of their time at the PNG High School in Gangtok, where he installed some computers he’d imported (see ‘projects’ below), and Manila undertook some nursing duties. Perhaps I should write to the Australian authorities to hold them up in India even longer!

Talking of marriage, HELP seems to have become as much a marriage bureau as an aid agency. It’s not just Simon who has hooked up while on assignment with HELP, Rachel Marsden also got married since the last Newsletter with a colleague of hers in Ladakh. Yami and I were really pleased to meet her and Dushant in Kerala last January. They are now both back in the UK and living nearby. Who is next?

The volunteers remain central to HELP’s activities. The schools and their children benefit greatly from the fresh approaches and enthusiasm of the volunteers (and also, as some principals have told me, from the example they set to the local teachers with regard to time-keeping and attendance). In addition, much of the money that HELP has at its disposal comes from the donations made by the volunteers when they sign up. Indeed, they often undertake tasks beyond the call of duty such as taking photos of sponsored children, monitoring HELP funded projects, inspecting schools that have approached us for assistance and so on. All of this makes it possible to run HELP without having to pay people to do these things. Without the volunteers, and their contributions, HELP would be able to achieve very little. So thanks to all of you.

Projects

Inside a traditional Ladakhi house

We now have the following projects to find funds for:

• St. Paul Primary school building project: I was able to see the new building in February, and I was pleased to see that the school had just moved in, so it’s up and running at last. They still need to add a second floor to accommodate the boarders, after which the project will be complete. This year I have been able to give them a grant of £1,200.
• The JN Memorial school building project: This little school is housed in a flimsy wooden structure, which is slowly sliding down the mountain. The building project has been initiated by Alison Stephens, a friend of Becky Scott who was volunteering at the school last year. Alison and Becky’s mother, Anne Tallentire, have been raising funds for a new building, and have just passed over £1,700 which I shall be sending to the school shortly. I shall also be digging into HELP funds to help things along. The target is £7,000. In addition, they have established a pen pal scheme between the JN Memorial children and a primary school that Alison’s son goes to.
• The Social Public School, Pokhara, Nepal: HELP has provided grants over the past two years in response to requests submitted by volunteers. Last year we contributed £500 towards the building of a Science Lab which was the brain-child of Susan Foster. This year we contributed £150 towards the costs of setting up a library, which Brittany Sears has set up.
• SASA Academy, Uttarkhand, India: This school has requested £4,250 to build two new classrooms. We have made an initial contribution of £500.
  

  Irena Arambasic and pupils

• Computers for Indian Schools: This is a project established and run by Simon Forwood with assistance from HELP’s representatives in India. This year he has imported from Australia,and set up, 20 decommissioned computers for 9 schools in Sikkim and West Bengal. For more details see the project website We have given Simon a grant of £500 as a small contribution towards his costs.
• Teacher Training: Barbara Porter, a free-lance teacher trainer who taught at St. Paul primary school in 2006, has agreed to run two concurrent seminars in Kalimpong and Gangtok at the end of next February, just before the new school year. The aim is to improve standards of English teaching by introducing local English teachers to new methodologies. Many thanks to Himalayan Kingdoms for their £500 contribution to this event. I have used their trekking services twice now, and can recommend them without reservation.
• In addition to these projects, our volunteers and their families make direct donations to their schools. For example, Ann McGivern, mother of volunteer Mairi McGivern, has raised £251 for the Gyan Jyoti school in Kalimpong, which wants to build two more classrooms. She has also set up a pen pal link between the Gyan Jyoti school and the school she teaches at.

In addition to these sums paid out by HELP, our volunteers have also, as part of their commitment when signing up, made personal contributions (£50 or more), directly to their schools. This money is spent on items agreed jointly by the volunteers and the school principals, and include books, and stationery, games equipment, computers and printers, and also repairs to and decoration of school buildings. Altogether, these small sums amounted to approximately £1000 this year.

Sponsorship

Sponsored children

We now have twenty sponsors sponsoring 28 children (compared with a total of ten sponsors sponsoring sixteen children last year), so the programme is steadily growing. Many thanks to all our sponsors for the long-term commitment they have made. These payments make a big difference to the families lucky enough to benefit from them.

To save on international transfer charges, I generally make payments once a year in November, in time for the new school year. £3177 of our sponsorship funds have been handed over this year.

Ex-volunteers have set up their own sponsorship schemes to help children in the schools they taught at. Why don’t those of you who are doing this give us an update on how these schemes are going via the HELP Network?

The Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Awards 2007

Thanks to all of you who nominated HELP for this award. Unfortunately, I have just heard that we didn’t win. I’m not sure what it takes to win these awards, but on the basis of the ratio between funds earmarked for running costs and those marked for projects, and of the transparency of our operation, HELP should have won! Naturally!

The Future

The aim has to be to recruit enough volunteers so that all the schools on our database get at least one a year, and also to raise funds for the projects we have committed ourselves to. The charity trek and the teacher training seminars are new ventures, and I will report on these next year.

Merry Christmas to all of you, and a happy new year!

Jim Coleman
Director
Himalayan Education Lifeline Programme