NEWS
HEALTH WORKER TRAINING COURSE NEARING COMPLETION
24.10.11
Saraswoti,our trainee health worker is nearing the end of her training and is now working at her placement in the Begnas Tal Hospital. We wish her every success as she completes her course and look forward to her returning to Chitepani to begin her work there.
GALLERY IMAGES EXPLAINED
18.08.11
1.The school play area has a new fence. The children can now play safely. The village temple is in the background.
2.The mothers' group setting out on their farm visits.
3.The mothers' group relaxing in the evening after a day of farm visits.
4.Mother and child.
5.The children are experiencing paint for the first time.
6.Saraswoti, our new health worker in training.
7.Two children learning about printing with paint.
Ann took paints and printing tools to share with the children. Their little aprons were made in Pokhara specially for the school.
EDUCATIONAL TRIP FOR WOMEN'S GROUP
18.08.11
The Mother's group in Chitepani have been asking for help for some time to improve their farming methods. Arrangements were made for them to go by bus to Bandipur, Gurkha and Tanahun on a two day visit to observe and learn about different ways of farming goats, cows, buffaloes, chickens and vegetables. They also visited a cheese factory.
Many of the women had never been away from their village overnight so this was a great adventure for them. The days were spent visiting farms and seeing new ways of doing things. In the evenings they gathered together to relax, to dance and sing and enjoy their time away from home.
This was the first time they had travelled away from Pokhara as a group. They enjoyed it very much and learned many useful things to make their farming more productive.
SOME INFORMATION ABOUT CHITEPANI
19.07.11
A number of people who have not had the opportunity to visit Chitepani have asked me questions about the village. So I have spoken to a number of villagers and have gathered together various facts and figures and general information which I hope will be of interest.
SITUATION.
Chitepani is 3200ft above sea level and is approximately 9.3 miles (15kms) from Pokhara, the nearest town with any facilities (I have always believed that it is about 10.5miles(17kms)and I think this is more accurate. The village is situated in a wonderfully panoramic position with views of the mountains...Manaslu,Dhaulagiri, Machapuchre and Annapurna 1.
HISTORY OF THE NAME.
The name Chitepani dates back 600 years. Apparently the king of the region was hunting deer nearby and became very tired and thirsty. he ordered his army to search for water. His personal bodyguard walked to a settlement and found a spring. He took the king to the area and he named the settlement Chitepani, which means ..wished for water. That very same spring still flows to this day.
FAMILY NAMES
The villagers are all high caste Brahmins who originated from different parts of Nepal. Their family names are exclusively Sapkota,Subedi, Dhakal, Adhikari and Poudel.
POPULATION
There are 55 houses within the village and there are 559 people registered as residents. (284 men and 275 women) In reality about a third of this number live in the village at any given time. A significant number of young men work as guides and porters and are based elsewhere.
SCHOOL
The village primary/junior school was established 52 years ago and caters for 4-9 year olds.
HOW THE VILLAGE IS ORGANISED.
The village is managed by various committees who make decisions about all aspects of village life, including grazing rights and collection of fuel and fodder from the jungle. The allocation of water from the various springs in the village is managed by several committees.
The temple, school and health centre are similarly dealt with.
Ann Armstrong,
UK Co-Ordinator, The Chitepani Trust
CHITEPANI'S FEMALE HEALTH WORKER
19.07.11
When the Chitepani health centre was established some eleven years ago,it was accepted that at some stage it would be very beneficial to employ a female health worker to work alongside our male health worker. Women's health in Nepal has been notoriously neglected. Women are reluctant, for cultural reasons to see a male for specifically female health related issues.
Several years ago a group from Ramblers Holidays on a walking tour, visited the village and, acknowledging the obvious need, decided to raise the money to provide health worker training. Ideally the person selected would have close links with Chitepani.
After a number of setbacks, Saraswoti Adhikari was chosen and passed the entrance exam for the fifteen month training course. I was able to meet Saraswoti in Kathmandu in March. She is a personable young woman, married to a young man from Chitepani. They have two young children.
The practical placement she will undertake soon will equip her to provide advice and assistance related to pregnancy, nutrition and general health as well as post natal and infant care issues.
