Sarah is back in Nepal

Hi it’s Sarah here! I am back in Pokhara after a lovely time in the UK, visiting my family and the Pod UK team.

It is great to be back in Nepal and visiting the placements. It is lovely to see the children again; they all seem to be about a foot taller!

Currently, the schools are closed so our volunteers have gone on a week long trek – very jealous! I will be meeting them when they return at the weekend.

There are many exciting things in the coming months, starting with our charity donations from the Pod Charity that we will be beginning next week.

I am so happy to be back and working alongside Janice, and we can’t wait to meet all the coming volunteers; maybe one of them will be you…

If you are interested in volunteering in Nepal, email Ellie on ellie@podvolunteer.org

It's nearly Christmas!

A blog from Sarah

We are getting ready for Christmas in Nepal! Our volunteers are planning lots of celebrations with the children, as well as arts and crafts sessions focused around the theme of special festivals around the world.

One of our volunteers, Galen, has been working really hard up at the Street Children’s Centre doing all sorts of practical jobs. He has built a fantastic fence which runs the length of the vegetable patch; no longer will the veg be destroyed by flying footballs! The boys can now play to their hearts content without any worry. If this wasn’t enough, today he began his mission to build steps up from the outside space to the main house; currently there is a small jump so it will be great for them to have some safe, reliable steps.

Also this week I have been able to make a donation to Aama at the Street Children’s Centre. Two of our previous volunteers Jade and Yasmine, donated their mobile phones when they left; consequently we ave been able to provide Aama with a phone of her own. This is incredibly important for her as for a lot of the time she is on her own with the children she cares for and so to have a method of communication if she needs it is invaluable. Thank you so much Jade and Yasmine, and your company BE Offices who provided the volunteers with the phones.

This will be my last blog post for a while as I am leaving Nepal for a few weeks to go to visit my family for Christmas! I feel very sad to leave and say goodbye to all the wonderful children at all our wonderful placements but I am also so excited to go back to the UK and visit everyone. Janice will be looking after our volunteers and placements over this time so everything is in very safe hands.

As lovely as it will be to visit everyone in the UK, I cannot wait to get back here and carry on the vital work that PoD is doing. I am extremely excited for the coming adventure; for the incredible  volunteers I will meet and for the progress we can all make together. Maybe one of them will be you?

On that note, I leave you with a video created by one of our wonderful volunteers, Jade. Jade works part-time as a real life Elsa from Frozen, and so decided to say goodbye and thank you to PoD by sending us this wonderful video, follow the link to see it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0gchXcHK2c&feature=youtu.be

If you would like to join the team here in Nepal please email Gemma on gemma@podvolunteer.org

Welcome to the team Janice!

It is exciting times here for PoD Nepal… We have a new exployee! Janice, whom many of you will know as she is Bindu’s daughter, is taking over the PoD Placement Manager role. Janice has long been involved with PoD and fully understands our role and purpose out here. She has been able to spend time with our volunteers over the years whilst they have been staying at her mum’s guest house, and she has also long been involved in the actual volunteering herself. She is familiar with all the placements and has a great relationship with them already. Here she is with Tika, a teacher from Annapurna Primary School. We are very excited for this next chapter of PoD Nepal to begin!

Welcome to the team Janice!

If you would like to join the team here in Nepal please email Gemma on gemma@podvolunteer.org

Quarterly Charity Donations!

Once again we have reached our 3 month quarterly charity donation time – time goes so fast! I have been busy this week visiting our placements and handing out the donations.

At Annapurna PrimarySchool, the PoD Charity donates money to provide all the children with a filling, nutritious lunch. It was great to see that this is working well and Tika, a teacher at the school, told me that for many of the children this will be the main meal they eat in the day and so it is so important for them. I also visited Prabhat Primary School where we are able to donate to provide lunches as well.
At Asha Foundation Children’s Home, the PoD Charity provides them with a monetary contribution to enable them to have meat twice a week. At Asha they are able to grow much of their own food due to a small allotment that they have, however this donation allows the children to have some much needed nutrients and variation in their diet.

