Educating Reeti

Eight-year-old Prakriti studies in the Early Childhood Development Class at Tulsadevi village school in the hills above Kathmandu. This is one of the three schools that were destroyed in the 2015 earthquakes and that ChoraChori rebuilt through the Educating Reeti project. The odds are stacked against this little girl. She doesn't remember her parents as her father died and her mother eloped (common practice in Nepal) when she was an infant. Now she stays with her aunt and uncle who unfortunately are alcoholic and who spend a lot of their time engaged in drunken rows. There are no social services that can intervene in this situation in Nepal but we can help a little by ensuring that Prakriti and her classmates get at least one decent meal per day - the free school lunch that we lay on at all three primary schools to incentivise attendance. Prakriti is a very quiet child yet when one of our field staff asked her what she liked at school she replied "1,2,3". By that she meant that mathematics is her favourite subject!

Our next immediate challenge is to set up oyster and shitake mushroom cultivation that will generate the income locally that will pay for the primary school lunches in perpetuity. We had hoped to build two mushroom sheds a couple of months ago as this is now the growing season, but unfortunately, we haven't raised the funds we need to launch this element of our work. Specifically, it costs £600 ($740) to build a mushroom shed with a fourfold return on investment. If you can help us with this fundraising need that would be wonderful.

Later in 2017, funds permitting, we'd love to develop the project further by extending support to the excellent, but under-resourced, secondary school that serves these and other primary schools in the locality. Kitinin Higher Secondary School provides a full education from ECD classes right up to Bachelor's degree level. At the moment there are 600 students attending in classes ECD up to Grade 10, with 550 in the High School and Bachelor's programmes. Results are remarkable with a 100% pass rate in last year's 10th Grade School Leaving Certificate examination. School graduates go on to find very good jobs and sometimes quite prominent places within Nepali society. See this film.

The surprising thing is that 70% of the pupils are girls. Why the imbalance? The reason is entirely one of gender discrimination for parents are willing to fund their sons' education at private schools while their daughters are sent to state schools. It's difficult, but not impossible, to overcome such attitudes within Nepalese society, but in the meantime, ChoraChori aims to give the school the funding support we believe it needs and deserves. We have two fundraising goals. The first is to purchase the 12 new computers that will allow the school to extend computer studies to the highest grades. The existing 12 computers are now obsolete (10 years old) and of these three aren't working. The second goal is to set up a science laboratory without which the school can't teach the subject in any meaningful way. A science lab will benefit pupils in grades 8 to 10, with 85 pupils in each year. The computers will cost £3,700 ($4,590) while the science lab will cost £4,600 ($5,700)

So overall, we remain on course towards our Aim of delivering a comprehensive and sustainable education programme in the aftermath of the earthquakes.

Thank you so much for your continued support.

Kind regards

Philip Holmes

Founder ChoraChori

• Educating Reeti Programme Needs 2017 (PDF)