Hi everyone!

Thanks for taking a moment to visit our Nepal 2012 project page!

We, seven student volunteers will be living and working in Labernager village, a small community of roughly 1800 people, over a period of six weeks.  There will be several stages to our development project at the Rashtriya Primary School, which currently holds 188 pupils. We will construct two classrooms in order to create extra learning space and accommodate increasing student numbers, along with furniture and a fence (to keep out panthers we are warned!). Also, in the aim of promoting basic health and sanitation in the community, we will help improve toilet facilities and develop a deep boring water system in the school in order to provide a consistent and clean supply of drinking water. We will also have the opportunity to teach basic classes on environmental awareness and its effect on sanitation and humans generally. 

Rashtriya is a government school currently operating under extremely basic facilities. Whilst it is open to any child in the community, the majority of its students are from the most disadvantaged sectors of society -100 students are from the untouchable caste- so our project is targeted at children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The school has extremely poor toilet facilities which create health risks, particularly diarrhoea, for the students and teachers. With such water borne diseases rife, the risks of these will be greatly lessened with our work on improving toilet facilities and the installation of a deep boring water system will create a clean water supply. Currently the school does not have enough access to water for drinking, cleaning and cooking purposes during the dry season and it relies on a well which is a long walk away. In turn, valuable education time is wasted on travelling to collect water especially when the amount of water carried back is never sufficient for the needs of the whole school. Thus, the in-school water system will not only provide cleaner water but also closer and more conveniently. Such facilities should increase attendance so that the additional space that we create will help the school achieve its aim of upgrading to lower secondary school and allow these disadvantaged students to continue their education further.

We will be working alongside community workers, both skilled and unskilled, building the various parts of the project. In order to carry this out we need a range of different building materials such as cement, bricks, zinc which PSD will provide on receiving our funding. We will also be working with the school teachers in order to provide lessons on health care. Such partnership between us and the beneficiary communities will not only be an indispensable source of labour but allow for a large cultural exchange and international understanding. Indeed we are excited to begin learning Nepalese before we stay in family homes in the community. 

 

With your help we can achieve a sustainable development for the school and community. Leading from our initial work, the school will be able to turn their uncultivated land into a paddy using the deep boring water system. This will in turn generate a regular income for the school’s maintenance and improvement, further subsidised by a grant of 40,000 rupees per year per student from the Nepalese government. This should raise perceptions of education and, along with the new classrooms to fill, will increase attendance and allow the school to expand to a higher level of education, potentially benefitting the whole community.

We are extremely enthusiastic about our project and we hope that, after reading this, you are too!!!!!! :)))

Thanks for your support,

Kasia, Ross, Mimi, Mai, Andrew, Maddy and James :)