Finally, I was able to hand over the PoD Charity donations to the Street Children’s Centre. Here we give money towards their food supplies for the months. They buy rice, meat and veg and Aama, the woman who looks after the children, makes some wonderful dal bhat, (the traditional Nepali dish). The boys were telling me that Aama has also been making pasta, noodles and a variety of other dishes too; their favourite is still dal bhat though!

Some of you may remember that a few weeks ago, we were able to secure an extra PoD Charity budget to clear the outside space at the Street Children’s Centre. They have recently moved homes to a much bigger and more practical home. There is a great outside space for the children to run around in as well as sit out and under the shade and do their homework, however currently it is full of scrap metal and rubble; this needs clearing and an area of the garden needs to be covered by a shelter with their outside table put back up. This will make such a difference to the children and Aama’s quality of life as they won’t be cramped on the floor in the kitchen doing their work or eating anymore, they will have a proper space. This is what the space looked like a few days ago when I made the donation…

                                                              Before....

                                                               Progress so far...

I visited 2 days later and this was the progress that had already been made… The boys are so excited!

If you would like to join the team here in Nepal please email Gemma on gemma@podvolunteer.org

Rice flour, bracelets and Spider-man...

As ever we have been busy, busy, busy this week! At Asha Foundation we gave making rice flour a go – they are planning to make a special sweet bread which is traditional during Tihar, a festival that will be happening next week. Hilary, one of our volunteers had a real knack for it, but the rest of us were quickly substituted!

Our new volunteer Kate arrived this weekend. She has begun working at Ward 6, one of our childcare placements as well as at the Street Kids centre. She has really enjoyed her first few days and is settling in really well!

 

As it is still the holidays here and the children are not back at school yet, we have been working hard to provide fun activities to keep them entertained! At the Street Kids, the volunteers have taught them how to make bracelets and they love this. They all now have arms full from wrist to elbow! One of our volunteers also brought out with them some fabric paint and so we are also planning this week to take a plain white tshirt for each of the children and they can decorate. Here they are planning their tshirts…

Ramesh, one of the boys at Street Kids, decided to turn his tshirt into a Spider-man outfit and made himself a mask aswell! He looked great and spent the rest of the day ‘being’ Spider-man!

Two of our volunteers are currently working hard at SOS Bahini. Hilary is running conversational English classes with the children as they are not at school – the children love these classes and the fun activities she comes up with! Tania, our other volunteer at SOS Bahini, is here on a Film and Photography placement. She is busy creating a professional promotional video for them as well as taking beautiful photos. Here she is in action photographing Hilary’s lesson…

If you would like to join the team here in Nepal please email Gemma on gemma@podvolunteer.org

Kites, festivals and celebrations...

The Dashain holidays have officially begun here! Everyone is in great spirits especially the children from Street Kids and Asha Foundation whom we have been spending plenty of time with.

Firstly this week we had to say goodbye to Ged, he has been an wonderful volunteer and contributed much over his time here. We spent his last day at Street Kids playing with sports and board games with the children. As you can see the children were very sad to say goodbye to him!

Over the weekend, our new volunteer Roshni arrived. We were lucky that when we went out for dinner on Saturday night, we stumbled across a big street party! It turns out that Saturday was World Tourism Day. We were treated to traditional dancing in the streets, local music, speeches and the Nepali national anthem. It was a brilliant welcome for Roshni and a really nice experience for the volunteers as well as myself!

This week the volunteers have been busy at the placements. On Monday the volunteers used their AMAZING arts and crafts skills and made kites. Kites are a big part of Dashain and so the children loved the opportunity to make their own. 

The winners of the best kite was… Bidan and Ramesh! They were so proud of themselves and it was lovely to see them all working so well together.

At Asha Foundation as well we have been having lots of fun. The children made Dashain posters! On behalf of all here in Nepal, HAPPY DASHAIN!

As the holidays continue, we are all having fun planning more exciting activities to do with the children!

If you would like to join the team here in Nepal please email Gemma on gemma@podvolunteer.org