We recently sponsored the kit for this football team in Pokhara.
Above is a photograph of one of the schools we have helped build - Peace Garden Secondary School in Khokana, Lalitpur. As you can see everyone is in school uniform. These are children from very poor families, whose mothers work in the fields and are uneducated...The complete uniform costs about £8 we contribute towards this cost.
We try to ensure that the girls are well educated so they can teach their mothers things like proper hygiene, hand washing. We build separate toilets for the girls and boys for obvious reasons…not something that happens here very much.
On the right Greg and the school staff are dispensing vitamin A tablets. We organise this every 6 months...The vitamin A is to help the children with their growth, due to the poor diet that they have. The de-worming tablets are are essential as the children can become extremely unwell, which seriously affects their attendance. This medication hugely decreases the level of absenteeism.
For the past 15 years we have helped arrange for students - from Birkdale School in Leeds - to visit Nepal during the Easter holidays, where they spend time working and teaching in the schools. This has proved to be a lifechanging experience for many of the pupils...
In Nepal education is clearly one of the only ways children can escape a life of poverty. It gives them an opportunity to seek employment beyond subsistence farming, giving them and their families a better quality of life.