Jean-Francois, my husband and partner in this venture to Nepal and India, came along for the meeting yesterday with Surya Prajapati and Ramesh Shrestha, the two men in charge of RCRD/CBR. Before we are finished with this project, we ought to be able to tell you what the difference is between the two organizations. They inhabit the same building and both are concerned with helping the handicapped. It is Surya, head of RCRD, with whom I have had the most contact so far, but that may be because his English is just one notch better. Both men are members of Servas, a peace-through-hospitality organization that JF and I belong to, so that is how I met them in the first place. I was in Kathmandu doing a database for another nongovernmental organization (always simply shorthanded as NGO here) and was calling various Servas hosts just to broaden my contacts in the area. Surya and I hit it off, and I did a little database work for him.
This time, without other volunteer prospects on the horizon, and with an encouraging email from Surya, we came directly to Bhaktapur, not even starting in Kathmandu. After a trip to that fabled but now overcrowded city yesterday, we are thanking our lucky stars that we did.
The main concern that RCRD/CBR have, Surya told us yesterday in the meeting, is funding. The core source of their funding has been Save the Children Norway, but the international NGOs that have funded projects here in Nepal want their fundees to become self-sufficient, and so after some years, they "phase out" their support. RCRD/CBR finds themselves in this situation.
They realize they need to have a web site, though, and that is closer to my expertise than funding. I'm looking at this project and see what they're doing that might interest my Rotarian friends back home. I asked surya to introduce me to his Rotarian friends so we could discuss the possibility of a matching grant to help the organization out.
We haven't talked about what they might want to do with a matching grant, but rest assured I'll have come up with something before I leave there. In the meantime, I'll be writing about the process of working with them on their web sites.
Welcome to Nepal. I read your blog, it's interesting and fabulous. I know you always find some thing better to start with. anyway, enjoy your trip and keep it up.
Posted by: Nar Thapaliya | May 13, 2008 at 05:10 PM