HELP is a hugely admirable organisation in that it focuses much more on those actually requiring help, as opposed to the volunteers. Other organisations I have seen are set up as charity holiday camps, catering for the volunteer’s every need and providing a very simple, pleasant, but ultimately false experience. Volunteering with HELP is the real deal. (Cathal Hardiman, Mount Star Academy, West Bengal:2011)
We are still looking for volunteer teachers for schools in Leh, the capital of Ladakh, this summer!
Our first volunteer to go to the Shree lali Gurans primary school in Chitre, a village on the Annapurna Circuit trekking trail, will be arriving there within the next few days. It’s one of just a few schools that our volunteers have to trek to.
The strike called at the start of the year by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, which blocked all traffic between Siliguri and Darjeeling and Kalimpong, was called off in mid-February. This was a relief for us, since our first volunteer of the year was unable to reach their school. We now have a volunteer in place in the Gyan Jyoti school outside Kalimpong, and we are hopeful that our programme can run without further disruption from now on.
One of our volunteers has had to abandon her teaching assignment in the village of Mungpoo because of a strike called by the Gorkha Jankukti Morcha which is campaigning for a separate Gorkhaland. She and her husband were bussed down from Darjeeling to Siliguri, at the foot of the Himalayas, by the police yesterday just before they were due to travel to Mungpoo.
The ‘India Blooms News Service’ reports the following
Darjeeling/Siliguri/Jalpaiguri, Feb 11 (IBNS) Life remained shut for the third consecutive day in the hills of Darjeeling on Friday while scarcity of essential commodities became acute as the indefinite strike, called by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, continued.
Uncertainty continued to prevail in the three hill-subdivisions of Darjeeling, Kurseong and Kalimpong besides the Terai and Dooras in Jalpaiguri district of north Bengal over recurring clashes between pro-Gorkahnd and anti-Gorkhaland supporters and vandalising government property over the past three days.
The shutdown has been called protesting the February 8 police firing at Sipchu in Jalpaiguri in which two Morcha supporters were killed.
Transport movement to Sikkim and rest of the northeast continued to be affected.
The government has clamped prohibitory orders in several places of Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri districts to prevent rival forces from organizing rallies.
The GJM has been attempting to organise rally in support of ‘Gorkhaland’ and highlight the police firing, while the tribals of the plains and Bangla O Bangla Bhasha Banchao Committee members are opposing division of West Bengal.
An anti-Gorkhaland march to the hills, ‘Darjeeling Chalo’, was prevented by police on Thursday by detaining about 150 participants at the Tenzing Norgay bus terminus in Siliguri.
Life has almost collapsed in the hills with no vehicles plying, government offices remaining shut, business coming to a halt and stocks of ration dwindling fast with no supply coming from the plains.
The silence prevailing in the area was occasionally broken by the screech of security vehicles as the Border Security Force and Central Reserve Police Force jawans intensified patrolling.
Schools along NH 55 between Siliguri and Sukna remained open today as the Morcha allowed students to travel only in school vehicles.
The GJM said said it would allow outstation students, appearing for board examinations, but the vehicles carrying them must have ‘on exam duty’ stickers pasted on them.
But inadequate logistical support make the school authorities doubtful about the exams being held successfully.
Several nationalised banks, which are the custodians of question papers, are shut due to the strike.
The institutions have requested boards to allow an exemption and permit the main exam centres in each area to keep the question papers.
The ISC practical exams in science subjects are scheduled to start on Monday and many outstation students have not been able to return to their schools because of the strike.
Around 500 students are expected to sit for the ISC practical exams.
Jalpaiguri district magistrate Bandana Yadav refused to give permission for a GJM rally, proposed to be taken towards Jaigon on Friday.
The administration would not give any permission to anyone for holding public meeting or a rally at this situation after Sipchu violence, she said.
Over the past 15 days there have been attacks on humans by wild animals in the Tehri area of Uttarakhand, and two incidents involved children being supported by the Serve and share Association which runs the SASA Academy - one of the schools we support.
