Youth for Nepal

YFN starts school rebuilding project in Sindhupalchowk

YFN is pleased to announce that it has started a project for rebuilding Bhatte Primary School in Ramche VDC in Sindhupalchowk district in Nepal. This project is being run in collaboration with Santi School Project (SSP), a local NGO focused on building and renovating schools in the community and providing training to teachers employed in the district’s schools. Bhatte Primary School is located in Ward #9 of Ramche VDC. It has 4 teachers (3 men, 1 woman; 3 Brahmin, 1 Tamang) for 109 students up to the 5th grade. The student population is mainly indigenous groups (Tamang, Magar,Dalit) and female. All of the teachers have completed the government’s 10-month teacher training course and two of them are also enrolled in the early childhood education training course that our partner organization, Santi School Project, is currently conducting for 22 teachers in Ramche VDC with the Early Childhood Education Centre, a private agency based in Kathmandu. The village of Bhatte is accessible by road, so construction materials can be transported to the site by truck. The majority of its residents are subsistence farmers.

Originally built in 1984, Bhatte Primary School consists of two buildings, only one of which is used because the other is near collapse and must be destroyed. The school has adequate furniture for only 60 of its 109 students. There are toilet facilities. The water tap is damaged; no drinking water is available for students. There is no perimeter fence. There is no library and very few educational materials are available. The project will build the following:

1. A new four-room building to replace the dilapidated building
2. A roof with local high quality wood to support zinc sheets
3. Plasterwork for the walls and floor of the new building

The total budget for the project is around $12500, of which YFN will contribute $5000; SSP Nepal will contribute $5000 and the rest will come from the community in the form of free labor and materials. The project is scheduled to be completed by February 28, 2011. We will post further updates of the project on our website as it progresses.

Following are some snapshots depicting the current state of the school.

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YFN organizes first aid training project in Lamjung

On December 3, 2010, Youth for Nepal (YFN), in collaboration with Resource and Research Center for Community Development (RCCD) Nepal, organized its first “First Aid Training Project” in the town of Bhotewodar in Lamjung district. Supervised by a First Aid expert and a registered nurse, the one-day workshop provided hands-on training on basic First Aid to 3 members (2 high school students and a teacher) from each of the 10 schools in the district. Many villagers in Lamjung do not have easy access to health facilities and are unaware that the common medical conditions that lead to disability and death in that area can be prevented and even treated by following basic hygiene practices. As part of the training, each participating school also received a First Aid kit stocked with essential medical supplies. The organizers believe that the participants of the program will be able to train other members in their schools and villages, hence enabling them to better treat minor ailments or manage progression of easily preventable diseases.

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YFN sponsors school renovation in Dang

YFN is pleased to announce that we have started renovation work at a lower secondary school in Basti Khola Village Development Committee in the Dang district of Nepal -- Shree Bastikhola Nimna Madhyamik Vidyalaya. This project is being run in collaboration with Nepal Youth Awareness Organization (NYAO), a local non-profit focused on renovation of multiple schools in the district. We collaborated with NYAO closely and extensively in designing the renovation plan, and are funding the project in its entirety. Total cost is estimated at $5000. The school has three building blocks and the oldest building has been demolished and a new building is being constructed. The rocks and the re-usable doors and windows from the old building will be utilized during the course of the project. The scheduled completion date for the project is November 30, 2010. We will post videos, pictures as well as progress reports of the project in the coming weeks.

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YFN donates to Pakistan flood relief

Since late July, millions of Pakistanis have been affected by flooding caused due to heavy monsoon rains. Youth for Nepal donated $200 to the American Red Cross Pakistan Relief and Development Fund. YFN is proud to be able to help in its own small way, a fellow South Asian and SAARC member nation at a time of great need.

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Donations made to World Computer Exchange

YFN donated 9 used computers to World Computer Exchange (WCE), including 5 PCs and 4 Macs on July 3, 2010. YFN had earlier received these computers as a donation from Macalester College located in St. Paul, Minnesota. We thank our supporter Sumit Shrestha for his efforts in securing this donation from the college.

