PAPA's ENDEAVOURS NEPAL

  A MINI-BUS FOR 'TASHI WALDORF' SCHOOL It’s a little after 8am as eight small children say hasty ‘Goodbyes’ to mothers as they join teacher-ma’m at the designated pick-up point for transport to school. A small, four seater (at a squash) taxi draws up.  Teacher-ma’m opens the rear door and in scramble seven of the children! The rear door closes and teacher-ma’m opens the front taxi door, gets in, sits and invites the remaining child to squash-in with her! Packed like sardines in a tin, the driver heads off to the ‘Tashi Waldorf’ school, a twenty minute drive away. This scenario is repeated in two other locations around the city. At 3.30pm, there is a repeat scenario with passengers being ferried back to their home locations. Twice a-day, five days a week at Nrs800 per day, per vehicle, amounting to Nrs12,000 per week for all three vehicles! As student numbers increase, so will the expenditure on taxis to and from school! The families of these students hardly have enough...

My connection with Nepal, especially Kathmandu, and in particular with those who are less fortunate than I, has been ongoing for all of 12 years since February 2010, when I paid what was intended as a swift, one-off, 2-week stop-over en route to the UK from AU. Those 2 weeks morphed into 2.5 years of accumulated visits between Feb 2010 – Feb 2019. Unexpected poor health prevented further visits throughout 2019, and by the time I was raring to go in 2020, I was prevented from doing so as a result of the corona pandemic. I was ‘grounded’, but not defeated! My visits became ‘virtual’, almost daily in fact, enabling me to continue with my charitable endeavours. The corona pandemic had and in fact is still having, a devastating impact on the lives of some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Where a day’s work was rewarded with a paltry wage at the end of each day, now there were no jobs, no pay. The result was immediate, without money to buy food, cooking...