Service Projects
3H Grant in Nepal
A $330,000 Rotary Foundation 3-H grant (3-H = Health, Hunger & Humanity) has been set up to fund an overall disability awareness campaign to help change the current negative attitudes and superstitions toward those with disabilities in Nepal.
The 3-H application was submitted in 2007 and approved in April, 2008. With these grant funds and Rotarian involvement we will work to change the general perception that if you have a child with a disability you (or your child) are suffering from a past-life sin or curse. We are planning an overall awareness campaign for our Rotary-funded pilot project and preparing specialized marketing materials, radio advertising scripts, radio dramas, street-theater programs, printed posters, billboards and other materials prepared specifically for this purpose.
We have identified a number of NGO’s who are already working in this area and will partner with us. We will also staff a small call-center/help-line that will provide referrals to other NGO’s in Nepal that can help. We will hire people with disabilities to staff the call center.
How can your club participate? Let us know if you have an interest in this groundbreaking project and we will forward potential projects for your club to review. Once you agree on a project, you are off and running! We have committees both in the USA and in Nepal to help facilitate the projects and partnerships.
Unless we properly address the core superstition that people with disabilities are cursed, or suffering from a past-life sin, it will be difficult for them to move forward, toward equality. These awareness programs and international joint club projects will have a substantive impact on dispelling these myths. Through Rotary we can lead the way to better, more productive lives for these worthy people!
Rimwa School
Sita Gyawali and her sister Nirmala (both women with blindness) have been my constant companions as we visit our various Rotary projects/programs. We recently took a trip to their village home in Charpala, Gulmi District and also made the bumpy drive to a fairly remote school with 13 children with blindness in Rimwa where we provide some support. They are in-residence (hostel) there with many other children. There are many shortages and problems for these BVI students. The last time Nirmala and Sita visited they found that there were only 8 food plates and that the children were eating in two shifts due to the shortage! They quickly bought 5 more plates and resolved the problem. Isn’t that crazy? In addition, there isn’t proper nutrition for them and they are always short of Braille paper. We left $200 with the resource teacher for a year’s supply of paper which they can purchase in Butwal. Like I told the Rotarians I spoke to at the Dillibazar Rotary meeting last evening….being without braille paper is like being without a pencil for a BVI student. How can they take notes and study???
Amazingly, even with all of these deficiencies, several of these BVI students in the Rimwa school are doing more than just ‘getting-by’ with their studies. They are excelling! Two out of the 13 are 1st in their class- of any of the children, sighted or not. There are over three hundred kids in this school!!! Many of the BVI children are also very talented, musically. Either with the madal or flute or by song. What beautiful singing voices filled the little schoolroom/bedroom (these rooms are combined here, due to lack of space). I was overwhelmed and overcome by their ABILITY!
That was a lovely afternoon as we bumped and jolted our way back up the steep road to head back to their mom’s home for another peaceful, quiet evening spent in the village.
The next morning we drove back to burning-hot Butwal and met with representatives of two Rotary Clubs and discussed the disability awareness program. One of the clubs- Butwal South wanted us to visit another school for the Blind/Visually-Impaired that wasn’t far. There were 32 students with blindness in residence along with hundreds of other non-visually-impaired students. We quickly agreed and after a late lunch (our earlier lunch consisted of two kinds of potato chips, some cheese-balls and a coke as we waited for RR, my project partner to arrive at the airport!). Also attending was Jayanti Bhatta who is our program administrator for the Rotary Disability Awareness Program. She was the victim of polio before the age of two and knows full well the societal stigma attached to disability. We arrived at the school in late-afternoon and the hot sun was quite oppressive as we trudged across this huge, dusty field in front of the school. We met most of the 32 children with blindness and toured the facilities which were about the same as the Rimwa village school facilities, but with more space in each of the rooms. There were also a separate kitchen and dining room. But as we questioned the students, teachers and staff we quickly surmised that they had many of the same problems as the village school- not enough fresh fruits, vegetables and protein, lack of Braille-paper and other basic needs. The government provides a 1,000 rupee allowance per month for each student (about $13 US) which doesn’t come close to meeting the cost of these basic needs.
