6000 Street Children in Nepal: Give Them a Home

One of our older boys (well, we should be saying 'young men' but for us they are still 'our boys') from the Children's Home is now gaining work experience at our Child Helpline. He will be joining our other 4 boys that are already in Goa, India but needs to wait a bit longer to get his citizenship papers - and due to his background and the complicated Nepali system it is very difficult for him. We are all working hard to make it all possible and hoping that he will be able to get everything sorted in a month or so. In the meantime, he is doing his college and assisting our staff at the Helpline. The main focus for now is to continue helping those children that we identified during our survey - those who beg/work/collect rubbish on the streets and do not go to school. Everyday we speak to the children and families and everyday we get more children that are happy to join our day time classes at the Helpline. The aim is to prepare them for regular school with our interactive, fun classes and they will be enrolled into school in April, when the new school year starts. 

Because of local politics and arguments between different government departments, we still have a couple of children at the Helpline that should be at a permanent children's home (they have no family). However, the local government cannot agree on which of their officers needs to sign one letter allowing us to move the children to a different organisation (we have found them an amazing place) so the children have to stay with us until we get that sorted. Without that paperwork we are not legally allowed to move the children anywhere. We have enrolled them into a local school that is near the Helpline so at least they have a good routine and are receiving extra support from our staff. 

Apart from that, all the children at the Helpline have been having a great time - playing cricket, football, enjoying a lot of recent Nepali festivals. At the end of this year we will be doing another evaluation of the project and seeing which activities need to be expanded - we will see if it is enough for us to deliver more classes at the Helpline or if we need to start organising more classes in villages. 

We will keep you all updated! Thank you so much for all the support - thanks to that we are able to equip our children with tools for an independent future, and we are hoping to keep helping more and more children that have no-one else to turn to.