Nepal Revisited – Day 22

This morning Heather, Richard & I headed to Child Nepal to confirm some details about our upcoming trip for a monitoring and evaluation visit of a couple of Temporary Learning Centres (TLC’s) that have been built in the Sindhupalchok District. While we are there next week we are going to officially hand over the TLC’s to the school and present the students with a school bag and some stationary items.

We needed to get the longitude and latitude coordinates of the schools as accurate as possible, so that we can organise the helicopter landing zones and book the flight to include time on the ground at each school.

Once we had got the information we required we headed to the MAF booking office to book and confirm the flight details. This means another early morning visit to the airport next Monday (them’s the breaks).

We had intended to meet up with VIN at a shelter cluster meeting in Jawalakhel, but unfortunately the dates had got mixed up on the calendar and the meeting wasn’t on. Just as well as we were running about 1/2hr late as it was…

Instead we headed to Shabri for lunch and had a sizzling walnut chocolate brownie. Yesterday they didn’t have any, but the waitress advised me that she would make sure that they had them available for today. And they did, absolutely divine!

After lunch we needed to get some stationary supplies, mainly paper for the printer, so we headed to the local markets. This is obviously the place to go as the amount of people was almost stifling. Even with all the fuel issues going on shops were full to over flowing and cheap in comparison to other places we had been to in the past.

After about an hour wandering the streets to see what else was available we headed back to the office to do some more paperwork, filing and reporting.

Tomorrow we start interviews for a local administrative assistant / translator to assist the project team as they go forward.

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Nepal Revisited – Day 21

This morning Richard, Heather & I headed into Jawalakhel so that we could introduce Richard to a couple of our partners; Mountain Child & Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF). After this Richard & I headed to the Humanitarian Staging Area which is located near the airport for a Logistics Cluster Meeting.

The two key items on the agenda were the fuel shortage and road closures and its affect on agencies. The fuel shortage is really staring to hinder the humanitarian aid effort, as organisations find it increasingly difficult to obtain petrol and diesel for their vehicles; especially for monitoring and evaluation, and distributions of much needed materials. (Refer to this article posted yesterday ’26 Oct’ in the Kathmandu Post.)

Also their are increasing concerns around the flow on effect to essential services such as hospitals, water treatment plants, sewerage plants etc. Many of the small businesses and cafes, restaurants and bars seem to be closed at the moment, some of which is due to the festival season. But the fuel shortage which includes LPG is obviously having a roll on effect as well. Many small stall owners and shops are running out of essential products and are closing for the time being as well.

While we were at the meeting Heather went and did some groceries and after the logistics meeting we headed across the road to the MAF booking office to confirm if they could fly to Sindhupalchok as we are intending to go and do a monitoring visit next week to check on some Temporary Learning Centres.

In the afternoon we spent some time catching up on paperwork and planning for the remainder of this week and into next week.

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