Looking Forwards

A short blog to send grateful thanks to all of our friends and supporters for keeping us going through 2020.  Hopefully you’ll be pleased to hear that this week we sent enough funds, together with our friends at Altevette-Onlus in Italy, for our annual donation to cover the school’s operational running costs for 2021. 

As we begin a new year we are funding the salaries for 8 teachers and 2 support staff and all the operational costs for providing the education of 41 girls in school (possibly 5 more returning as soon as travel restrictions are lifted).  And of course for many of our students who have no homes to go to, or who cannot travel home due to poverty or the remoteness of their semi-nomadic families, our school is home for them all year round.

This is no mean feat when most of us have spent the past year mostly isolated and in lockdown and we can’t thank you enough for your kind generosity in supporting our collective attempts to help bring education to disadvantaged and vulnerable girls from remote high-altitude Himalayan regions.

We’re looking forward to another year of support for sustainability and capital infrastructure improvement projects and to help take the school forwards for coming years.

Socio-Emotional Education

Although our children come from remote areas, with the help of internet, they are also becoming socially and globally aware citizens.  This morning they joined the live conversation with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Greta Thunberg and leading scientists to learn more about the climate feedback loops that are escalating our climate crisis.

As well as receiving a full government school curriculum and their Buddhist studies, 3 languages (Nepali, Tibetan & English), the concept of Socio-Emotional development and learning is a strong factor at school.

The children learn about being good citizens, altruism and kindness to each other and the surrounding community as mentioned in previous blogs.  The older girls, together with staff and boys from the monastic school, take part in distributing food to desperately hungry communities during lockdown and lead environmental cleaning programmes within the local communities.

They care for and clean their own school facilities, grow some of their own food in Mustang, learn about sustainable menstrual hygiene products, share health & hygiene learning within their wider families.  They also assist in the development of infrastructure projects that will ensure a sustainable, self-financed future for the school longer term.

Global Climate Crisis

And now they will learn about global climate change through projects aligned with the important initiative introduced by HH Dalai Lama and Greta Thunberg this morning.

It was wonderful feeling to know we were watching together the livestream this morning (early morning in the UK and afternoon in Nepal) even though we are in different geographical locations.

Stay Safe & Healthy

As we begin a new calendar year we wish a Happy, Healthy, New year to all our regular and occasional supporters around the world in geographically different locations as diverse as Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Sweden, Norway, UK, USA, Brazil, Mexico and more.

We thank you for supporting us last year and hope you will stay with us as we begin to look forward to another new year.  Despite the pandemic and challenging times many of us are having with wild fires, floods, political upheavals and so on, it’s good to know that we have all come together to support our dear staff and students in Nepal. 

Thank you all for your continued support.  Please share our newsletter with any friends and family who may be interested and help support our FB page.

And please look out for our newly designed website launching soon.

And as always your kind donations of any size are gratefully received.  

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