Saraswoti views her role with great enthusiasm and looks forward to making a significant contribution to the health and welfare of the women in Chitepani when she returns to the village in ten months time.
The Trustees of the Chitepani Trust are very grateful to those who have persevered to make this possible.
CHITEPANI IS AHEAD OF THE GAME
28.02.11
In the past three years, The Chitepani Trust has enabled every household in Chitepani to build their own toilet, improving the health of the people of the village. Work is now in progress to improve the drinking water supply and the health centre promotes the washing of hands.
In the KATHMANDU POST Ann found an article from which extracts have been taken.
The Nepali government has recently come up with a five year plan to raise awareness of the importance of sanitation and support to eliminate open defecation in the rural areas.
A survey shows that fewer than a quarter of households in Nepal's rural Mid West have a toilet. A pilot project in the region of Dailekh has helped locals to construct toilets, and make them aware of the need to wash hands with soap and highlight the dangers of open defecation. This initiative is highly appreciated even in the remotest areas.
The chances of catching waterborne communicable diseases varies between 50 and 85% depending on the awareness of personal hygiene,safe drinking water and sanitaion.
Although 148,000 toilets are constructed in Nepal annually, only 10% of the poor have access to one.
Each year, in Nepal,13,000 children die of waterborne diseases such as diarrhoea or cholera.
According to the World Health Organisation(WHO)10.6 million people die every year from water borne diseases, mainly in Africa and Asia. 90% of the dead are children under 5 years of age.
Worldwide, 2.4 billion people have no access to sanitation.
For a country that witnesses hundreds of deaths each year due to waterborne diseases, the promotion of hand washing, the construction of toilets and the provision of safe drinking water are among the simplest methods of reducing and controlling such epidemics.
Kathmandu Post November 2010
WE'VE DONE A LOT IN CHITEPANI
15.02.11
As Tika and I made our way along the mountain ridge on our way to Chitepani, we stopped from time to time to look down to the rice paddies far below us.
Everywhere was a hive of industry. It was time for the rice harvest, probably the most important season of the year for the villagers. Young and old alike were working in the fields, barefoot and half way up their legs in mud. They shouted and waved to us, laughing as they worked. Some were cutting the rice, others gathering it into stacks to be trampled by teams of oxen. This process separates the precious rice grains which are then collected for domestic use. The successful cultivation and harvesting of rice is an essential part of life in Chitepani. When the grain is separated from the straw, the straw is baled and tied with rope made from the straw.
The village was quiet when we arrived. It was obvious that all able-bodied adults and the older children were busy in the fields, working from dawn until bedtime. Exhausting and back breaking labour. The reality of subsistence farming and how it needs to take priority over everything else became clear to me.
We had decided to visit those villagers who had recently been helped by The Trust. We wanted to be sure that their needs had been met. The older couple who had been without electricity proudly switched on and off, the light inside their house. With financial help from The Trust, their power supply had been connected and they were delighted with it. They both insisted on putting on clean clothes in order to have their photos taken.
We went on to see Rukbina Subedi, an older lady without family support. The Trust gives her a small allowance each month to pay for food and essentials and provides her with necessary medication. She has cheered up considerably since she was given her goats. She now asks if it's possible to have a length of hose pipe to enable her to water the vegetables that she grows, without having to carry water from the tap some distance away. Before I came home, a hose pipe had been supplied for her.
The school was our next port of call. The children were pleased to show off their new furniture and school uniforms. The little shoes that The Trust had provided were lined up neatly outside their classroom. Since my return to UK the school playground has been made safe and a secure fence has been put up. Before this, there was a real risk that the children could fall many feet from the edge of the play area to the bulldozed track below. It was a busy day with many people to visit and talk to. Tika and I ate rice and lentils at the health centre with the health worker and his industrious and green-fingered wife. We called in to see the newly established and flourishing free computer class. Several young women were learning to use spreadsheets.
At the end of the day we walked down the mountainside discussing what had been achieved and what still needed to be done. When we eventually reached the river and the place where we invariably stop to share a welcome beer, Tika said,
We've done a lot at Chitepani...but there's always something else to do...always!
How right he is.
