Winter relief campaign 2016, Nepal

This post is an update to this winter relief campaign.

—

Dear all donors, supporters and well wishers,

Many many thanks to all of your who made the effort and managed to donate to our cause. Last week we received the funds that you donated to our campaign few weeks ago. We ran our campaign for 10 days on Generosity platform and collected a total of $448, among which we received $405.66 (NPR 43,426) after deducting $42.34 Credit Card processing and Swift transfer fees.

After we received the funds, we met few peoples regarding what to buy and where to buy efficiently and in that process ended up meeting Ms. Sumana Shrestha (on 19th of December) who has been helping with winter relief at many other places at much larger scale, had collected relevant data which we could use and begin with.

We added our funds to the funds collected from elsewhere by Sumana Shrestha, with which we were able to buy raw materials for around 510 blankets, where the average cost of each blanket comes around 900 Rupees, enabling us to contribute for approximately 45 blankets from our NPR. 43,426 that you contributed.

On 20th of December, we started cutting blankets from the roll and readied those up. On 21st, we packaged remaining rolls and transported those to Dhading. The transportation from Kathmandu to Malekhu of Dhading was managed by Ram Kumar Karki of the same district.

The following day we splitted the blankets for 2 different locations targeting specially on Chepang Community who are among the most disadvantaged and poor. Our target location was Jogimara and Mahadevsthan. 310 households from Jogimara and 200 households from Mahadevsthan were coming to get the blankets. Although the distribution was planned for 12 pm, people started arriving from 10 am. We expected to maximum of 510 households to receive the blankets, but the people increased upto 1.5 times as the people who hadn’t received reliefs started arriving from other villages too. We had planned for providing warmer blankets to people of higher altitudes and less warm (2 blankets per household) blankets for lower altitudes. We stuck to our plans for people of higher altitudes, but started providing single blankets for people of lower altitudes. We engaged the locals and the leaders from the community to make a name list of the peoples who needed the blankets most and distribute it themselves.

Among the blankets we had, we also managed to distribute 25 and 20 of them to Chepang Hostel and Nepal Chepang Association respectively. Chepang Hostel is located at Jogimara 9 and is for students from Chepang Community studying from grade 2 to grade 12. Nepal Chepang Association is an organisation that promotes handicrafts made from Chepang Community and also provides other various services to the community. We handed these blankets to the chairman of Nepal Chepang Association, Tilak Chepang.

Most of the people walked for 3 to 5 hours along the mountainous trail crossing over 30 water streams. The age of people varied from 12 year olds to 82 year and most of them were elder people. Some women with children on their backs also arrived from the same place to get the blankets. The villages where these people came from, almost all of the houses were destroyed by earthquake and they are now relying only on temporary houses and caves (few peoples are still living inside caves) for shelter. Winter become more troublesome as they did not have money to buy blankets and bedsheets. They said they only have grains to eat for 3 to 6 months. Rest of the months they have to rely on edible plants such as Doiscorea bulbifer (gittha vyakur) from the forest. Different NGO’s and INGO’s such as Prayas Nepal, Muslim Samaj, Nyano Sansar, HCI (Himalayan Climate Initiative), Agrawal foundation, etc are working for those communities. Although those organisations are working actively, the effort is not yet sufficient as the living standard has not risen as much as it should.

The people were humble and were very happy and grateful for caring them and providing blankets so that their family could stay warm. Some elder people thanked us personally and expected everyone of us should help others in need. The women and children were hesitant to talk to us but the happiness was radiant in their eyes.

Thanks to Basudev Dallakotee, Neeru Karki, Pratul Poudel, Kunjan Maleku, Manoj Ghale and many other people who helped us in preparing these blankets with cutting, sewing, packaging, transporting and distributing these. Thanks to Tilak Chepang, Harihar Rathore and Samjhana Bhandari for organising the distribution and informing the peoples.

Huge thanks to Sumana Shrestha who collected majority of the funds for this campaign, managed and planned for this program. And many many thanks to you all of you who actually donated so that needy people could stay warm.

Many thanks to all of you, from us and the peoples receiving these blankets.

Regards,
Bishal Paudel & Sushil Gupta