The first incident involved one of the brothers of a sponsored child. As he went outside in order to go upstairs, a leopard attacked him. It held onto his thigh and was pulling him away, but the boy was fortunate enough to able to cling onto the solar panel rod outside his house. He shouted and people came out to rescue him.
The second child, a 3 year old girl, was not so fortunate. She was sitting and eating in the ground floor room in front of the open door when a leopard just walked in and pulled the girl away in full view of the mother and vanished into the night. The body was found next day half eaten.
On 27th Jan one of the SASA teachers was attacked by a wild boar while walking home. She was rushed to hospital and had 9 stitches in her arm and thigh.
The Forest Depertment managed to shoot a leopard, but it is not certain that this was the cuplrit.
All this reminds me of Briton called Jim Corbett who spent the inter-war years responding to requests from villagers to help them eliminate man-eating leopards and tigers. Whatever we might think nowadays of the rights or wrongs of killing wild animals, the villagers were very grateful to him and a national park which protects these wild animals has been established in his name. My wife and I have read his books and last year visited a museum dedicated to him. We even went on a safari in the park, and although we saw tiger pug marks, we were not lucky enough to see the elusive creatures.
Volunteer recruitment is going well this year with six already signed up and several more in the pipeline. This is encouraging after a rather poor year in 2010 which saw only six volunteers placed at schools in the whole year.
The first volunteer of 2011 has now started at his school in Nepal, and the others will be going out to the Himalayas over the next 5 months.
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| The view from the tent |
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December 2009 - November 2010
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:
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“Part of the town has been destroyed by the mud slides and I have been helping there and at the one hospital which is still open as the school has been closed for the last few days. Everyone got evacuated on Friday night so we had to spend the night outside on the top of the mountain which was an experience. The entrance to my guest house got flooded so I have been staying with friends up nearer the top of the mountains for a few days but the river looked like it had gone down a bit today so hopefully I will be able to move back soon. I think one of the teachers is missing and a pupil so hopefully they will be alright. ……. I think that food supplies are running out so I am having to live on eggs and bread at the moment and I have stocked up on water just in case.” |
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.
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| Doing homework under tarpaulin (Uttarakhand) |
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| Monsoon damage in Uttarakhand |
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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.
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| The aftermath of the cloudburst in Ladakh |
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| Demolishing a damaged house in Choklamsar, Ladakh |
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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?
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| The Himalayas |
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The following HELP-nominated projects receive financial help from both HELP’s general funds, and donations from HELP’s friends:
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.
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.
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.
We have sent £500 to this state school in Pokhara, Nepal, to buy books for their library.
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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.
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| Teacher training workshop |
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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.
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.
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| Monastery school students |
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| Phyang monastery |
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Flood relief in UttarakhandIn 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
Untied donationsIn 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:
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| Going to school in Uttarakhand |
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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.
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 familyTo 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.
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| Gokarna Pathak |
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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.
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| Alan and Jim Coleman on trek! |
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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.
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.
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
Think of the Himalayas, and you don’t iimmediately think of Uttarakhand, if at all. Nepal springs to mind, and maybe Sikkim and Bhutan. But the Indian state of Uttarakhand has everything that those more familiar places have in terms of scenery, and it has unique features such as the beautiful hill station of Nainital, with its spectacular lake, and in the Himalayan foothills, it boasts of two of Hinduism’s most sacred resorts: Haridwar and Rishikesh, on the banks of the Ganges.
My son, Alan, and I went on an eight day trek in Uttarakhand in October, and fell in love with the place. The advantage of trekking in a lesser known region is that you have the trail pretty much to yourself. We passed through villages many miles from any road, and encountered villagers for whom a foreigner is still a novelty.
