Devi Lower Secondary School has been forced to conduct its classes out in the open due to lack of adequate classrooms. We are helping the school complete the ongoing construction of a building by raising around US$ 8,000. Please help us by clicking on the donate button to your right.

Introduction:

Devi Lower Secondary School in Nallu -9 of Lalitpur district was established in 1960. 219 students, 114 girls and 104 boys are enrolled in classes from Kindergarten to grade eight.

Need:

The school has six classrooms to conduct classes for nine different grades. Due to inadequate classrooms and poor infra structure, the school has been conducting its classes out in the open. The District Education Office had granted the school a partial fund as per the former’s policy to construct a four room building to alleviate this situation. Due to lack of funds, the school has been able to complete only the basic framework.

Solution:

We have agreed to raise funds for the school to complete the construction of the four room building. The project would construct external walls and partition the building into rooms, plaster the ceiling and the floor and paint the walls, doors and windows.

How much does it cost?

The school building construction is estimated to cost around NRs. 850,000 (around US$ 12,000). A quarter of the project cost will be borne by the school management and the local community with the rest being raised by us. The school has received a pledge of NRs. 75,000 (around US$ 1,000) from the Nallu Village Development Committee to complete the building construction.

How can you help?

Please help us by donating funds for the building construction by clicking on the donate button to the right. We would also appreciate your help in spreading the word about this project.

Rabindra Maharjan, Chairperson of the Shanti Education Initiative Nepal, and Prem Bahadur Thapa, Chairperson of the School Management Committee signed the agreement representing their respective organizations.

We have agreed to contribute NRs. 445,050, around US$ 6,000, with the community agreeing to contribute NRs. 148,350, around US$ 2,000, to complete the project.

For more information, please visit this page.

Gupteshwor Secondary School in Dhunge Sundar Pani, Nallu -3, Lalitpur District was established in 1960. It is in the hilly area to the south of the Kathmandu valley and around 20 kilometers away from the center of Kathmandu. There are nearly 250 students, mainly from the indigenous Tamang community, that are studying at the school up to grade ten.

Need:

Although it has four furnished buildings (eight rooms) it was short of classrooms and was awarded partial grant by the District Education Office to construct a two storied four room building.  With the grants from the education office and other sources, the school completed external walls and roof of the ground floor but there is no partition inside the building. There are no door and window shutter and the inside walls, floor and the ceilings are not plastered. The stairway leading to the first floor is not covered and when it rains, the ground floor where classes are conducted – at four corners – is flooded.

The school also lacks drinking water facility.

Solution:

We are helping the school to complete the furnishings and the partition of the ground floor, and install window and door shutters so that classes could conducted properly. We are also helping the school install a drinking water system.

Cost:

The total cost of the project is estimated to be NRs. 593, 400 (around US$ 8,000) with the community expressing their willingness and readiness to contribute 25 percent of the total cost of the project.

How long will the project take?

The project is expected to start from early March and is expected to end by the end of April.

For more photos of the school building, see below:

We also would like to thank  Rajan Subedi for his contribution in taking our organizations forward and wish him all the best to in his future endeavors.

The fellows will primarily work in coordination with the school management in helping the students broaden their horizons. They will be helping the students and teachers with the extra curricular activities and fill in the classes of the teachers who might be absent. Examples of some of the activities that these fellows will be doing are i) introducing the students with playing guitar ii) organizing a children movie show after the school is over. These fellows who are from the cities will also be exchanging ideas with the students in schools in the villages.

The fellows will be provided food and lodging, and stipend for the duration of their stay in the villages. We will share their experiences once they return from the stay in the villages.

To know more about our approach and philosophy, visit this link.

When I stepped into the seventh grade classroom, the first day of two months in Shree Biswamitra Secondary School, I had it all planned out. Start off with an icebreaker to learn more about the kids and to get them comfortable, then English language games to get their imagination going. Though my Nepali at that point was at most rudimentary, I observed that the teachers taught in English, and the students seemed to understand the language. Besides, I, in my utmost idealism, felt compelled to introduce a point of creativity in an otherwise stultifying Nepali pedagogy, in which English classes were the stuffiest of all. All the kids had to do was to write part of a story, switch papers with a neighbor, then fill out the rest of their partner’s narrative. Afterwards, get back their original tales, read the hijinks brainstormed up by the next student, everybody has a hearty laugh while interest in English and storytelling increases. Simple, right? When I got back the papers however, the general consensus, me included, sounded a resounding “Huh?”, a word that would continue to echo over the next three months I taught in two schools as a volunteer.