We had initially planned to use these computers to establish computer training programs in a few schools in rural Nepal. However, the shipping costs turned out to be higher than the resale value of the computers which made the initial plan infeasible. As a result, we instead decided to donate the computers to WCE, an organization that specializes in collecting donated computers, repairing them if needed, and shipping them en masse to their own grassroots level computer programs in remote areas of developing countries. To date, they have gathered, tested, and shipped over 27,500 computers that connect 2,600 schools, libraries, universities, orphanages, and youth centers used by over a million youth per year. WCE has such programs in 67 developing countries. Nepal is one of the countries that benefit from this program. Please visit their website for further details: www.worldcomputerexchange.org.

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Reproductive Health Education Program Completed

YFN is pleased to announce that the Reproductive Health Education Program for Adolescents in School (RHEPAS) that we initiated in February 2010 in collaboration with Nepal Medical Students Society (NMSS) was recently completed. Through this program we were able to impart reproductive health education to 905 adolescent students (493 boys & 412 girls) from a total of 10 schools, private and public, across the Bagmati zone which lies in central Nepal. Please click here to read the full report submitted by NMSS to YFN regarding the project. Below, a summary of the project, from the NMSS president:

With the prevalent scenario in our Nepali society where reproductive health subjects are looked on as taboos; this RHEPAS project was initiated by the 23rd body of the NMSS to address the needs of reproductive health education that is felt to be lacking in school curricula.

The agreement with Youth for Nepal for financial support provided the much needed backbone to go forward institutionally what had been the ideas of a few minds of this organization. The overwhelming support from the medical students of IOM to volunteer in this project and the uncompromising leadership of the body members of the NMSS together worked out a perfect way to educate the school adolescents.

The project was conducted in 10 different schools of 5 different VDCs of Kathmandu, one public school and one private school of each VDC. Volunteers were divided for each VDC together with the body members and supplied with all the logistics they required.

It was no surprise that the pre-teaching questionnaire survey showed a lot of misconceptions and lack of knowledge on various reproductive health issues including abortion, changes in puberty, age for first sex, masturbation and many more.

A planned approach of interactive teaching through the aid of diagrams, charts and facts was implemented over a session of 2 hours, which in most schools would prove short for answering all the queries that were put upon, in fact a lot of them and some about issues that were not in the project curriculum such as sexual abuse.

At the end, the adolescents that underwent the teaching learning exercise were happy facies who spoke words of gratitude to their tutors warmly. The post teaching questionnaire was always a success for us. The other teachers in the school and the students themselves did not hesitate to remark that the exercise was overtly beneficial, and in fact the students would ask their tutors to visit them again in future; some asking for phone numbers to people and places where they could ask for help in the future.

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Reproductive Health Education Program for Adolescents in School (RHEPAS)

YFN, in collaboration with Nepal Medical Students Society (NMSS), designed and sponsored a reproductive health education program for adolescents in 10 private and public schools in Bagmati zone, central Nepal, beginning February 2010. This project was designed as a scaled-down, pilot version of the award-winning proposal submitted by NMSS members to International Federation of Medical Students’ Association in August 2009.

Under this project, medical students and doctors from Nepal’s premier medical college – Tribhuwan University Teaching Hospital – are educating hundreds of students in rural and urban areas of Kathmandu valley on various reproductive health topics. This program has three stages: 1) pre-curriculum survey of students to gauge their initial knowledge; 2) educational sessions conducted by doctors to enhance reproductive health knowledge; and 3) post-curriculum survey of participating students to establish the level of knowledge enhancement achieved through the curriculum. The survey questionnaires and curriculum were designed by the medical students and doctors themselves based on their field and local expertise.

YFN allocated $530 for this program all of which has been disbursed to NMSS. The program has run smoothly thus far with 9 out of 10 schools already completed. The project is scheduled to be wrapped up in the next few weeks. Upon completion of the project, detailed reports and additional pictures and video materials will be made available on our website. Stay tuned.

