Off the beaten track in Nepal

In my head I’m still in Nepal, in fact, I’m still being thrown around in a jeep making my way on an unsurfaced road to beautiful village in Kabre District.  Although I returned to London on Sunday night I can’t get this particular journey out of my head.  It was beautiful, particularly after the noise and pollution of Kathmandu; rhododendrons in flower, Himalayas in the distance, and at one point we went through a village on a mountain ridge with the most gorgeous, ancient looking, carved wooden houses.  That’s when I felt like an adventurer – we were nowhere near any tourists and I was quizzing my hosts about Nepalese culture.  We were on our way to visit a village in one of the key ‘source’ areas – where children drop out of school and migrate to Kathmandu to work as domestic servants.  CWISH work with the community there to try and prevent this migration.

The whole trip to Nepal was great – CWISH is a very strong and competent organisation and we got on very well with all the staff we met. Jonathan and I are confident we will be able to develop a project together and find funding for it.  But I can’t get this journey out of my head and I want to figure out why it was so important for me.  So, I’m going to use my blog to analyse it OK!?

When I think about the journey my main feeling is excitement – it felt exciting to be driven (yep I was pleased I wasn’t driving!) off the beaten track.  I guess it felt like an adventure but with all the dangerous bits taken away.  I trusted my hosts (and the driver!), the sun was shining, the flowers were out and to use a racist term the ‘natives’ were friendly.  Perhaps that’s the key issue actually – by this point Jonathan and I were very comfortable with the staff at CWISH, everything we had seen had reassured us that we think similarly about our respective work with child domestic workers.  In fact, I’m sure I will learn a lot more from CWISH than they could ever possibly learn from me.  I was humbled by their work.

Going back to the native thing…one of my fears in setting up Children Unite is that our partners overseas who are working directly with child domestic workers will not see us as ‘partners’ but as ‘access to funds’, they’ll see us as the people with the money (ironically, in the UK, my fear is that people think you’ll always be asking them for money!).  So, our aim in visiting CWISH was to figure out how we could work together.  we want to be involved in the work, not just proposal writers or evaluators.  And we certainly didn’t want to feel like or be treated like colonial benefactors. So, by the time I was on my mountaintop journey, we had already discussed how Children Unite and CWISH could work together….and I guess I was excited about this other journey too, knowing it would be off the beaten track but in safe hands.