Nepal Challenge by Steve_Shears

April 9-11th Kathmandu -London

We spent our last few days rummaging around the fair trade shops in Patan and Kathmandu looking for gifts for the folks back home. I found some Lapis for my youngest daughter and other people filled up the available space in their bags that had been created by giving away their stuff to the guides and porters in Pokhara. Most of us were leaving on the 11th but we had to wait for hours that day for a window in the smog that was shrouding the Kathmandu valley - it was a particularly good batch of it that morning but we eventually got away to Doha and eventually a very cold and wet London. I felt a bit ill and it developed by the next night into a full scale throwing up fest - however, a few more days of not eating seemed to do the trick -I was getting used to that by now! I was sort of glad to be back in the UK but had weeks of feeling quite dislocated - it was a strange feeeling of not being quite sure where I belonged -that was slightly odd but it passed (well for now anyway)

30th May, Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland

So there I was enjoying the Orkney Folk Festival a few days ago (by the way, go and see the group 'Lau' if you get chance to) and I thought about that idea of the trek as metaphor thing that I described a number of posts back. The experience of the island and the spirit of the place stood in sharp contrast to what has been my lived experience for the past 5 years. I mentioned that the trek was uncomfortably close to acting as a metaphor for these years - it would be summed up as 'interesting but hard' - I had thrown myself into work to cope with relationship breakdown and massive change - that said, I had also learned that to compromise myself and accept arrangements that were not healthy for me was not good -I had learned to assert my needs a bit more and not put up with odd stuff just to keep the peace and so I would be liked. Basically I knew that my needs were to develop a better lifestyle and get some peace and do what was right for me - I never fail to be amazed at the spin offs of visiting Nepal!

One thing that Nepal is very good at is disturbing your perspectives - what we think of as a biblical disease of leprosy (Hansen's Disease) is still casting a shadow in India and Nepal. Even when is is tackled effectively by multi drug treatments (MDT) there is still the damage that has taken place in the form of ulcers and nerve damage to contend with. We visted the Nepal Leprosy Trust and learned about their work to help support survivors and their families. I bought some Batik prints there -including one for my mum of a Nepali version of the last supper! I suppose it was an attempt to at least give a little to this good work. We also visited a Fair Trade craft producers organisation that was doing it's bit to ensure that it's craft producers were not exploited by foreign businesses. By the end of that tour I could appreciate further why Emma was so passionate about fair trade and was doing her bit through Hatti.

The evening brought it's own share of further disturbance - we encountered some of the street kids (maybe 10-12 years old) settling down for the night in shop doorways and sniffing from bags of glue/solvents - no social services to call here! This doesn't make you sleep easily as you settle into your hotel bed.

April 8th Godawari, Kathmandu

The taxi ride over to the Esther Benjamins Trust was a bit hellish - we did battle with the Kathmandu traffic and the heat and passed guys riding bikes with enormous gas cyliders hanging off them! Transport in Nepal is a very inventive thing I decided!

I had gone to meet Dilu who worked for the EBT and who also was doing a counselling psychology course in Kathmandu. I was pleased to be meeting her as I knew Philip who was the director of EBT in Nepal held her in high regard. I had made some contribution as far as finance went with doing the sponsored trek but this was an opportunity to contribute in a different way to the lives of the kids.

Dilu herself radiated an air of calm and a profound sense of what it was that the kids faced in relation to being people who were dislocated in terms of family and place and the sense of their psychology as a result of their experiences of human traffick, being in prison with parents and being street kids. It took me a little time to get used to her shaking her head and smiling a lot as we talked -because in India and Nepal that head shaking means the person is in tune with you and agrees with what you are saying -whereas in our culture it means something different of course! We discussed psychological trauma in cultural terms too as there could easily be an assumption made that all children (and adults) respond in exactly the same way to trauma or think about adverse experiences in the same way we do in the West. Culture mediates everything - including experiences of hardship and trauma. Suffering and expectations. is also viewed from a different perspective in places like Nepal. That said, Dilu knew that some of the kids did struggle with their feelings sometimes or saw their futures in fairly bleak terms and this sometimes made it hard to reach them. As a therapist herself this was frustrating for her and she welcomed any techniques or ideas for helping to engage some of the kids. I said that when I had talked to Philip two years ago I had said that I thought that the way the refuge was run and the dedication of the staff and the resilience of the kids went a long way to helping to heal some of the hurts - it was a 'secure base' as John Bolwby might have said.

I gave her the books I had brought with me and we discussed play therapy techniques as practiced in the West and I handed over the playmobile figures that could be used in non-directive sandtray work. She also found the ideas from Solution Focused Brief Therapy conversations with children interesting and I said I would email her some stuff about this when I got back to the UK. In all it felt like a productive meeting of East and West experiences and philosophies and I hoped that in some small way it might help the kids.

THE MOTHER OF INVENTION - OBVIOUSLY!