I suddenly had a ‘light-bulb’ moment and quickly asked the Rotarians from Butwal South how many club-members they had. They said, “32″. I said, “Great! Perhaps each of your club members could agree to sponsor one of the 32 students in this program and provide some additional funding on a monthly basis, maybe 300-500 rupees per child ($4-6)….it wouldn’t take much and would be easily affordable for any of them. They were very positive on this idea and agreed to consider it! Now I am thinking that if they are successful with their small ‘micro-granting’ program, perhaps we could have other Nepali Rotary Clubs do a similar program with other schools with children with blindness study. The best part of this program is that the HELP and the CHANGE is coming from within the country.
Empowerment and Intervention
Yesterday we visited one of the ‘Club-to-Club’ partner projects that have launched as a result of the ‘Rotary USA/Nepal Disability Awareness Program’. To see this project in action was very inspiring and it is already having a wonderful impact on many lives. This is a partnership between the Rotary Clubs of Dhulikhel, Seattle-International District and University District.
This Rotary Foundation Matching Grant Project has two main parts: one is vocational training with empowerment and employment opportunities. The other is orthopedic surgeries and physical therapy for thirty individuals.
Rotarian Ashok Shrestha from RC Dhulikhel gave us a tour of the newly launched Disability Support Program, where people with disabilities receive vocational training, jobs and a chance at a productive future. They are running this program in a very simple, effective and efficient way. One small manufacturing center works with bamboo products and another works with rataan. They have identified a number of products which are in high demand, such as student bookcases, coat racks and small stools. They produce these and then sell them to retailers. So far the demand far exceeds their ability to supply, however they are continuing to ‘ramp-up’ production to meet demand. There is a good profit margin on these products which bodes very well for project sustainability.
Even though our project motto is “We Are All Able”, I am still amazed at just how able People With Disabilities (PWD’s) are. The production team that has been trained to produce the student bookcases includes three blind individuals, one with developmental disability and three with physical handicaps. Two of the young men with blindness were using very sharp tools to cut the bamboo into about one-inch strips, a fellow with one leg and another physically handicapped woman were sawing them into the correct length and one physically handicapped person, the man with developmental disability and a guy with blindness were assembling them into bookcase form. One of the men doing final assembly was blind, yet he skillfully and precisely hammered each of the one-inch slats of bamboo to the bookcase frame.
To top it off, the young man in charge of the bookkeeping and accounting is also a person with blindness and he keeps track of all accounts via computer. So many great skills are being taught with this program that will impact the trainee’s life and their family for generations to come.
We also visited an orthopedic hospital where doctors are going to operate on the little boy you see in one of the photos, who had been badly burned in a fire in his village. He was happily coloring away when we introduced ourselves. The severe burns have also caused his leg muscles to contract so that he now isn’t able to straighten them out. His parents had spent all of their savings trying to help their son in the village hospital. The matching grant funding that has been raised for this project are his hope to walk again. 30 such surgeries will be done as a result of this one grant, 15 operations have already been completed .
Getting these grants isn’t an easy process. Ashok Shrestha, Susan Sola and Judy Ginn all put in a great deal of effort to help make this project come to life. But when you see the transformational impact with your own eyes, it is like a gift that we both give and receive. We give the help and hope, we receive the satisfaction of being able to be of service to others through Rotary.
Rotarian Magazine Article
The Rotarian magazine, with a worldwide distribution to 1.2 million Rotarians has published a six-page article about the ‘Rotary USA/Nepal Disability Awareness Campaign’. This article took two-years to be published but it was worth the wait! Associate Editor, Diana Schoberg did a masterful job of telling the story of this meaningful project which aims to raise awareness about disability in Nepal, provide tangible help to People With Disability (PWD’s) through club-to-club Rotary partner projects and empower those with disabilities to strive for more opportunities and a better life!