Educating Reeti

I am very pleased to be able to inform you that we have now completed rebuilding two out of the three beneficiary schools that were destroyed in last year's Nepal earthquakes with just finishing touches required to the third. See accompanying pictures. The schools will be operational after the Tihar festival that falls in the first week of November, with new children admitted to all the schools. No longer will children have to be educated in "temporary learning centres", the rudimentary constructions you can see in the foreground of the Chapakharka school picture. We have been providing mid-day meals at Tulasadevi and Rayale Schools for the past year and from November these will start also at Chapakharka School. A new teacher whom we've been able to appoint through your funding support will be having her culinary as well as her teaching skills put to the test as she rolls up her sleeves at lunchtime!

We can't - and shouldn't - continue to fund school meals indefinitely. These were only intended to provide short term support to the school and incentivise attendance after the earthquakes. So our next goal is to provide the schools with the wherewithal to fund these themselves through our helping them set up an income generation programme. We are reviewing a range of options but oyster mushroom farming is high on the list of possibilities.

So far we've spent a total of £84,611 on these schools and your support through the "Educating Reeti" Appeal has been central to supplementing what we have raised from grantmaking Foundations and from individual donations. We still need to raise a further £8,000 to allow us to complete the project and make it sustainable. I hope that by the next quarterly update we'll have secured these funds too so please help us if you can by spreading the word!

Many thanks on behalf of our colleagues at ChoraChori-Nepal and of course from the children themselves.