Newsletters

We all need children’s laughter to cheer us up at this difficult time!

As you might have guessed, this has definitely not been a vintage year for our programme! Travel to and from Nepal and India has been restricted, so we haven’t been able to visit our projects, or run our volunteer programme. On the bright side, our sponsorship programme has continued, and, with your generous support, we have been helping our adopted schools survive during the lockdown.

2019 has been a much better year for volunteer recruitment. It has also been good for fund-raising, thanks to the generosity of our friends who responded generously to our playground appeal. Find out what we’ve been up to this year!

My indefatigable and estimable colleague, Barbara Porter, who runs our volunteer programme, and doubles up as our teacher trainer, has just returned to the UK from an arduous five week visit to the Himalayas, including Ladakh, Nepal and Uttarakhand.…

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So here we are, in our 16^th year, still doing our best to make a difference to the lives of young people in poor Himalayan communities in India and Nepal. We can be proud of what we have achieved with your help over these years, with new school buildings and classrooms constructed with your donations, young students being helped through their education with your sponsorship money, and standards of English in village schools being raised through the efforts of our volunteer teachers, and our teacher trainer, Barbara Porter.…

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This newsletter marks our 15^th birthday! I never thought when I set HELP up in 2002, with the indispensable assistance of my family, that it would still be up and running 15 years later. I hope you will agree that it has been a worthwhile effort.

We redesigned our website this year. If you haven’t seen it, do go and check it out and let us know what you think of it.

The on-going demand for a separate state for the Nepali-speaking regions of West Bengal flared up earlier this year in a prolonged strike in Darjeeling and Kalimpong and surrounding areas.…

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Another year has passed. The completion of our 10 year anniversary last year marked an appropriate time to review our programme and re-orientate it where necessary. Barbara Porter, one of my fellow directors, has just returned from her first inspection visit:

Barbara with local teachers

Barbara Porter started out as a HELP volunteer in Sikkim and since then has run teacher training seminars in Kalimpong, Leh and Pokhara for local teachers.

She spent three weeks this autumn in Ladakh and Nepal visiting old contacts and the schools we have been supporting, meeting as many sponsored children as possible, ferreting out new schools that would benefit from our programme, and making new contacts.…

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