750,000 litres of fuel distributed to private vehicles

Over the past couple of days it has been fascinating to see the lack of cars, buses, trucks and motorbikes moving about on the roads. There have been long queues lined up on the sides of the roads however.

Yesterday it was astounding to see the amount of motorbikes lined up for miles as they waited for a fuel ration of 5 litres per motorbike.

The following article was published in the Kathmandu Post yesterday (13/10/2015):

Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) distributed 750,000 litres of fuel to the private vehicles in the Kathmandu Valley on Tuesday. Some 600,000 litres of petrol and 150,000 litres of diesel were provided by the NOC to 125 petrol stations across the Valley, according to Spokesperson of the Corporation, Deepak Baral

The state oil monopoly had ceased providing fuel to private vehicles for the past two weeks given the acute shortage of fuel in the country. The vehicles were playing on the road since Monday in hope of receiving the petroleum products rationed by the NOC.

Spokesperson Baral shared that not all the vehicles queued in a long line received the petroleum products due to the limited availability of the petro products. Motorcycles were provided five litres of fuel whereas four-wheelers received 15 litres.

The NOC is preparing to make available fuel to more of the private vehicles tomorrow until the import of this essential fuel comes in adequate quantity. The distribution of LPG gas would not take place until the Birgunj check point opens, according to NOC.

So hopefully over the next few days as approximately two million people head out of Kathmandu to their respective villages to celebrate the beginning of Bada Dashain images such as these will become less and less, as the fuel distributions become more commonplace.

(Bada Dashain is the most widely celebrated Hindu festival in the country.)

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Nepal Revisited – Days 5 & 6

The past couple of days have again been spent working through the administration requirements of sorting and filing of paperwork, reporting and organising meetings to be on the same day, so that we can conserve fuel.

As far as the reporting goes after these past two days I can honestly say I am almost there – hurrah! I reckon I am about 90% there. We have sent a message out to try and get additional information from previous teams just to show that we have some records etc. So by the end of this week I should have been able to complete this reconciliation project that has been quite a mission in and of itself.

Every now and again to get some fresh air so to speak we have dropped tools and headed down the road or around the block for a walk, and Sunday was no different. Apart from the fact that today we decided to head into Jawalakhel, just to see how far it was…

In the process we found out where the MAF & Mountain Child offices were which we need to go to on Tuesday. It took us about 45mins to walk into Jawalakhel, much of the first half of the walk was downhill. When we got there we grabbed a drink at one of the many cafe’s and coffee shops, then had a look around the area. After grabbing lunch we headed back to the house, which took us a bit longer, but not too much.

In the afternoon I tried getting hold of family at home, our internet has been quite spasmodic these past few days, eventually getting hold of Annette at night (her time). It was good to catch up as she heads to a conference in Wellington tomorrow for a few days looking at church growth.

We celebrated MJ’s birthday (which she had kept very quiet) by going to what has become our usual haunt, which is just around the corner and from memory all of us had a reasonably early night – must have been the walk.

The following day had a very similar pattern, although this time the walk was only around the block where we stumbled across a land block of arable land in the middle of the housing estate which had fields of rice which some were harvesting for the upcoming festival.

In the afternoon I even managed to spend some time in the afternoon doing some sermon preparation for the sermon series I am doing upon my return to Invercargill, looking at ‘The Power of the Whisper’ which is a book by Bill Hybels which I finished earlier this year and has been resonating within me for the past three or four months.

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