Nepal, 2015: March 2015

Monday, 30 March 2015

Lahowchuk - an ICO community and initiatves

This is the village that Innovativecommunities.org Foundation, (ICO) and in particular Jen, Brad, Betty and Jim have been supporting for the past 8 years. Jen was introduced to the village when Navin was the porter for her and her Mom in 1998. A friendship developed, and she has returned 12 times. Brad, Jim and Betty have been here almost as many times.

ICO is currently supporting the village through an education initiative (supporting a public school with supplies and wages for an English and Science teacher); an irrigation initiative (where locals and volunteers have created 2 km of concrete channels to help address the monsoon and rain water; and a farm mechanization initiative, where we will be providing a tractor and supplies and the team will run as a business.

This in Navin's house and where we stayed & there was a welcome celebration for us when we arrived.

Here is a photo of a local school and the school kids that got a back pack full of supplies from our donors.

Here are a few students with their new cleats and soccer balls

Here is a photo of the irrigation canal that ICO helped to build. We provided the funds for supplies, and volunteers helped the villagers with the physical work required.

We worked with the English teacher to purchase supplies and material for school uniforms from shops in Pokhara.

We are supporting the village to buy a tractor. This is the type of manual work that they currently need to do.

Wednesday, 25 March 2015

Pokhara

We caught the half hour flight to Pokhara on Monday afternoon.

Pokhara is the second largest city in Nepal and a popular center for tourists to start their adventure tours. After strapping our additional bags onto the roof of the taxi, we arrived at the Lotus Inn and met up with Jim and Betty. Sitting outside, I enjoyed my first Nepalese beer (Everest)