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Smokeless Stove Training Program in Khotang

YFN initiated a smokeless stove building training program for 50 poor households who have limited access to firewood in 10 remote villages of northern Khotang district, located in eastern Nepal. Smokeless stoves significantly reduce the amount of firewood used and smoke produced in day-to-day cooking. Thus, they help in conservation of local environment as well as enhancement of family health, particularly women and children who are most vulnerable to respiratory diseases caused by excessive exposure to smoke.

This program is being run in collaboration with Jana Sewa Samaj Nepal (JSSN), a local NGO founded and run by young community members of the Khotang district. JSSN volunteers with prior experience and local expertise are providing training to households in building these stoves. The program began in May 2010 and the training phase is scheduled to be completed by the end of summer 2010. Further monitoring and follow-up training sessions will be scheduled periodically until April 2011.

YFN has allocated $550 for the project which is yet to be disbursed. The project is currently running on JSSN’s own budget. We will provide more updates on this as the project progresses.

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Literacy project in Siddharthanagar, Rupandehi

YFN sponsored a literacy project for young females run by a local volunteer in Siddharthanagar village of Rupandehi Distict in eastern Nepal. The objective of the project was to increase the literacy rate of girls in the area, especially those whose education had been previously hindered due to familial objections. This project started in January 2009 and concluded a year later. During this period, the girls were taught how to read and write basic letters and words, as well as to construct their own sentences by local female teachers. 50 girls under the age of 15 participated in the three-phase program. YFN had allocated a budget of $750 for the project to be disbursed in three installments corresponding with each phase of the project. YFN was forced to halt the program after the second phase due to unsatisfactory levels of financial and operational transparency forthcoming from the project leader towards the end of the second phase.

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We can do it for Nepal : Can collection in Iowa

Nepali Students Association (NSA) and Youth For Nepal (YFN) volunteers of Ames, Iowa, have been collecting cans and raising funds in small, consistent amounts. They started the venture in October of 2010 and has since collected approximately 2000 cans, raising about $ 100.00. The volunteers, Suyog, Arbin, Ajay, Kapil, Akash, Gaurv, and Ashwin have taken turns collecting cans from the houses of Nepalis living in the Ames community. Community members actively participate in can collection and are happy to give them away as the volunteers come on their once-a-month round up to collect cans. For most volunteers, it’s the first time collecting cans and they are excited to be contributing to a noble cause.

“This is my first time,” says Gaurav, “I collect around 15 cans per person.” The simple act of collecting cans being used as investments in YFN’s developmental projects for Nepal also motivates the volunteers. “I’ve always believed in moral obligations and took YFN’s project to act on my beliefs,” says Kapil. Referring to the can collecting activity for raising funds, he adds, “It can’t get easier than this.”

Aashwin Lamsal, 12 years old, volunteered to help children in Nepal. He agrees with Kapil on how easy it is to collect cans for fundraising. “I collected in small amounts,” he says, “I hadn’t participated in any can collecting event before so this was my first time. I feel very committed to the activity because I feel like I need to do this. Once, my parents wanted me to take out the trash and they left tons of cans in there so I took them out,” he says.

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YFN donates $200 for Haiti earthquake relief

Youth for Nepal donated $200 from its funds to the American Red Cross' Haiti Relief and Development Fund. On January 12, a number of earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from 6.5 to 7.3 devastated Haiti. This was another in a series of natural and man-made (social / political) disasters that have hit Haiti and made it the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. The political instability and the lack of infrastructure that arise from it in Haitian society in many ways parallel similar problems in Nepal. YFN is proud to be able to help in its own small way at this moment of need in a small, proud nation's history.

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Fundraiser in New York

In cooperation with the National Association of Asian American Professionals, NY chapter, YFN organized a happy hour event at Bar Twelve in New York. A number of YFN and NAAAP-NY members attended, and a good time was had by all. Members of NAAAP-NY, including Vice President and Treasurer Brandon Sun served drinks as guest bartenders, and YFN also sold raffle tickets. In total, YFN raised $260 from the event.

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