Lack of Aid....

The students are in exams now for nine days which has given me the time to come here. As I sit here building my website in the city/town of Chautara where I must hike up a mountain and then take a bus or pickup truck to this place, a foreigner pops into the room. Very surprising to my eyes as I haven’t seen one foreigner now in two weeks in the region of the village I am staying nor here in this city. I can’t even find this city online – its like it doesn’t exist. The owner of this café isn’t here to set him up on a computer so we begin speaking. He, like me has not seen a foreigner in this region until me. However, this is his fourth month here. So I ask the question I’ve been wondering. “Why is it that you are the first foreigner I have seen here?” He explains to me the situation that happened in Nepal with the Maoist Insurgency and how this area in particular is full of Maoists. The guerilla war by Maoists rebels was particularly bad in this region. It is still full of Maoists who want to abolish the monarchy and establish a communist system in this poor country. “I’m safe wherever in the world I go because I’m from Holland. It’s the Americans and English they don’t like. But even being from Holland, the staff of the orphanage I am volunteering don’t let me go out alone.” It made so much more sense to me now why the villagers are so protective of me whenever I leave. I have both a British and US passport and I think he could sense the little bit of worry I had as he was telling me this. “Oh, its totally fine now. There has been peace in the region for two years.” I guess what the Maoists used to do with Americans and English was hold them up by forcing them to pay money wherever they were. I learned the reason the orphanage this man works for was set up was because of the amount of parents that were killed in the fighting of the Maoists. After doing a bit of research online I have learned that the reason there are hardly any NGO’s in this region is because they withdrew many years ago when the fighting began which has caused a huge halt in development, aid, infrastructure – everything. Projects and plans for helping these people are still not happening even though its considered a peaceful time. The kind man has invited me to see the orphanage and perhaps do an environment/health workshop with the students once I get this site up and running....