As a college student from a highly academic liberal arts college in the USA, I was by my junior year feeling the general sentiment shared by most my peers: “What is the point of my studies; what am I going to do with my life?” which translates roughly into “I need to get out of here and do something concrete fast” After months of Googling pages of NGOs, only to shy from their extortive costs, I learned about Santi School Project from a college alumni. At once I was intrigued by both the lenient budget offered both by the volunteer program and the country itself as well as the accolades of previous volunteers. With that in mind and many years of helping my elementary school teacher mother edit her lesson plans, I flew off to Shree Biswamitra Secondary School, Jyamikort, Nepal to try my hand at teaching to broaden my horizons, gain some experience, and help out in the schools. Though I knew that it wouldn’t be too easy, I had traveled widely in my childhood and with a English Major in the works, I knew it would be a worthwhile goal to apply my learning to teaching. After observing the teachers for a couple of days, I had three concrete goals in mind. First was to increase interest in English as a creative medium and originator of very real benefits. Second, on a more technical level, was to improve grammar, writing, and pronunciation. Lastly, I wanted the students to feel that I as a teacher was a figure of trust rather than of authority. Therefore, over the next two months, the kids would learn about storybooks and comic books, informal fun projects that would gently push the students to write more conscientiously and correctly. Later on, upon learning about the Nepali youth’s obsession of Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, and the rest of the pop, I wanted to integrate songs into the lesson plan to work on pronunciation and auditory comprehension, literary intepretation, and to teach a little slang.

However, the papers that I got back that first day indicated plainly the long and hard road I’d have ahead. Habituated to narrative templates since early on, my students had pretty much copied from their textbooks–regardless of whether their partners had written about those stories at all. I had overlooked, or rather, ignored that the English I first observed had a distinct Nepali tang that form a very real barrier to communication. For the rest of those two months, with short breaks for the school award ceremony, Dashain, and Tihar, it was generally the same story again and again. I aimed unrealistically too high and my class didn’t get it. The comics and storybooks faltered, the songs excited the students, but their enthusiasm and attention were limited to a fashionable few. I definitely formed a rapport with the students, visiting them often on the weekends and the festivals, even walking to a town an hour and half away to watch their soccer tournament. One of them I even dubbed my Nepali little brother. But while we joked, mocked fought, danced, sang, and played frisbee (an American import of mine) with each other outside of the classroom, the students unused to such familiarity with teachers mistook my friendliness to liberality, putting the classroom into chaos or stalemate, populated by neglected homework assignments.

However, as time went on, things slowly started to come together in unexpected places, a process that continued when I moved from Jyamilkort to Ramche, a small village near Barabise, to teach in its primary school. Though lessons based around English games and even songs were too complex for the students, and while they had difficulty grasping the basics of tense, a lesson based around a quiz game would always incite enthusiasm and draw out hidden reserves of information with competition. I found that they loved the photos that I had taken while I was traveling around the States and would ask about seals, New York, rock concerts, and American farms. I found that the kids, while restricted by the uninspired Nepali textbook and the rigid curriculum, loved to draw and loved to see drawings made, encouraging me to teach art more thoroughly in my second village. Best of all, I found that the students, while hampered by their poor English and despite my growing Nepali, were bit by bit pushing their English so they could talk to me more and more easily and give me a hand with my Nepali, creating a symbiotic exchange between us. Though I had despaired of being a proficient teacher by technical standards, my class was nonetheless trying to meet me halfway.

The culmination of all these moments and feelings arrived finally after days of struggling to teach shapes-to-detail drawing with no avail. As the school day drew to a close, my student Bimal produced a pristine ring with a cluster of crows feet petals bursting from the center: a lovely marigold. In another village six hours away, that “Huh?” that had followed me from Jyamikort, that I had encountered time and time again in my lessons, was finally answered, literally in a sense, by “I see!”

Which brings us back to volunteering. Advice to prospective volunteers, especially if you’re not trained: keep it simple and be patient. The primary mission, as a volunteer, is to expand the students’ worldview, not necessarily to get them to write grammatically pristine sentences or speak with diplomatic elegance, especially since their English won’t be the best. Expect communication to be difficult, especially with short term volunteers. Best to be playful and have fun with the kids, show them what else is out there beyond the limits of the village life, beyond stale cliches of globalized culture. Pulling out a song by Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift (admittedly, some of those same cliches) have often been my greatest tool in teaching pronunciation. The fact that the students love teeny pop doesn’t hurt the fun factor. Or even go outside for some good old flower treasure hunting. Whatever the plan, the students will surely carry themselves with enthusiasm, incomparable cheerfulness, and good nature.

To view more pictures that Sarah has taken, please visit this link.

The grant worth Rs. 300,000 (around 3,000 euros, 4,000 dollars) will be instrumental in finishing the ground floor of the building so that classes can start there in the next academic year in April 2012. The money allocated for this project has been raised at Nepalfest event in Muttekopfhutte, Imst, Austria.

We had helped the school previously with funds raised from Muttekopfhutte to kick start the construction of the same building.

The program was jointly funded by Santi School Project and Youth for Nepal, both US based organizations, with each contributing US$ 5,000.  The summary of the finances of the school building project is given below:

Bhatte Primary School Financial Summary

Kathmandu, Nov. 25: Shanti Education Initiative Nepal has successfully completed the construction of a building of Bhatte Primary School, Ramche -9, Sindhupalchowk district, Nepal. Read More here.