It was a demanding trek, with many very steep climbs, but very rewarding. It was a fund-raising trek on behalf of the Himalayan Education Lifeline Programme (HELP)
The view from the tent
The Times of India reported the following on 23 October 2010:-
LEH: As an unforgiving winter waits to descend on the mountainous desert of Ladakh, its people face the grim possibility of spending the bitter months without a proper roof on their heads. Having suffered due to the August cloudburst, residents of Leh’s many villages have been banking on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s word that all houses destroyed during the calamity would be built before the onset of winter. It’s been over two months since that promise, and hope is fading away.
Relief work in the flood-affected areas is moving slowly, and those holed up in camps say the cold months ahead could be even more unbearable than the cloudburst. With minimum temperature dipping to as low as minus 30-40 degrees celsius during extremely biting days, Leh winters are harsh for even those furnished with heaters and ‘bukharis’.
In Choglamsar - one of the worst-affected by flashfloods - natives are busy rebuilding their houses and lives. Most led simple lives, with thought of such catastrophes not even crossing their minds. But that August night changed all that.
Tsering Dolma and her husband Chhering Wangdus, a landlord, had to take a small dwelling unit on rent because they say the tent was too cold for their three little children. “We’ve been given Rs 1.5 lakh for rehabilitation,” said Tsering, as she prepares the cement mixture. With the family’s fields too ruined, Chhering fears that they would soon run out of their meager savings. “If we manage to construct the house on time, we’ll be able to save on the rent,” he added.
Gya also shared his worry about rehabilitation work suffering as migrant labourers would return home by the end of this month. “Nothing is being done to keep them back,” he claimed.
However, deputy commissioner T Angchuk, who was recently asked to proceed on leave in view of the elections to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, Leh, said, “A major part of the Prime Minister’s Rs 125 crore relief package has been earmarked for rehabilitation and ex gratia compensation.” Quoting official figures, he said 234 people, including six foreigners, had lost their lives in the cloudburst and 68 others were missing. “Our survey has found that while 688 houses were destroyed, 690 were partially damaged,” he added. With majority of residents losing their only source of income in the form of agricultural land, the DC said reclamation was also a priority.
“Close to 600 hectare land has to be reclaimed at a cost of Rs 18 crore,” he added. Estimates for the same, he said, had been sent to the Centre after a panel of experts had prepared its report on the damages. “Besides this, NGOs have played a major role in relief operations,” Angchuk added.
Claiming that the process of rehabilitation was on track, tourism minister Nawang Rigzin Jora said, “In Solar Colony, work is on to built the dwelling units up to the plinth level before winter. As many as 450 prefabricated structures would be provided by the Union ministry of tourism and housing and urban poverty alleviation.” Though Jora asserted that these structures consisting of one bedroom and bathroom would be ready by November 15 in the worst-case scenario, those living in Himank relief camp doubted the claims.
Sonam Angmo, who is living in one of the tents along with two young children, said, “We were promised Rs 2 lakh but I haven’t got a single penny. My husband is in Bihar and I have to construct the house alone.” Her immediate priority is to arrange a heating apparatus for their home, when it comes up.
In Sabu village — once a model village under the PM’s programme — where rubble still lies strewn as it did two months ago, Sangborma, a middle-aged homemaker, complained that the government had done nothing to improve their lot. “Our lives have changed forever,” she despaired.
For 35-year-old Stanzin Dolma, who lost her daughter in the cloudburst, winter seems to have come soon enough. “Water has already begun freezing in pipes during morning hours. It’s unbearably cold in the tent and nights are especially gloomy. I’m waiting for the compensation that is to be deposited in my bank account,” she added. Stanzin is staying in Himank relief camp, the biggest such quarter set up by Army after the cloudburst, and where every house has a sad tale to tell. NGOs have provided bathing cubicles and toilets in the area, where chilly evenings leave everybody huddled together in makeshift canvas structures.
Though children have returned to school, they haven’t been able to understand the nightmare that has befallen them. Parents say most of them have unending questions about what happened that night, and why, in such cold weather, they have only a thin piece of fabric above their heads, instead of the warm comfort of home.
Read more: Roof of the world awaits warm cover - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Roof-of-the-world-awaits-warm-cover/articleshow/6796380.cms#ixzz13fbNB0RW