A MODEL CLASS AT CHITEPANI SCHOOL
17.08.10
Huge effort is being put into the village school to improve the quality of education and attract more children to attend classes and encourage parents to stay in the village rather than seek better education in the towns. An earlier article on this page tells of the reaction of one UK group to the conditions in the school on their visit last February.(Scroll down to find the article)
In order to raise the standards to what children in Private schools would expect to find in their schools in town, Chitepani school has made a start by introducing English Medium to the first class.(THE MODEL CLASS) The children will be taught in English and a qualified teacher has been employed for the first year to pioneer this new venture and help train the other teachers. One teacher is taking a 12 day course in Pokhara run by the British Council Nepal.
The classroom has been decorated, new furniture provided and a carpet laid and floor cushions to make the environment more comfortable for the young children.
New uniforms including ties have been purchased and English medium books and other educational materials distrubuted to the children at a ceremony to inaugurate the new regime. (See photo 1,2 and 4 on the gallery page)
There are now 12 children in the class.
The school is closed for about a month for the monsoon and rice planting but will open again soon.
A HOLIDAY VISIT
16.02.10
Ramblers Worldwide Holidays runs walking holidays in Nepal each year. Some of the groups visit Chitepani as part of their tour itinerary giving an opportunity to get close to life in the Himalayan foothills and to meet some of the people. After one such visit, John and Susan Revie wrote the following account for us.
We visited Chitepani in November 2009 with a Ramblers tour. This was for me (John) probably the most interesting of our lovely walks in Nepal because we had the opportunity to spend time in the village. Our Ramblers leader had been there before and had explained to us the interesting connection between Ramblers and this particular village. Tika Ram Sapkota had joined us as an additional local guide. He grew up in the village so could explain everything to us and answer most of our questions. I find it fascinating that the people who live with such hardship in these hills are so friendly and apparently contented. (In Scotland I work as a volunteer in a very run down town where most of our clients have existed on benefits for most of their lives. I find the contrast between these two groups of very poor people quite intriguing.)
We had lunch sitting outside the new health centre. As usual we had far more in our packed lunches than we needed and surplus quickly disappeared into the pockets of a hovering local boy.
The village has an electricity supply which, I think, was installed by a Finnish organisation. This provides a metered facility mainly for lighting. There was an empty room attached to the health centre and Tika proudly explained that it was planned to install an internet connection there with a UPS to stabilise the supply, and a mobile connection from a mast across the valley. At the time I felt that the internet was probably the last thing these relatively unspoiled people needed but I have since learned how it should help to make their lives better.
After lunch we were shown a bio-gas installation for a single house. Both human and animal waste are collected in a tank constructed beneath the collection facilities. The resultant(methane)gas is produced at a surprisingly good pressure - enough to supply a good sized single gas ring. The owner was clearly very proud to show us her cooking facilities and the rest of her house.
Tika has a dream that one day every house will have its own clean water supply. We discussed how that might be achieved and we have since corresponded on the subject. Other priorities currently indicate that simple improvements to the existing communal water supply will probably come first.
In the afternoon we moved down to the primary school where we met a young British couple who were staying in the village for a week to help. Many of our group were former teachers and had interesting views on what they saw in the school. Susan was one of these and this is her account.
As always we were impressed by the friendliness of the adults and the enthusiasm of the children who delighted us with a rendition of their national anthem. However, what disturbed us all was the state of the school. Each of the three classrooms had bare concrete walls with virtually no decoration - no wallcharts, no shelves of books and no display of pupils work apart from four small scraps of paper in one classroom. There were no pupil materials in the classrooms and when we handed out all our remaining pencils, rulers etc we were told by the British couple that these would probably be handed out to the children at the end of the day and would disappear into the community. It was not easy to see what was stored in the staff room but we did hear that the safe contained one calculator and nothing else.
We were all rather subdued when we left the place, most people comparing what we had seen with the resources in our own schools, with all the labelling and organisation, the play materials which we feel are essential for development, the beautifully prepared aide-memoirs, the modern furniture and a calculator for each child! Going even a small way towards that would give these delightful and motivated children such a boost and would be a worthy goal.
We plan to continue our association with Chitepani and hope to contribute towards the achievement of some of these worthy goals.
John and Susan Revie, Scotland.