A few days have passed since our first visit and after discussing with knowledgable people in Bandipur we have created a proposal and plan for the school’s renovation. However, we needed to get some measurements of the buildings to calculate costs for materials, and decided to head back to the village on Monday 13th October to retrieve them.
But before we left we had some visitors to join us, they were 3 volunteers with Global Vision International (GVI), the same organisation I was with for 10 weeks on my last trip to Nepal, and how I came to be in Bandipur, as many of you know.
You can see in Image 1 Mon and the 3 volunteers. Also, Angela the Aandhimul Project fundraiser from Australia, and Jolana the Aandhimul Project fundraiser from the UK were both volunteers with GVI in Bandipur and had done a similar visit to the village with Mon and I in January this year.
We decided to walk to the village as the weather was beautiful and the walk itself is wonderful, although a little slippy on the small, rock paths leading down into the valley. The vegetation is lush and we passed through some lovely villages with friendly people intrigued by us foreign trekkers, and we constantly passed under bridges of webs, and you can see one of the friendly, bridge supervisors in Image 6.
We did not stay too long in the village, but first stopped in an area where I stayed on my last visit in March. I had my laptop with me and showed the villagers pictures of themselves I took last time, they were very happy to see them and were laughing when I showed the videos too!
But you can see in Image 8 one reason why we need to help educate and support this village. Some children pictured show signs of malnutrition, which we need to try and eliminate from this village as soon as we can. It’s not widespread but is still happening due to unstable economic conditions and lack of education, thus resulting in poor diets and of course young children are then the first to suffer.
After this stop, we took a long walk around the village to the school. Whilst on this walk I took a picture of the School from above, Image 6 shows this, and hopefully it gives you more of an idea of the size of the school. When there we took the required measurements and then made our way down to the highway and caught the bus back to Bandipur, as it was too late to walk. Going back uphill would take over 3 hours, so the bus it was.
All the GVI volunteers really enjoyed the experience, and Lou from the UK especially took interest and showed real enthusiasm to help the project in anyway she can. She may even be able to get some funding for future programmes, which is great and I’ll keep you updated on that one. And sorry I didn’t get a front shot of the volunteers, hopefully I get a picture soon, and post it on a later blog.
